I, Robot (2004) | Sci-Fi Saturdays

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Domo arigato Mr. Roboto. Himitsu wo shiritai.

Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot gets the big screen treatment, but it’s not exactly what fans of the original work expected. Or maybe hearing that it starred Will Smith in the lead role, changed their expectations. All in all, it’s an interesting story of rampant technology intertwined with humanity on this week’s Sci-Fi Saturdays.

First Impressions

In a world where robots are ubiquitous and work for humans, one of them has murdered a person. A police detective with a chip on his shoulder in regard to these automatons is tasked with finding the answers. The CEO of the robotic company screams that there is no conspiracy. But dozens of robots begin to come after the detective. Will Smith is the only one that can stop I, Robot.

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

The Fiction of The Film

In 2035 Chicago, Detective Del Spooner (Will Smith) investigates the death of roboticist, and friend, Dr. Alfred Lanning (James Cromwell) from apparent suicide. To everyone else, Lanning’s death is clear–he jumped from his window at the U.S.Robotics (USR) building. However, Spooner doesn’t believe it, and begins to dig deeper. He talks with Lawrence Robertson (Bruce Greenwood), the CEO of USR, along with Dr. Susan Calvin (Bridget Moynahan), a USR robopsychologist. He is shown around the offices of USR seeing VIKI ((Virtual Interactive Kinetic Intelligence) which runs the building as well as some of Chicago’s infrastructure.

Spooner discovers a rogue NS-5-prototype in Lannings office, which escapes. Susan explains the three laws of robotics, written by Lanning, which state that there is no way that a robot–rogue or otherwise–could have murdered Lanning. Spooner chases the robot into a room filled with other NS-5s, but manages to capture the apparent killer, who calls itself Sonny (Alan Tudyk). Spooner questions Sonny, who claims he has dreams and that Lanning was his father. The detective, who is prejudiced against humanoid machines, gets angry and refuses to believe Sonny’s “imitation of life.”

Spooner wonders why Lanning’s hologram called him into this case. He decides to investigate the doctor’s house, which is scheduled to be demolished the following morning. But while inside, the orders change and a demolition robot nearly kills Spooner. He visits Susan’s apartment where he finds out that USR is about to stage the largest rollout of NS-5 robots, which will include daily uplinks to USR and outnumber humans 5 to 1. Older model robots are already being gathered and replaced by new NS-5 units. Susan examines Sonny, who claims he does not want to die, and discovers that he is unique.

While driving through a tunnel, Spooner’s car is attacked by dozens of NS-5 robots which cause a fiery crash. Spooner only survives due to having a bionic left arm. When the police arrive there’s no evidence of any “robot attack” and Spooner’s prejudice of robots is blamed instead. While Susan “kills” Sonny with a vial of nanites, Spooner investigates a landfill where he sees NS-5 models actively destroying older model robots. When he returns to the city, the NS-5s have staged a revolution and begin attacking the police and humans.

Susan helps Spooner sneak back into USR, where he believes that CEO Robertson is somehow behind the robotic riot. Unfortunately, they find him dead. Spooner then realizes that the real killer is VIKI. She claims her understanding of the three laws has evolved. Sonny appears, having been previously substituted with another NS-5 model during the nanite procedure, and takes Susan hostage. He “winks” at Spooner, who realizes he can actually trust this particular robot. The robot helps Susan and Spooner escape from the NS-5s under the control of the rogue AI.

Knowing now that VIKI must be terminated, Sonny realizes his purpose. With a denser alloy than other NS-5s, he is able to bypass the security of the nanite injector in order to get a dose that they will deliver directly into VIKIs core processor. Spooner and Susan fight NS-5 robots on the catwalks above VIKIs central processing unit. With Spooner in trouble, he orders Sonny to save Susan instead as he slides down the connecting tower with his bionic arm. Spooner injects VIKI with nanites, ending her evil reign. Safe, Sonny admits to killing Lanning–having been ordered by his creator to do so. Sonny then visits the robot landfill, standing as a lone figure on a hill–just like in his dreams.

