Do you care about a machines feelings?

Rating: 6/10 (20 July 2004)

Yes, you do. Star Trek's Data was a successful robot that was human enough in character for viewers to care for it. It is rare that a movie can get an audience to care about a robot. I, Robot manages to do so because of the creative license it has taken in animating a plastic face to give it human expressions. I guess the viewing audience has accepted this concept from the morphing Terminator in T2, that a robot can assume complete facial features. But then again I didn't shed a tear when Arnie the terminator was liquidated.
I,Robot is trying to be both a thought provoking science fiction story and a big budget action film at the same time. When Will Smith does his "Bad Boys" routine, it is incongruous with the Blade Runner-esque future world that he is surrounded in. The big dumb action scenes butt up against any attempt to be a stylish suspense film. Poor old Will keeps getting side-tracked by destroying freeways and buildings. Then there's the slap-in-the-forehead moment when we see Will's boss ask for him to turn in his badge. My god, the catering assistant could've pointed out that cliché is as old as fossil fuels. All credibility is lost when the movie stops to show a Converse Shoes commercial. We pay ever increasing admission fees for these movies, and more and more are we subjected to the one thing we leave our TV sets at home for - NO COMMERCIALS. It's bad enough that I walk into the auditorium a few minutes after the posted start time and they are showing regular TV advertisements. It's disgraceful.
So amidst all this commercialism and standard explosions and chases, we are supposed to care about whether some dude committed suicide or not. But instead, I ended up caring more for Sonny, the CGI robot with convincing facial expressions and superblue eyes. In the end, I could care less about the several plot twists that didn't make sense, I more enjoyed the screen time of Sonny, a hybrid Data.

I give it a 6 out of 10