Ok, stop wincing. Really.
Just saw it, and it wasn’t that bad. I went in there expecting nothing good at all, and it definitely exceeded that. 
They even kept true to the stories once or twice.
But all that aside, my geeky “oo shiny thing” side was totally impressed by the KICK-ASS CGI!!! Sonny jumping, moving, vaulting, was unbelievable. The scene in the subway tunnel, with a million robots jumping on him, the scene in the police station, Sonny fighting the two robots in the hallway…
WOW!
While I think the movie is an abomination to the I, Robot name, I did think it was pretty cool on its own. But whenever it tried to be like the stories, it just felt tacked on. I probably would’ve enjoyed it more if it weren’t “I, Robot”.
That’s what’s so frustrating about the whole thing. It could’ve been a good movie on its own, but it had to drag in that title and ruin it for me, and ruin any chance (as little as there was) of there being an actual I, Robot movie.
I saw this a few weeks ago and it was a good deal better than I expected. The ads from last summer made it look like a typical, big, dumb action movie, but it wasn’t. I read I, Robot immediately after and found that the film was very much in keeping with the spirit of the stories that inspired it. You can tell Akiva Goldsman wasn’t very involved in the writing.
It was a better adaptation of the source than Starship Troopers, but only barely. However, it was a much more enjoyable action flick than ST, because it had better internal logic (though it lacked gratuitous (female) nudity, which is a shame). And the Verhoeven fans will tell you that ST had important social commentary, I guess.
All in all, I think the movie was definitely worth the viewing (as was Starship Troopers), but I’m stil waiting for a screenwriter to adapt either of these authors without getting the point exactly backwards from the original.
And yes, the CGI stuff was amazing.
“You are experiencing a car accident”
I loved this movie. I went in with trepidation, but I really like Will Smith, I really like when things blow up and I really like robots. I wasn’t disappointed. 
I was going to say “no romance in an action film, please” but then I noticed you said gratuitous female nudity, and that’s always good, even if I am female.
However, Will Smith really bulked up, though, huh? Didn’t suit him much.
FilmGeek, I love robots, too. If, Og forbid, something happened to my beloved fiance and they could make a perfect robot copy I’d f*** it. :eek:
I watched it. Loved it. Read I, Robot. Loved it. Watched I, Robot. Loved it again. Spotted the things it has in common with the book. (not much)
It was a good film, and deserving of a sequel, but it might not be wise of them to call that “Rest of the Robots”
No discussion of “I, Robot” is complete without a link to this article
Maddox is hilarious, but despite that, I Robot is one my favorite films from last year.
I also had extremely low expectations, because the trailors made the movie look like a stupid popcorn fest. To my surprise, it had far more than mindless action, and the action is did have kicked ass.
Sonny was awsome too, in a HAL sortish way.
Eh. I read half of the article and gave it up. Excessively negative.
Cool robots, man! Cool stunts! A motorcycle! (I love motorcycles).
Lots of robots! Lots of shiny stuff! What else do I need? The only thing missing was my man Arnold.
I loved sonny (I loved the voice too, but I’m not Gay. Honest)
The reason for this extra post, and the one thing that annoyed me about an otherwise good movie is: I hate how they made it seem so easy for USR (or, as in the book, USRAMM) to create a robot capable of ignoring the three laws. In all the asimov reading I’ve done it has seemed apparent that violating the laws is a near impossible event.
The line (paraphrased) : “he has the three laws, but he can choose not to obey them” is where this annoyance is centred.
No, no, no, Lobsang! The way to think about it is, “Hey this movie is a little bit like that great book, I Robot, by Asimov.”
Not, “This movie is supposed to be like that book!” Therein lies the way to madness.
Although, when they were entering VIKI’s chamber, did anyone else say, “What are you doing, Dave?” and chortle? No? That was just me?
Ah, well.
What’d that contribute to the discussion? The writer felt he had to double the length by using giant print and including a picture of Will Smiith peeing on Asimov’s grave.
It’s an opinion thing, obviously, but I do remember my roommate (who had already seen the movie and felt the way I do about it) overheard one line of dialogue and said “that’s exactly what Susan Calvin would say.” He’s read much more Asimov than I have, and he agreed that the movie was basically true to the feel and the spirit of Asimov’s books.
Right. Especially since the book is basically just a collection of short stories!
Squeeze me???
:eek:
Preface to the book - written first person by someone interviewing Susan Calvin, describing a conversation he had with her. She was a ‘shrink’ for robots. OK, the book got that one correct. What they didnt get correct was that she did allmost all of the research that ‘made’ the positronic brain able to function.
First of the short stories in the book - Robbie. Little girl has a robot companion that she adores. Parents decide to send the bot back, she goes into a funk and searches for Robie everywhere…think of any lost puppy meme. They go back to the factory and ‘discover’ Robie and he saves her life and they take him back home. OK, in the movie robots had been sold as companion units and servants. Not a big stretch.
