REVIEWED - I, ROBOT: We have been told so often that the machines will turn against us that it's hard not to feel a little disappointed that our laptops, answering machines and remote controls have remained so stubbornly uninterested in cutting our brake cables and poisoning our drinking water, writes Donald Clarke.
I, Robot, the cinema's latest grim warning about technological insurgence, has nothing much new to say on the matter, but its musings on the distinction between consciousness and artificial intelligence are expressed through such deliciously spooky visuals and with such grim humour that it very nearly passes muster as a properly intelligent piece of work. Sadly, the perceived need to deliver explosions, hurtling fireballs and pithy quips eventually takes over and we end up in noisily familiar action movie territory. This, after all, is a film directed by the man behind The Crow.
It is 2035 and robots are everywhere. Humanoid in shape with a bouncy gait, they deliver mail, clean the streets and, crucially for the plot of the movie, rescue motorists in peril. Despite this, Earth is unchanged in many ways; corporate logos are still sufficiently conspicuous to accommodate movie product placement, and detectives - witness Will Smith's Del Spooner - all still work under world-weary African-American superiors and come with an inbuilt fatal flaw.
Spooner, for reasons that are revealed deep into the movie, just cannot be doing with these quasi-sentient machines and imagines them to be up to all sorts of no good. So when he is called in to investigate the death of a founding father of robotics (James Cromwell, seen in holograms and archive footage), it's not surprising that he focuses his attention on one of the old man's creations. Sonny, fashioned out of the same creamy plastic as an iPod, is beginning to show signs of independent thought, and Spooner reckons the mixed-up machine may have flung the scientist through a window.
With notable caution, the producers tell us that I, Robot has been "suggested by" Isaac Asimov's Robot stories (how long before a film will be said to be "faintly reminiscent of" or "not entirely dissimilar to" its source?). Readers familiar with those tales will be aware that any such murderous action by Sonny would be in contravention of one of Asimov's three laws of robotics - the one that states that robots cannot harm humans. It soon becomes clear that the robots have a slippery, lawyerly understanding of the dicta hard-wired into their systems.
With his sad, cold eyes and inverted teardrop of a head, Sonny poignantly works through issues previously addressed by his mechanical cousins in Blade Runner, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Westworld. The script (much less impressive in its human dialogue) allows Sonny a few opportunities to consider interesting ideas about identity and individuality without quite meandering into pretentiousness. Looking around him at the other models in his class, he muses: "They all look like me, but none of them are me." Elsewhere an analogy between the plight of robots and that of racial minorities in contemporary society is suggested, but not overplayed.
Will Smith, though far from convincing in moments of existential anguish, uses his brash, needy charm to good effect as a very human human adrift in a frighteningly mechanical world. Future scientists, busy at work on the Affleck X20, would surely never think to manufacture an actorbot with such singular ears and teenage swagger.
Sadly, the script allows too little time for Smith and the robots to chew over their differences. Every time the picture starts to get interesting you can be sure a fast object is about to hurtle into something inflammable. Whenever a complex idea is raised, a car is guaranteed to be just out of frame ready to screech its way towards the camera.
As the too-familiar mayhem eventually gives way to the credits, the brief glimpses of the intriguing film hidden within I, Robot will have been long wiped from many viewer's hard disks.