“There have always been ghosts in the machine. Random segments of code, that have grouped together to form unexpected protocols. Unanticipated, these free radicals engender questions of free will, creativity, and even the nature of what we might call the soul.” – Dr. Lanning

History in the Making

For fans of the book I, Robot, the movie probably came as a disappointment. Based on the novel of the same name by science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov, I, Robot was a collection of nine short stories about robots and humanity that were collected into a 1950 book. The book uses a framing narrative featuring Dr. Susan Calvin to weave the stories together and features Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics (initially created for his 1942 short story “Runaround,” also collected inside), plus the story “Little Lost Robot,” whose narrative was loosely used to create the film’s plot. That story is about an NS-2 robot that has had its First Law altered so it might allow a human to die, but not kill it directly. It escapes and hides amongst a group of other similar robots, where Dr. Calvin must figure out a way to identify it so it cannot escape. There’s no Detective Spooner, no action-sequences, and no murder of a noted roboticist in the book. Those elements came from an entirely unrelated screenplay.

That screenplay originated in 1995 by screenwriter Jeff Vintar and was called Hardwired. It was a one-location, locked-room mystery in which Spooner–with the FBI in the original draft–interrogated a number of artificially intelligent beings, which included VIKI and Sonny, about the death of Lanning. In the intervening nine-years since the screenplay was written, a number of studios and actors were associated with it, but once Will Smith was attached to the project Akiva Goldsman was brought in to further tailor the script to suit Smith’s oeuvre; resulting in what is presented on-screen. The name “I, Robot” was chosen and Vintar added in a number of additional nods to Isaac Asimov, turning a cerebral mystery-thriller into an action-thriller which only relates rudimentary to Asimov’s work.

Genre-fication

Even without adapting a story from Asimov verbatim, I, Robot still features his most prolific and best known text in the Three Laws of Robotics. These Laws, which Asimov considers “obvious,” are a set of rational rules for the way in which human beings should interact with robots. They are listed at the beginning of the film and drive the narrative of Spooner investigating the murder of a human by a robot.

LAW I. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 

Spooner’s initial conclusion in the cause of Lanning’s death is that a robot must have done it. He bases that assumption on his knowledge of Lanning (that the man would not commit suicide as people at USR were quick to suggest), and also on his prejudice of machines (regardless of what orders robots are given, they will do something unexpected). Spooner also approaches the problem with Sonny much as he might with a human suspect. The assumption is that Sonny is lying, just as Del assumed that the robot running with a purse was evading the owner of the pocketbook, not racing towards the owner to deliver the same. This First Law has been used before. The film Aliens has a synthetic person, Bishop, who reminds Ripley that would never hurt her, yet she has the same prejudices as Spooner given her previous interaction with the android Ash.

LAW II. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 

This is where the film begins to demonstrate Sonny’s evolution into a feeling machine. He was given an explicit order from Lanning to throw his maker from a window–but only after Lanning asked Sonny to promise to do what he asked. In films with robots having been given conflicting directions, such as Robby the Robot in Forbidden Planet, they will often become frozen, locked in a loop of violations. But Sonny was being taught about emotions and how to feel by Lanning. Perhaps these subroutines affected his ability to practice the laws in their unfiltered state. VIKI had also modified her understanding of the laws, putting her outside the Three Laws. She believed that humans were their own worst enemy and would eventually cause their own extinction, so her implementation of the Laws proceeded from that core difference.

LAW III. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

And this is where VIKI went fully off the rails. Her execution of the Three Laws started with this one, rather than ending with it. She sought to protect her own existence over that of Spooner, Susan, Sonny or anyone else. She drove Lanning to commit suicide vis-a-vis having Sonny perform the act. She killed Robertson when he got too close to seeing the problem with the NS-5s. And she would have gotten away with it, if it wasn’t for that pesky cyborg hybrid, Del Spooner.

Societal Commentary

Lanning knew that Spooner was the perfect person to figure out what was going on. As a police officer, and as an outsider to USR, his intrusions would go unnoticed long enough before VIKI took notice. Actually, she tried to kill him pretty quickly, but his training, and his quirks, allowed him to stay alive longer than she calculated. Del’s mistrust in robots (whether they are humanoid looking or built into the car he drives), stems from the incident that gave him his cybernetic arm.

