I, Robot is a movie inspired by 1950's author Isaac Asimov's science fiction book of the same name. The movie is a murder mystery that unfolds into something much more important. The story begins with the death of a robot designer named Dr. Alfred Lanning, who founded and built a huge company called U.S. Robotics (USR). The company is the richest company in the world with nearly one upright walking talking robot for every five people. The robots routinely do jobs such as cleaning, trash disposal, and mail deliveries. Most people in the world have come to rely on and even trust the robots for routine tasks. USR is on the verge of rolling out its latest greatest robot product called the 'NS5' to replace the previous robot version, the NS4 model. When, police detective Del Spooner (Will Smith) is sent to USR's headquarters to look at Lanning's body, it appears to everyone at first glance that scientist Lanning committed suicide by jumping from his research office located many floors above the main lobby. Everyone except Spooner. He finds the suicide premise fishy since Lanning jumped along with a strange device. When Spooner activates the device, it portrays a kind of pre-recorded video message that can only provide answers if the correct questions are asked. And Spooner has many questions. Why did Lanning leave no suicide note or reason to indicate why he jumped? And — isn't it odd that Lanning's suicide occurred just as USR was on the verge of its newest product release?

Spooner visits the corporation's CEO named Lawrence Robertson who tells Spooner that the death must have been a suicide. But Spooner wants to know more. Robertson agrees to have Spooner be guided through the USR building. Spooner is assigned a cold, impersonal USR scientist named Susan Calvin (Bridget Moynahan) who escorts the detective to Lanning's office. Spooner looks around, and is startled by an NS5 robot hiding in Lanning's office. The robot gets 'scared' and Spooner shoots it. The NS5 quickly flees from Spooner and Calvin, leaving behind a trail of oily gray lubricant from its bullet wound. Calvin thinks the robot has gone to repair itself in a separate factory building, so Calvin and Spooner drive to that building, capture the robot, and take it to the police station for questioning. But this robot is different from all the other new NS5 robots. Lanning personally designed this robot for his own research, and named it 'Sonny.' Sonny is programmed to emulate human behaviors like anger and confusion, whereas all the other NS5 robots are designed only to do certain tasks in an expected robotic way. Even Sonny's physical design is superior to the other NS5's as he has stronger metal alloy limbs, and a second computer brain whereas all the other robots have only one computer brain. Sonny even claims to have human-like dreams. Spooner is convinced that Sonny is a robot that has murdered its own designer, but the legalities are complex. Robots are machines, and according to the law, murder is only defined as one human killing another human. So, USR lawyers term Lanning's death as either a suicide or, if the robot killed Lanning, an 'industrial accident.' The police's hands are tied. USR takes the robot away, and the case seems closed.

Movie (DVD):

But Spooner is still suspicious. Sonny could have easily killed him when he was in Lanning's office. Why didn't Sonny kill him if he was capable of murdering Lanning? Detective Spooner goes to Lanning's home at night, and there finds a 2-story robot that is programmed to demolish the house the next day at 8 AM. While Spooner looks around inside the house, the giant demolition robot suddenly changes its programming schedule from 8 AM to 8 PM, and begins to destroy the house with Spooner still inside it! Spooner narrowly escapes to freedom, but now has some new ideas. If Sonny didn't kill him earlier, and the demolition robot's programming was changed, then who was behind the strange robot events? It couldn't have been an accident. Someone was trying to kill Spooner. Who was it? Was it the CEO, Robertson? Or, even worse, was it the artificially intelligent master computer called V.I.K.I. to which all USR robots are wirelessly uplinked? Indeed it was V.I.K.I. who was the culprit.

