It ain't Asimov

Rating: Null/10 (28 July 2004)

I am going to skip any plot specifics. They don't matter. This movie has almost nothing to do with anything Isaac Asimov wrote. It nods in the direction of Asimov's famed three laws of robotics. I won't go into those because I'm sure they've been included in numerous other comments. Some of Asimov's characters are present in name. The laws and the characters are all that survive of his work in this film.
When I first saw that a film called I, Robot based on Asimov was in production, I was almost giddy with excitement. I thought somebody had managed to get Harlan Ellison's script of it filmed. No such luck. I saw that it was going to be a kind of murder mystery, and I thought maybe they had adapted one of the Elijah Bayley/R. Daneel Olivaw novels. I have seen the movie, and they did not.
Although the three laws are present in the film, they are ultimately discarded in their implications. In Asimov's works, any violation of the laws leads to a complete shut-down of the robot's positronic brain or at least the robotic equivalent of catatonia. The greatness in Asimov's work is how he weaves his plots around the practical application of the laws in unpredictable human situations. Asimov started writing the robot stories because he wanted to get away from what he called the `Frankenstein Syndrome' direction most such stories took at the time. That is, thinking machines turn on their masters. The first story he wrote on the subject involved a robot nanny that ends up saving a child's life after incessant paranoia has been rained on it by the child's mother. The whole point of Asimov's laws is that they are inviolable. The twist in his stories was that the machines always behaved exactly as they were supposed to, and the problems arose out of humans failing to appreciate subtleties inherent in how the laws work in real situations. Any robot harming (even by accident) or allowing a human to be harmed through inaction would cease to function. End of story. When this becomes inconvenient, one cannot ignore this for the sake of the plot one wants to have if one is going to be true to Asimov. The only reason I can think of for having Asimov's name on the credits is to draw in people who are fans of his work. That is also the only reason to keep the title of Asimov's book on this movie, because it has absolutely nothing to do with that collection of short stories entitled I, Robot. The Ellison script I mentioned earlier would have been vastly better.
So in short, if the attraction of this movie for you is Will Smith and the action movie genre, you'll probably be OK. If you're going to this movie because you're an Asimov fan, don't.