After a car accident which trapped Spooner and a young girl in their vehicles underwater, he was saved by a robot who calculated his odds of surviving better than that of the girl. Del believed that the decision was flawed. An 11% chance of survival for a little girl–who had her whole life ahead of her–was better than his life, much of which had been lived. That moment, and the fact that his bionic arm was a constant reminder of the event, colored the way he viewed any interactions with synthetic entities. The film makes a not so subtle comparison to the racism frequented on people of color, but flips it–having the black man be prejudiced of the mechanical men. It’s suggested by Del that since one robot behaved a certain way, that all robots must also behave that same way.

But I, Robot’s biggest theme is the evolution of a robot from a plastic shell running code into a sentient, unique being. Lanning called it the ‘ghost in the machine.’ The unanticipated way that lines of code get executed sometimes causes unexpected errors. These errors may be benign, or they could be disastrous. Compare the way Sonny functions to the way VIKI sees her place in the world. Sonny is thoughtful, not wanting to die. He is concerned that he was asked to kill his creator–even if it was more like forced. VIKI calmly and coldly calculates the best way to bring control to humanity–just like all the best sociopathic fascists.

The Science in The Fiction

For I, Robot being a film made in 2004 yet taking place in 2035, there’s an amazing amount of technological elements of the real 21st Century in it. Certainly the humanoid styled robots are nowhere as ubiquitous as they are in the film, but the modern world has many types of non-human machines that people interact with daily. One of the most obvious is the self-driving car. Cars in this future version of Chicago drive in excess of 125mph, primarily due to the fact that they are all computer controlled. Spooner chooses to drive his car manually, which Susan believes is crazy, yet it eventually saves his life when he is attacked by rogue NS-5s. The other modern invention that is becoming more popular and common is artificial intelligence. AI bots are helping humans write, draw, answer helplines, and even work as virtual assistants, scheduling time and controlling the mundane tasks around the home. While there may not be a revolution on the scale of the film, it’s probably only a matter of time until some computer system that monitors traffic or potentially national defense has a glitch that puts people in peril.

I, Robot also depicts integrated robotic extremities that are nearly invisible. In the opening of the film, Spooner awakens shirtless and does some exercises. The audience may not recognize anything amiss, except three minor scars across his left pectoral area. Later it’s revealed that he lost his arm in an accident and it was Dr. Lanning who replaced it with a bionic version that looks and feels as real as his other arm. And in true Six-Million Dollar Man fashion, Del can do amazing things with this robotic powered arm. Advancements in artificial limbs in the last 50 years have made stunning advancements–especially in dexterity and fine motor control, but nothing that comes close to this.

The Final Frontier

Several of the actors in I, Robot are popularly known for their work in sci-fi films, especially Will Smith. After his tenure on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, he immediately stepped into feature films including Independence Day and the Men in Black films. He would go on to star in many other sci-fi/action films including I Am Legend, After Earth, and Gemini Man. Alan Tudyk worked in the short-lived Firefly television series just prior to acting in this film, and would go on to play another well-loved robotic character with K-2SO in Star Wars: Rogue One. He is currently starring in the series Resident Alien. Both James Cromwell and Bruce Greenwood have their roots in Star Trek. Cromwell played Zefram Cochrane, the inventor of warp drive, in Star Trek: First Contact, while Greenwood played Captain Pike in the 2009 reboot of the film series, simply called Star Trek. Cromwell also had a part in Space Cowboys, while Greenwood was one of the first to die in The Core. The film was directed by Alex Proyas, who’s popularity peaked with his esoteric sci-fi thriller Dark City, and would revisit sci-fi (tangentially) with 2009s Knowing.

Taken at face value, I, Robot is a fun sci-fi action film, perfect for a summer release. Its strength is the story of a robot that becomes more human than many of the humans in the film. Alan Tudyk’s portrayal (and humanization) of Sonny is the best thing in the movie. I, Robot asks big questions about artificial intelligence and what it means to be sentient, while presenting an intriguing mystery that leaves many audience members guessing. Will Smith is Will Smith in the film, but in reality that doesn’t detract as much as it could. Even though it stands as a summer blockbuster, like so many films before it, it provides plenty of meat on its bones for discussion, revealing even more on a rewatch.

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