fine whine

Doubtless science fiction fans have both eagerly awaited and dreaded an adaptation* of Isaac Asimov's robot stories. From what little looking I did into this film, more hoopla surrounded the trailers than the final product, er, film.

'Product' does a good job of describing this 'film' as so much of its creation seems to be assembled from off the shelf parts more than organically and artfully combined. Most of this centers around our protagonist, Will Smith playing every action movie character he's done before. His street-smart cop is the only guy who doesn't trust the seemingly harmless androids, and naturally sets him at odds with everybody else. In the world of easy filmmaking, that means he's due to have a protracted foot chase with a seemingly purse-snatching robot (which is obviously a misunderstanding, made annoyingly so by the length of the chase), to get chewed out by the weary chief of police, and so on and so forth. It's as predictable as a Meg Ryan movie, I tell you.

It's as though the filmmakers were faced with but one question: what excuse do we have to make Will Smith run? Not, how do we shoehorn action into a thinking person's movie; nor, how do we make the robots and other effect look convincingly real and not distractingly CGI-slick?

Overtly CGI films as a technique are still in their infancy, and this will not be heralded as one of the early triumphs. Everything looks too fake, too slick, and the robots in particular don't quite seem to be inhabiting the space the actors who were motion-captured actually did. It all looked, well, too fake, even before we got to the sideways semi/robot onslaught at high speed scene, which was far too long.

Oh, and while we're talking about the vehicles, I'd like to add one thing: Spherical wheels are not a neat, futuristic idea. Think about why the lucky ones of us have upgraded to optical mice instead of their ball-laden forebears. Nice try on the futurism bent, but don't think that the car will be that much reinvented in a mere three decades, let alone so impractically.

But back to the sheer obviousness of it all. When first we meet Bridget Moynihan (the obligatory initially reluctant partner/eventual soul mate) she's wearing smart, shiny synthetic clothes with her hair up and speaks with a clipped, precise manner that comes off as too intellectual and stilted. By the end of the ordeal she's clad in natural fibers and leather (not head to ankle like our Converse wearing protagonist, but close) with her hair down and tousled, and she speaks like an average action hero's girlfriend. This may be some sort of character arc, I suppose. Either I'm a genius at spotting things or we're getting beaten across the head with a theme stick.

The lack of subtlety and depth sink this movie far more than anything else. All in all, it's too, well, robotic.

* 'Adaptation' is not exactly the correct word. The titles noted that this was "Suggested by" Asimov's works, so the writers could pick and choose as little or as much as they needed to plunder and pillage. Their philosophical conceit, at the very core of the movie, is more or less sound, at least as far as I have found in the whole Asimov-discussion-circle demographic. Isaac himself addressed much of the same idea in 1985 by creating the lesser known 'zeroth law' of robotics, dealing with the injury of humanity as a whole, not piecemeal. This addition would have seriously compromised the film's plot, far more than the usual burdens of credibility and the laws of physics.