The Cyrillic Harpo speaks wisdom.
Case in point: The upcoming Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is, inarguably, science fiction.
But it’s being sold as a comedy/romance.
What does that tell you?
(And for what it’s worth, it’s also supposed to be amazing. Get in line now.)
Since Eternal Sunshine was also (co-)written by the same Charlie Kaufman who wrote Being John Malkovich the odds of a similar mindset are really high. 
I want to give it a chance. I just wish the trailer wasn’t so incredibly awful.
Actually, the trailer looks great. The story may be ass, but the style and the cinematography look first rate.
True. (Well, I won’t say whether they were cheesy.)
From the look of the trailer there is one thing and only one thing wrong with this movie. But, you know, the trailer may be misleading – gosh! A misleading trailer? From Hollywood???
I, Robot, is indeed a series of short stories. And yes, Harlan did a screenplay once. I haven’t read it, but I suspect it has absolutlely nothing to do with this movie. And you know what? That’s OK. Really. They don’t really need to follow any of the original stories as far as I’m concerned. They just need to do one thing, and it appears they are not doing it.
Isaac Asimov created the three laws of robotics for a very specific reason. At the time, pulp fiction was full of “the evil robot turning on its master”. You know, it worked for Mary Shelly, so let’s keep recycling that same theme over and over and over again. And Asimov was sick of it. His fictional creations were first and foremost machines. Machines are made a certain way. And if you create these machines to behave a certain way they aren’t going to “just decide” to rise up against their human masters. They’re machines, not people! Thus the “three laws” were an english phrasing of the way the robotic minds are created. It is physically impossible for them to break these laws.
For those of you just joining this concept, the three laws are (1) A robot may not harm a human being or, through inaction, cause a human to be harmed. (2) A robot must obey all human commands unless it counters the first law. (3) A robot must protect itself from harm, unless that counters the first two laws.
Now, over the years Asimov played with the concept quite a bit. After all machines can break. Just how would a robot behave should one of these three laws be defective? For that matter, what if a law was just slightly out of balance? For that matter, how does a robot recognize a human being at all? All of these subjects have been dealt with quite a bit.
But this move, from all appearances, has gone right back to the ol’ Frankenstein plot, the very hackneyed plot Asimov was dissin’!
Hook up an electric generator to his grave, ‘cause he’s spinnin’ around enough to power all of New York City right now.
Just to add to that - I recently read ‘The Complete Robot’, and every instance of a robot failing to adhere to the three laws was initiated by human activity, either accidently or intentional.
as somebody who doesn’t care one way or the other about isaac asimov, i just wanted to say that that movie looks cool, and i will probably see it.
oh yeah, and that’s why hollywood does things like this. I would say that the vast majority of people haven’t read the book, and it’s likely that a majority of people that watch these types of movies don’t even know who isaac asimov is.
The want to have a successful movie, and they’re probably not going to do it by pandering to the asimov crowd (is there such a thing? 
)
That’s how Hollywood does things? No, really? I bow down to your superior knowledge of Hollywood :rolleyes:
Of course that’s how Hollywood usually does things. So why even piggyback on Asimove at all??? Does this movie need the three laws? Is it even remotely going to use them? Do they need the connection with Asimov in the least? No, no, and no! So why not just call the damned thing “Robots Gone Wild” and save themselves the royalty fees?
I think that this is a question worthy of a new thread.
Robots Gone Wild. Get it now! EXXtreeeeeme robot action. All-robot, robot-on-robot action. Teen robots bare it all!
Okay, so that wasn’t as good as my first idea, which is “The First Law of Robotics is don’t talk about the laws of robotics. The Second Law of Robotics is don’t talk about the laws of robotics…”
Chronos: You’re probably right.
Fish: That was freakin’ hilarious!!! 
The LOTR movies pandered to the Tolkien crowd as much as was possible (read the books, despite the whinging of “purists” they’re at times line-by-line faithful) and made billions.
I think part of LOTR’s smashing success was the paucity of even mediocre fantasy films out there. That’s one helluvan oasis to put in Dearth Valley.
The sci-fi genre seems to have a new movie coming out every week…
Count me as another person who thinks Asimov is rolling over in the grave. Of all the short stories and books of his that I have read, I can only recall one where a robot was (possibly) dangerous on its own (someone had designed a quite powerful robot and left it to think for many years, during which time it might have decided that it, as an advanced robot, classified as more human than a flesh-and-blood human).
This movie (as depicted by the trailer) falls completely into the “Frankenstein Complex” (as Asimov called it) and does so completely against everything that Asimov stood for. Just about every one of Asimov’s robot stories depicted the hero or heroes as fighting against the idea that robots were monsters, and these movie makers throw everything Asimov worked for right back into his face.
Of course, it’s Hollywood, so what should I expect? It does look like it might be a somewhat entertaining action movie, but I fear that if they try to give too much credit to Asimov for the story (i.e. any credit), I won’t be able to stomach it.
Shoot, now I’m going to have to go find some Asimov short story collections to reread (I have the two-volume set of Asimov short stories, the big books, and numerous other collections and novels, but not here with me).
I’m also a bit ticked off that they’ve turned Susan Calvin from a middle aged severe ice-queen into a supermodel. Hmph. A better casting choice would have been Judi Dench, in “M” mode.
I am appalled.
That is all.
Oh, man, is this gonna be one of those times that Hollywood takes a book, mangles it into a movie, then turns around and gets some hack to write a novelization of the movie?
(I swear to gawd that I’ve seen this happen…but my memory fails me right now…)
You mean like The Cat in the Hat Junior Novelization?
Consider Phlebas wouldn’t take much alteration to make into a ‘big dumb action flick’. It’s got big menacing aliens, fast vehicles, extreme violence, countdowns to destruction, shapechanging assassins, sarcastic computers, and tons of ‘barely made it’ action sequences. I’m not knocking the book, it’s imaginative, well written, and a load of fun. I’m just saying that if you made an extremely faithful adaptation, you could rightly say it was a space opera action movie.