Product: I, Robot [Region 2] (2004)
Rating: 5.0
Daring Racial Theme
I am not quite sure if everyone picked up the daring racial theme in this movie. The robots operate as a type of slave society on which humans rely, much like ancient Rome or America as a developing nation. Keep in mind that not only did the economy of the Old South depend on black slavery but Yankee trading firms greatly strengthened their capital base through the well-known "triangular trade", in which captured Africans would be transported across the Atlantic and sold at great profit.So, here we are in the future with robots now the subject class. Will Smith plays the standard Black American action hero. However, instead of sympathizing with the robots, his character appears to be working out some sort of vendetta toward them -- and prejudice. Detective Spooner is right to suspect a robot uprising but his motives hardly seem pure.At the end of the movie, we see that Detective Spooner's hostility toward the robots is not because they are different from him but because they are too similar. "I, Robot" rejects the standard movie sentimentality toward Black American males and holds its protagonist up to an unsparing moral judgment.