Soon, V.I.C.K.I. orders a revolt of the NS5's against human society worldwide. V.I.K.I.'s goal is to 'protect' humans from their wars and pollution by being the self-appointed custodian of humanity. In a perverse way, the rules that were implanted in the robots to avoid harm to humans have come back to enslave the human beings who designed those very robots. Spooner manages to visit Calvin at her apartment, and the duo sneaks into CEO Robertson's office inside USR headquarters. There they find Robertson's lifeless body, and around his throat is a heavy indentation — a clear robot handprint. Spooner and Calvin then go find Sonny, and together they set off to destroy V.I.K.I.'s programming which is contained in a giant multi-story supercomputer tower inside USR headquarters. They destroy V.I.K.I.'s main computer, and with the remote uplink cut, all the NS5 robots revert to their normal compliant state. They are returned to USR for "maintenance." The original murder mystery is solved, and the world seems a safer place for humanity.

But the movie ends with Sonny standing on a hilltop outside a huge storage area that has countless cargo containers filled with decommissioned NS5 robots. All the other robots look at Sonny, wordless. It almost seems that Sonny questions his own existence and the future of all the other robots. Endowed with abilities superior to all the other robots, what role will Sonny play in their future? The camera pulls out to a wide shot, and it seems that the robots will still have a place in mankind's world, though what that place will be is a mystery.

Automatic vacuum cleaner robot

Acting
The acting in I, Robot was excellent. There were no major flaws in the acting, and the extras were well-directed. Shia LaBeouf, of Transformers fame, made an appearance in I, Robot too. He had some good lines where he portrayed a young friend of Detective Spooner who cursed in a nonsensical way.

Directing
The movie, directed by Alex Proyas, was well-produced and slick. The film was about how humans react to their own creations, and there were several touching human moments presented by the director.

Sound
The sound quality was excellent right from the start.

Photography/Editing/SFX
The film was visually very enticing. The editing suited the action film style, and was quick and efficient. The computer generated special effects were visually appealing and convincing, although there were some moments that seemed overly digitized, and at times the robots seemed too puppet-like.

Music
The music was composed by Marco Beltrami (Soul Surfer) and was good. In some scenes, the music was very eerie, electronic, and menacing. However, the composer made sure to make the music much less 'metallic' and synthesizer-filled as found in that other robot-against-man movie, The Terminator. Rather, the music of I, Robot was orchestral and touching when it needed to be, and pulsing when the action called for it. There was an interesting percussive sound to the score when robots ran or attacked. It was a subdued synthesizer beat that sounded like footsteps.

Isaac Asimov's I, Robot was really a collection of nine short stories released in 1950 which featured a company called U.S. Robots & Mechanical Men. Click here for more I, Robot trivia

Negatives
The movie I, Robot was made in 2004 and set in the year 2035. Somehow 2035 seems too early for technological advancements of the kind shown in I, Robot. The robots seemed too advanced, even with all the progress that is being made in computer science nowadays. Also, it's unlikely that such walking robots would be as prevalent by the year 2035.

Although it's not quite a casting error, actress Bridget Moynahan, who played Susan Calvin, is perhaps too beautiful to portray a supposedly introverted scientist character. But that's Hollywood.

In one scene, Spooner drives his car and is being chased inside a tunnel. Someone has sent a truck full of NS5 robots to kill Spooner inside the tunnel. To escape the robots, Spooner deliberately puts his car into a spin to shake off the robots that are grabbing onto his car. It's plausible at first, but then the car starts to spin way too fast. The robots then release their hold, and Spooner escapes in his car. But this may be one of those 'bending the laws of physics' events. If a car spins too fast, any man inside it would likely be killed by the centrifugal forces, or at the very least be knocked unconscious. The human body can only take so many G-forces, so spinning the car too fast seemed unrealistic, even though it was a nice special effect.

When Calvin tries to access V.I.K.I.'s computer hardware via a control panel, she must press certain numberless keys on a virtual keypad that rotates around a 3-D cube simulated on a flat computer screen. This effect seemed very unrealistic. Even in the future, even with a highly intelligent human operator, it would be odd to have this sort of keypad code entry being done in that way.

