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First there was Freddy vs. Jason, now Will Smith vs. The Terminator. What's next, Alien vs. Predator??, 21 July 2004

Author: Michael DeZubiria (miked32@hotmail.com) from Luoyang, China

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

In these Three Laws, written in the movie by the late Dr. Alfred Lanning but in real life by Isaac Asimov, we have the foundational structure of the rules by which robots must live amongst humans in Chicago in the year 2035. Massive advances have been made in programming, as robots have such a flawless performance record that the suggestion of malfunction is seen as a sign of paranoia or even insanity. Obviously none of the filmmakers or writers ever owned a PC.

Every once in a while, a movie comes along that is, usually purposely, a compilation of many other movies. Leslie Nielsen style spoofs are the deliberate and purely comedic version, then you have movies like Shrek, which border on being spoofs (especially Shrek 2) but make much more respectful references, and then you have the bottom of the barrel drivel like the Scary Movies, which feed off of the success of other movies because of a total lack of creativity or talent on the part of the writers and directors. In I, Robot, some of the references are deliberate, many other, probably the majority of them all, are circumstantial.

Sonny, the central robot, jumps out a window, striking a Neo pose while the camera reverts into Matrix-style slow motion. He talks almost exactly like the hypnotic HAL 9000 from Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. He is suspected of murder, slated for `decommission,' and ultimately walks the Green Mile. Dr. Lanning is able to make sporadic appearances post-mortem, exactly like Princess Leah did in Star Wars (although she was slightly less dead), such as he does late in the movie, where he explains to Detective Spooner (Will Smith, who doesn't seem to realize throughout the entire movie that he's no longer shooting Bad Boys II), that the Three Laws he has written for the robots can ultimately lead to only one logical conclusion – The Rise of the Machines/Attack of the Clones. There are several references to `ghosts in the machine,' which I'm only about 20% sure are purposely meant to refer to the mediocre sci-fi movie of the same name, the brain of the entire company is straight out of Sphere, and comparisons of Sonny to Robin Williams's Andrew from Bicentennial Man and/or Haley Joel Osment's David from Artificial Intelligence are impossible to ignore.

In an apparent suicide, Dr. Lanning, basically the brains behind a corporation called USR (which I'm pretty sure stands for either Cyberdine or Omni Consumer Products), that makes Microsoft look like Radio Shack, has fallen from the window of an office that was locked from the inside. It's not until we are taken into that office that we notice it's full of robots and robot parts. The immediate conclusion that it was suicide and not possibly a malfunctioning robot suggest not only the astronomical technological advances that have been made, but also the equally massive deterioration that has decimated the thought processes involved in law enforcement. Dead doctor, locked office, suicide. Case closed. The most tragic thing in the movie is that only one police officer took it upon himself to look a little deeper.

One of the things that people seem to have focused on is the disturbing lack of implausibility in the futuristic society that is presented. Given our current preoccupation with computers and whatnot, it doesn't seem too far-fetched to suppose that there will be personal, robotic assistants available to the general public at some time in the future. What IS a little far-fetched, however, is the goal of Lawrence Robertson, the Bill Gates of the future, to have the ratio of robots to humans at 1:5.

Permit me to digress for a moment…

In the 1960s, three engineers in Illinois came up with what they called the Doomsday Equation. Based on the population growth at THAT TIME (since population grows exponentially, it is already growing much, much faster), they predicted that the human population would reach infinity by the year 2026. Specifically, November 13th of that year. A Friday. The scary thing is that this impossible population number is barely 20 years away, and we are leaps and bounds AHEAD of the schedule they predicted. The Doomsday Equation predicted 3.65 billion people would be on Earth by the year 1975, at which point we turned out to be at 3.97 billion, a number that the equation didn't suggest we would hit until 1980, but by 1980 we were already at 4.4 billion. In July of 1986 we hit 5 billion, which the equation didn't predict we would hit until 1989. Now fast forward to 2035 and add another 20% to THAT population, which should have passed `infinity' more than a decade earlier. Corporate greed is a scary, scary thing.

Will Smith plays exactly the same character he's played in any movie where he ever starred in where he played a cop. He lives in a future where robots have displaced a staggering number of people from their jobs (and given the presumable size of the population, the unemployment rate must be astonishing), cars are stored rather than parked, Audi has bought out every other major car manufacturer (although Ford is still putting out an Aspire or two here and there), 2004 is vintage, and anything not voice-operated is just weird. Enter one misbehaving robot and one suspicious cop and you have yourself a movie. One car in the movie is impressively futuristic rather than the same old late 90s models with plastic ground effects added (see Back to the Future II), which I don't really understand. Really, all you need to see are the headlights to see that nothing's changed. Spooner's car, however, obviously provided for the movie by Audi (who just as obviously bankrolled the film), is very real and very impressive, inside and out. I'm not even entirely sure that the thing actually touched the ground while it was driving, but that still doesn't excuse the fact that turning the wheel sharply at high speeds will make the car spin like a top. I wonder what that little feature was meant for.

The finale is somehow able to be an obvious ploy but still work pretty well as an action payoff. The brain had to have been suspended in mid-air for no other reason than to provide a setting in which characters and robots can fall for hundreds of feet, but it's such a well-crafted and well-filmed scene that it's still impressive, and the closing shot of the movie is one that will go down as a science fiction classic alongside the Statue of Liberty on the beach from Planet of the Apes. I, Robot is only loosely based on Asimov's source material, but it's a fast paced and entertaining film which should be given credit even if for no other reason than because it elevates the level of science fiction, one of the two most commonly botched genres in all of filmmaking (the other, obviously, being horror).

And by the way, none of the Three Laws are violated by a human commanding a robot to destroy itself. Had Spooner thought of this it might have saved him a great deal of trouble.

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