Story 2 - runaround. A couple of mechtechs and their bot are on the planet Mercury, and their bot malfunctions…they have to go through all sorts of shenanegans to get the stupid thing to contravene its programming and get the chemical they need to save their lives. Nothing of this in the movie.
Story 3 - Reason - Same mechtech on a space station, with a robot named QT, that henceforth they call Cutie decides to find god, and obviously humans didnt make robots, so these poor schlubs are stuck being bossed around and hindered by bots that found religion. They are responsible for focusing some sort of energy beam to keep earth powered. After much putting of descartes before the horse, they determine that the bots of god can keep the beam targetted just fine and let them go on…
Story 4 - Catch that Rabbit - Same mechtechs again - I sense a theme here. A bot that is part of a working set of 6 bots seems to have amnesia, it wanders off and doesnt do its job. More tech-fu and they discover that the positronic brainage can handle 5 bots linked but not 6. Big whoop.
Story 5 - Liar - OOH Susan Calvin is in this one, about a mind reading bot=) He was interpreting the laws of robotics and trying to make everybody happier by reading their minds and implanting suggestions…he dies after Calvin-fu fixes him.
Story 6 - Little Lost Robot - One of the only stories that is vaguely anything in the movie…Calvin is on a space station trying to find one robot out of a gajillion identical ones. Of course after calvin-fu she manages.
Story 7 - Escape! - Aw, company breaks its positronic brain [think mainframe setup to do calculations and research] trying to make a hyperdrive. Calvin-fu results in the invention of the drive.
Story 8 - Evidence - Is Steven Byerly a bot or a man…does it even matter - maybe to some voters but he gets elected anyway…
Final story - the Evitable Conflict - The great bot Byerly faces off with Calvin-goddess to solve the problems of trying to run the universe with computers making all the decisions…and screwing up. Calvin-fu ensues.
Honestly, they barely take anything from the whole set of shorts. A man dies, a cop investigates and discovers a plot by robots to nanny humans into a safe little world and cop and calvin must find this bot. Big Yip.
Good CGI, but where did his arm come from?<boggle>
He didn’t say it was a slavishly faithful adaptation, he said it was better.
The book doesn’t have a plot. A movie needs one. So they took the characters, some of the details (including important ones, like the Three Laws, and the fact that despite the ‘perfection’ of the Three Laws something always goes wrong), and the feel of the stories and made a movie from that. You can’t get these things “correct” or incorrect. The movie credits say the film was “suggested by” the book and that’s all.
I think that, and VIKI, may have been a nod to the Asimov robots, Daneel and Giskard, who came up with the “Zeroeth Law”, which superseded the first law. It said, basically, that the good of humanity as a whole is more important than the individual, and the first law was amended to add “…except when doing so would conflict with the Zeroeth Law.”
I can’t understand that people want to defend this crap-fest.
The story made no sense whatsoever.
The action sequences were lifted straight out of John Woo, the CGI looked like, well… CGI.
The whole thing with the two Positronic brains making it possible to choose not to follow the three laws, the dream wherein Will Smith is suddenly the saviour of the robots… it just didn’t add up.
Now as a typical sci-fi blow-em-up action-vehicle it was kinda allright, but they never should have used the names Asimov or I, Robot.
Even without sonsidering the relationship to Asimov’s book (which I’ve written about elsewhere, and won’t go into here), I would’ve dislkied this movie. Eventually it’s another case of Robots Take Over Humanity , subclass For Their Own Good. Hasn’t this been done to death since Jack Williamson’s “With Folded Hands” and “The Humanoids”? (At the World SF con, Larry Niven greeted Jack Williamson on a phone hookup – still alive and publishing in his nineties – with “I see they made a movie out of “THe Humanoids” and called it “I, Robot””) Didn’t Star Trek already do this? Isn’t this the cheapest, least thoughtful ideas we can film and seem as if we’re doing something “deep”?
There were some good bits – The robot’s dialogue was priceless (“Can you write a symphony?” “No. Can you?”). Will Smith’s bionic arm was cute. But the rest didn’t add up to much. I never bought the idea that Smith or Smith plus a robot could really prevail against hordes of robots. Sheer numbers should’ve done them in. If they’d not gone after the Asimov connection and named it something else I still would have called it a good opportunity, wasted.
And, damnit, I like science fiction films, and keep rooting for a new, good one! I’ll give a flick a chance. But I won’t even watch I, Robot again.
It wasn’t entirely like that, though. It wasn’t Robots Take Over Humanity entirely but one boss-robot intrepreting the Three Laws a little excessively. And Sonny made a big difference.
That being said, who cares? In the end the robots may find a new dawn, and the effects were more than cool enough. Even the story wasn’t awful, just mediocre.