"Rose and I will be interested to hear what you think of I, Robot... I've heard some good reviews that lead me to hope it won't be as bad as the trailers are making it look."
It probably can't be as bad as the trailers are making it look, so hopefully there's hope :)
I, Robot? It wasn't as bad as I'd thought. Some of it was preposterous - Susan Calvin as the hot action babe was just wrong - but... how can I put this? It actually made sense within an Asimovian framework. To me, it seemed like a "Caves of Steel" sort of story, within the world of his Susan Calvin stories. Does that make sense?
I liked Spiderman better. Just got back from that. The elevator scene was funny, but I'm not sure the villian "worked" for me. Good movie, but it almost seemed too cookie-cutter.
We liked I, Robot.
Perhaps it was because my expectations were so very low, but it was respectable!
The credits said it was "Suggested by a story by Isaac Asimov". "Suggested" is a fair term to use. It was in the spirit of Asimov's story universe- a story that Asimov might have written had he been a fan of the shoot-em-up-cop movie genre. He was clearly a fan of detective stories and this is very much a detective story.
Will Smith stars as Will Smith. His character had a name, I think, but he always plays "the cop" the same way. He's not much for acting, but he is adorable and vey funny. The robots turned out to be visually satisfying. Beautiful in a sculptural sense, but still strange enough to allow us to empathize with Smith's aversion to them. The lead robot, Sonny, had a creepy "HAL"-vibe. I kept expecting him to say, "Hello, Dave". *shudder*
The millieu was right on- I'm glad they paid attention to those details. They did a good job tying our present into the future Asimov imagined. They also made a fair attempt at getting around the 3 Laws and got very close to Asimov's "zeroth law"- the one that places the good of mankind above that of an individual human. Not bad for amateurs. ;P
Overall, I found it entertaining and pretty good. Neither an epic masterpiece nor a MST3K candidate. There was some language, Matrix-style special effects gimmicks, shoot-em-up violence, but no nudity or gratuituous sex. We'll definately get this on DVD and might even see it again in the theater.