Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto

[Flying Beastie]

 

Been a while since I did one of these, huh? I wrote this up to try to sell it, but none of the papers around here accept unsolicited work. It sucks being freelance. Anyway. . .

 

I'll admit: I was pleasantly surprised at this.

 

First, some background: This movie is not an adaptation of Isaac Asimov's original short story (which has been comitted to film at least twice, in both incarnations of The Outer Limits). It started out with another title: Hardwired, written by Jeff Vintar, but the producers then bought the rights to Asimov's story in order to get away with using the Three Laws and certain character names.

 

The surprise, for me, came from the trailers. They went to great lengths to make it look like Will Smith versus The Evil Robots, whereas Asimov's original book (not a single novel, but several short stories connected by characters and universe) was more cerebral, focussing mainly on Sonny's murder/sentience trial (which isn't even touched on here). Asimov wasn't a technophobe who used high tech to commit dystopias involving man's self-destructive tendencies --his work stressed the benefits of technology, and of the drive for self-improvement that defines human nature. Asimov's Three Laws were designed to prevent a robot from becoming simply a Frankenstein's monster.

 

So, how does the movie stack up? Pretty good, considering. There are some plot holes, such as at the beginning, when Sonny hides in that day's product, even though he's apparently been active for at least two days (given his time with Dr. Lanning). The movie's main feature (for good or ill) is a reliance on eye-popping special effects and action sequences. Despite the high hopes of intellectuality engendered by its title, it's just another summer popcorn flick --but a good one.

 

The special effects, unsurprisingly, are dazzling. Sonny's Matrix-like slow-motion gymnastics are nothing that couldn't be done on a normal PC with a good 3D modelling program and a fast graphics card, of course, but what really impressed me was the translucencies on the robots, giving frosted glances into their inner mechanisms. The movie also suceeded where so many FX pictures fail: the interaction of live elements and CGI. With no fabrics of fleshy surfaces to give the graphics artists pause, the robots seemed perfectly real throughout. An especially nice touch comes in the warehouse scene, when Spooner (Smith) brushes one of the "frozen" robots and it shifts its balance to keep from toppling forward domino-style.

 

Despite Will Smith's big name appeal, the breakout performance comes from Alan Tudyk, who voices Sonny, and acts via motion capture for Sonny's less-spectacular movements (with all respect to Tudyk, I doubt he's that much of a gymnast). For those who've seen Tudyk's previous performances in A Knight's Tale, Dodgeball, and Joss Whedon's prematurely cancelled TV series Firefly (currently being given the movie treatment as Serenity at Universal Studios, for release in 2005), Tudyk's voice is almost unrecognizable. His normal, slightly-mad histrionics are gone, and he conveys Sonny's much more subtle emotions with a perfect "programmed-in" gentility and seriousness. The cat, however, is a terrible actor. It wasn't even trying.

[Keyan Farlander]

This looked fairly entertaining, but seeing a movie would require going out in public, so I think I'll wait until it plays on HBO.

[edlib]

Ditto.

 

I'm also a bit miffed that it seems to be a trend to take the title, characters, and situations from a book, and then totally alter the story for the movie. I understand that some liberties have to be made for the story to translate on screen (as per LOTR,) but sometimes it's almost unrecognizable afterwards.

In a few rare instances it can be better afterwards (Blade Runner, Minority Report) but most of the time, it's not (A.I.)

 

I'm a big Azimov fan, so I have a somewhat uneasy feeling about this one, but I'll try to reserve judgement until I see it.

[Jem]

It's "domoo arigatoo", long "o"

 

As for the movie, I'm not interested in it and you have failed in changing that