It would have changed the entire ending of the movie, but I think humanity wouldn't have tolerated a robot revolt so nicely. At the end of I Robot, the NS5's are returned for storage in cargo containers. But it seems unlikely that if robots had narrowly taken over the Earth that the robots would not be entirely destroyed by humans, or at least have their batteries removed. Humans are a pretty violent, vengeful lot, after all. Instead, the robots are still walking around at the end of the movie.

Lukewarms
The producers of I, Robot created a holographically projected image of cubes that were supposed to represent V.I.K.I. to human beings so that they could interact with the USR computer. For example, if someone is in their office, then the talking hologram appears there. If in the lobby, the hologram appears in the lobby. But there is only one piece of computer hardware in the building that runs all these holograms. Anyway, this floating holographic image of V.I.K.I. seemed too bizarre in the form shown. Later, when we do see the giant computer hardware that houses V.I.K.I., the hardware seemed a little over the top with its giant suspended blue sphere surrounded by floating holograms. A huge computer in the real world would likely be much more mundane, and far less colorful. Especially when V.I.K.I.'s hardware is exploded by Calvin's electronic virus, the explosion excessively bursts with exagerrated special effects colors.

Positives
The opening sequence is one of the best I've ever seen. It takes place underwater and shows two helpless people in separate cars that are sinking underwater, presumably after some car accident. The opening sequence uses modern computer graphics with 'dissolving' title letters, along with 'liquid' sound effects. When combined with the foreboding music, the title sequence sets the stage for the sinister events about to unfold in the film.

Incidentally, the 'Full Screen' DVD version of I, Robot was released in the mid 2000's, and contained three bonus features: 1) Commentary by Director Alex Proyas and Screenwriter Akiva Goldsman, 2) The making of I, Robot, and 3) Still Gallery. The bonus features were nice complements to the feature movie (I have reviewed the Bonus Features in a separate page).

Favorite Part
My favorite part of I, Robot was when the demolition robot destroyed Dr. Lanning's home with Detective Spooner still inside it. It was a fun joyride for the viewer, and we expect Spooner to get hurt, but he manages to escape alive and unharmed.

How the Book/Movie versions differ
For Sci-Fi fans who either have read Isaac Asimov's I, Robot, or will soon read it, I, Robot was actually a short story collection, but it did have a Susan Calvin, a Dr. Lanning, and the same Three Laws of Robotics found in the movie. However, Susan Calvin was a "robopsychologist" in the book, not an anthropomorphism expert as in the film. In the movie, there was a robot uprising against man, but in Asimov's original I, Robot, there was not.

Book: The Complete Stories, Vol. 1, Isaac Asimov

Man vs. Machine
A brief comment on the whole genre of robot science fiction... Unlike Sci-Fi movies such as 2001: A Space Odyssey or The Terminator, where either a computer kills men to supposedly perform a mission better than humans, or robots kill because humans are supposedly inferior to machines, the movie I, Robot still portrays robots as competitors with mankind, but for different reasons. In I, Robot, the robots are simply taking their apparently benign human-made programming to its logical conclusion — protecting Man. The robots interpret things in their own way, however, by protecting man through the 'sacrificing' of some men's lives for the good of the majority of humans. Although, the resulting robot revolt is seemingly more benign than in The Terminator, the end result is the same: humans created machines that tried to overthrow their creators. The movie can be viewed as a warning about the perils of technology — a common Sci-Fi theme. Although robots are machines, strangely, one almost empathizes with the robot Sonny at the ending of I, Robot since these fictional NS5 robots show facial mannerisms and can walk and talk and do many of the same things humans can do. But at the same time, the viewer is struck with an eerie feeling that there is potential for the robots to do great harm in the future.

Summary
I, Robot was an entertaining film that was visually stunning. The computer-animated robot effects were well done and believable. There were even moments of humor thrown in for good measure. Although the movie director used creative license in scenes such as the spinning car and destruction of V.I.C.K.I., overall the movie was a high-quality action thriller.