I, Robot

Well, to be perfectly honest, I not robot. I meat-monster hu-mon, instead. But there is a movie called I, Robot that I saw. Now, I've read Asimov's book of the same name, and while there are certain similarities between the two; for example, the title; that's about it. But then, how similar would you expect a Will Smith movie to be to a collection of short stories, none of which are about Will Smith? Not very, I'd assume. I'll begrudgingly admit that they both tackle the same essential subject material: robots, and how things can go wrong even with the supposedly flawless Three Laws of Robotics.

What, not familiar with the Laws, are we? Then you are peon, and deserve none of my pity. Be gone!

So, while the book looks at robots in an intelligent, insightful way, the movie looks at robots in a way that has a lot of explosions. Don't get me wrong, I like explosions, and I liked the movie, but I really don't think they should have ripped the title from something so completely different. Eh, whatever. On to the nuts and bolts of the review. Get it? Because nuts... and bolts... ha hah! I'm brilliant!

Will Smith cracks wise, and sometimes it works. Also, he's more or less naked right at the beginning, so take that into consideration if you want to show up five minutes late. Or early, with a camera. Whatever, your call. The CGI is brilliant, the older robots look like something a few decades off from out own technology. The newer robots, meanwhile, look eerily close to human, but with moving parts visible beneath synthetic skin, so the overall effect is pretty spiffy. Alan Tudyk plays the star robot, or more or less voices him and gets edited out and replace with a CG facsimile, but whatever. I've liked Tudyk in literally everything I've ever seen him in, which is now two movies and a groundbreaking TV series. He's a great guy, and a living antithesis to the old adage: "No one can play a pilot, a pirate, and a robot." So. Good for him.

All is not perfect in the movie, which is hard to believe because it takes place in Chicago and nothing ever goes wrong in Chicago. Well, there was that one half-century of political corruption and mob control, but that's about it. And also intermittently having the country's highest death rate, but whatever. And then there's Mike Ditka running for the senate, but that's over with. So, basically, I lost track of where this paragraph was going. The movie is set in Chicago, but it doesn't really take advantage of that fact, unlike 'Spider-Man 2', which is set in New York City, but still manages to display our El to good effect. (Fun fact: When the movie was being filmed, helicopters literally picked up large sections of track and flew them to New York, where they were dropped between buildings downtown, leaving hundreds of Chicago commuters stranded. Also, when 'I, Robot' was being filmed in Vancouver, they moved the Sears Tower by flatbed truck so that it could appear in the background. Unfortunately, due to customs issues they were unable to bring it back to the U.S., so now tourists are forced to mill around by a big hole in the ground, complaining that the view isn't as good as the postcards would have you think. (Stupid tourists! The Hancock has almost as good a view, there are other buildings, you don't have to rely on this one, even if it is the tallest building in the world (and note that I said world and not country. Putting a big, hollow dunce cap on an 88 story building does not the tallest make, and yes I'm talking to you, Kuala Lumpur and your damned Petronas Towers. Unless you got a yogi with an adding machine balancing up there, you got nothing! It's highest occupied floor or bust! (And even it if weren't, then the top of the antenna should be considered, which would also make the Sears Tower the tallest (ever since early 2000, when it installed a new antenna that superseded the Twin Towers and made the city HDTV compliant (not, I repeat, not simply a measure to take the title of 'tallest building' back from the World Trade Center (I mean, sure, we could have done the same to the Hancock, knocking the antenna up another hundred feet, and it would have worked out just as fine, but dammit, give us a break!)))))))