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this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2023
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I, Robot, especially after reading the books. It functions as a combo of the books, but set roughly where the first book took place in, using a variant of the protagonist from the sequels. The robots taking over as they did, though, wasn't really accurate, even just regarding the laws of robotics, but it worked for the movie's conflict. In the books, they get a larger hold on humanity, but to help them go past Earth to become an intragalactic society. For a one-off, though, I can see the directions the movie took to give it that close-ended feeling. Also, the implications of robots and humans, and Spooner as a chracter were pretty faithful to the source material, IMO.
Do people not like I, Robot? It's a fun movie that doesn't feel like cheesy sci-fi to me. The ridiculous spinning camera toward the end was over the top, but the rest of the movie was decent.
It was seen as a new low when it came to product placement, which was much talked about at the time. There's a scene where someone compliments Will Smith's character's shoes and the camera zooms in on them while he says "vintage 200X" that was incredibly reviled.
Ah yeah, the Chuck Taylor reference, it was brief, but considering how it had been criticized it must've stuck out in how obvious it sounded. It's at least a far cry from being Hawaii 5-0 tier, thankfully.
I've seen that link before without realizing it was from a movie, not an actual commercial. I can't believe they put that in a movie.
I haven't heard anyone personally that outwardly disliked it, I picked it based on the RT/metacritic score and me enjoying it despite that. I was way too young to remember fresh reactions to the movie when it came out.
People don't like it because it has nothing to do with the source material beyond some character names. It's literally a random action script that had Asimov slapped on top of it just so the studio could legally claim to be using their movie rights. No relation to the book. Nothing at all like anything the original author himself would have ever written, to the point of being disrespectful to one of the greatest of the genre.
I don't think it's an insult to Asimov's work.
Asimov didn't write action movies or stories that could become action movies at all. But the elements in the movie I Robot are all solidly woven into Asimov's work.
But I agree it's a tradgedy that it's a lot closer to Minority report than to Bicentennial Man, Total Recall, or Blade Runner, as far as adaptations go.
I'm not mad at what we got, but we could have had a lot more Asimov and a lot less action movie tropes.
All that said, Will Smith's deliver of "11% is more than enough. A human being would have known that." is an incredibly worthy condensation of Asimov's core tension across the books.
I think it was fine. Dunno why the hatred for it. Yes sure, Asimov was a genius with how he made up new concepts and immediately started playing with them, and the movie doesn't quite live up to that.
But also the story is (loosely) based on a short story that's like what, 10 pages long? I, Robot is a collection of random short stories, so I'm not sure what people expected from a movie with that name. Maybe something like Animatrix?
If you wanna see some real butchering of Asimov's work, there's the Foundation series...
I would say the only thing the movie has in common with the book is that it mentions the book's main character and the laws of robotics. The book is all about weird behavior of robots that actually obey the laws but the movie just treats them as some corporate doublespeak.
Yeah, I don’t think Spooner is identical to Elijah Baley, but I see they connect on the technophobe aspects, if nothing else. It’s been a while since I’ve read the books, in other aspects they’re probably vastly different.
The main character in I, Robot is Dr. Susan Calvin. It also features Donovan and Powell. Elijah is from the robot trilogy, which happens centuries after I, Robot.
"The Caves of Steel" is very much part of the "I Robot" storyline, and not an important distinction here. I also expected Dr Susan Calvin, but when talking about what we actually got, it's closest to an adaptation of the R. Daneel trilogy.
And anyway, on Asimov's average scale, those years are right next to eachother. /s
I posted the same movie before seeing this. I wish they would make a TV series of these books instead of Foundation. I thought the movie was a good robot movie, but was very disappointed that it didn't follow the books.
It was to my understanding they'd already had a movie written and only brought in "I, Robot" because it was familiar to some of the audience and they could pick the corpse of the book for buzzwords. Even the ending credits say the movie was "inspired by" the collection of short stories.
On the topic of Isaac Asimov stories on the big screen, I nominate Bicentennial man. 36% critic and 59% audience score respectively.
I thought it did a good with the themes it brought forth and Asimovs testing of the types of conflicts that would occur with Robots gaining sentience and humanity seeing them as just machines.
Despite the one event near the end that would create a conflict with the laws of Robotics and the effect it should have on a positronic brain.
Also James Horner's awesome soundtrack.
I would have never guessed Bicentennial Man would have scores that low. It's a great scifi and a really well made movie.
At worst, it sacrifices a strong ending for telling a complete scifi story, which many scifi movies do. (And I believe was the right call.)