The best novel adaptation that I have ever seen

Rating: 9/10 (29 January 2012)

For a movie that is very loosely based on the book of the same name, it is actually pretty good. In fact it is also good that in the credits it indicates that the movie is very loosely based on the book. The three laws are the same, as well as the robots, and there are also two characters from the book (Alfred Lanning and Susan Calvin) however in the book they never meet as Calvin is actually born at least 100 years after Lanning. However, these characters reprise their roles from the book, with Lanning being the inventor of the positronic brain, and Susan Calvin being a specialist robot psychologist.
The book is a collection of short stories about the development of robots, and deals with significant events in their development. The movie itself is loosely based on the last story of the book, where the robots have developed to such a point where their interpretation of the three laws includes what is called the Zeroth law, that is robots may not harm, not cause harm to come to, humanity. In the book this is dealt with subtly with the robots making certain changes to the Earth government by removing those that are dangerous and replacing them with those who will be helpful.
However, this movie is a sci-fi action detective thriller, which is nothing like the books. Further, the understanding of the robot's role with humanity is somewhat more forceful, as the robots decide to step in and force humanity to protect itself (much to the horror of the humans) in their argument, humanity is inherently suicidal, and as such they must be protected from themselves. The protagonist, a Detective Spooner, is purely a creation of the film, and his paranoia regarding robots is useful in this role (as it was intended to be).
I once wrote a story connected to the book in high school, and that not only dealt with a positronic brain being placed into a computer, but also the computer becoming self aware, and deciding that it must step in as humanities 'nanny', a very similar plot to this film. I did wonder why Asimov never mixed the positronic brains with computers, and why computer systems never played a huge role in many of his science fiction writings. The simply answer to that is that it is not that computers did not exist (they had existed for a while beforehand) but that they were not as ubiquitous as they are now. There was no internet, and a computer would take up an entire room. In Asimov's eyes, he could not envisage miniaturisation, nor could he envisage the world as it has turned out to be. He vision was in regards to bipedal machines that had a capacity to learn. Come thirty to forty years after the book was written (and I wonder is Asimov would end up rolling in his grave) we are in a different world to Asimov. Robots don't simply exist in bipedal machines (actually they don't even exist) but rather hidden in computer source codes. We refer to them as bots, programs designed to lurk in computer systems, and act at particular times. There are stories of these bots mimicking women and men on dating sights, and are designed to elicit information from the victim.
I still think this is an awesome movie, one of the best novel adaptations that I have seen (not that it is directly based on the book). I personally think it is because it is exactly how I imagined a movie based on I Robot would be like, and, well, because it turned out the way I expected, I know I have no need to surpass it.