I, Robot

Synopsis: Detective Del Spooner (Will Smith) investigates the mysterious suicide of a chief roboticist on the eve of his company distributing a domestic robot to every household in America. The robots are naturally more than they seem.

\I could overlook Alex Proyas marring Dark City with Keifer Sutherland but I, Robot just has too many things going wrong with it to forgive. This is what I think Alex Proyas must have 'suggested' to the studio bosses:"You remember how we couldn't get the rights to Isaac Asimov's I, Robot? You know, the grandfather of modern robotics science-fiction; who invented the three laws of robotics? And you remember how we were going to use that 'Hard Wired' screenplay to make another robot film instead? And how that screenplay was hopeless and we didn't have a marketable lead actor?

"Well, I heard we can get the I, Robot rights after all! But the book is actually not that cool. Just short stories about clunky robots! And it's a bit sexist, maybe even racist. The only female character, Dr Calvin, is 75! Not sexy! And nobody dies, no guns, no cops... I mean we could do something with a retro-1950s sci-fi vibe, but Cypher already beat us to it.

"So here's the plan. We say the film's 'suggested' by Asimov stories! We jazz up the 'Hard Wired' screenplay and call it I,Robot. We change a few of the character names to match Asimov, butwe make the old lady young and ice-queen sexy, you know? We make the year 2035 to match the I, Robot timelines, but we use high-techrobotics that Asimov imagined would only be built hundreds or thousands of years in the future."

"Then we get Will Smith to do his 'cool cop' thing, lots of dumb wise-cracks and stuff. And we'll have a nude scene in the shower! The nudity clause in the contract will cost a packet, but the product placement can pay! We'll have him wearing and talking about Converse All-Star shoes, and we'll get someone to say 'Hey, nice shoes!' And we'll have this JVC stereo right there in your face, and an Audi. And we'll make him a retro-fashion collector, so he can tell people the shoes are the 2004 model. Like, you know, so the audience will know they can buy the exact same shoes today! And they can pick up the stereo at the same time!

"There won't be much money for script-editing, so I guess we'll have to live with the huge plot holes. The special effects will blow the budget. But we can rip off that 1998 Bjork music video that had really, really cool-looking robots. And for most of the other visuals we can rip off Minority Report. We'll have this lead robot that's really interesting, but we won't use him much because the audience really wants to see thousands of robots doing bad stuff. And we'll rip off the death of HAL from 2001, but we'll have thousands of robots doing bad stuff then too like all those things in the Aliens\ movies. And we'll jam on some sequel set-up at the end. Cool!"
Not cool, Alex, not cool.

 

 

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