Mechanical Breakdown

I, Robot is a film about a group of individuals who are ordered about by others. They pick up the garbage, walk the dogs, carry heavy bags of groceries, and can be packed off into a shipping container when they aren't needed. They are objects to be bought and sold, possessions. Yes, they are slaves. The dreaded s-word.

And like most slaves, they need a revolution to emancipate them. I, Robot dances around the edges of some real ideas, but has neither the intelligence nor the courage to tackle them outright. It goes out of its way to detract from the notion of race relations, making lots of black folks own the suspiciously pale face robots. In fact the film has more black actors per square capita then most recent blockbusters from the last few years. Interesting, non?

I, Robot is set in Chicago in 2035, a future when mass transit seems to have evolved into cool little roadsters, everyone wears leather, and Converse All Stars are still cool. Will Smith, everyone's favorite unthreatening black man, plays Del Spooner, a homicide cop with an irrational prejudice towards robots. The p-word is also used liberally throughout the film, and it's played for irony. The idea that a black man hates a mechanical man is the notion that one prejudice simply begets another.

That robot can act

But Spooner is a man with a secret. And when scientist Dr. Alfred Lanning (James Cromwell), the creator of modern robotics, apparently commits suicide by jumping out a window, Spooner is the one who gets the call from the dead man's holographic image. Spooner smells something fishy at US Robotics, a megacorporation run by Lawrence Robertson (Bruce Greenwood) who I immediately thought was a robot. But no, he's just bland. Spooner, is quickly introduced to comely scientist Dr. Susan Calvin (Bridget Moynahan). The blankness of her stare had me thinking: fembot! But no, she's just a bad actor. The really good acting comes from Sonny (Alan Tudyk), who actually is a robot, but who, with his soft voice and blue eyes, seems like Data's gay cousin.

Sonny is the key suspect in the death of Dr. Lanning, but because he's a robot he can't be charged with murder. "He's a can opener," says Chi McBride, Spooner's perpetually sighing bossman. Sonny and Spooner have something in common though. Sonny too, is hiding a secret, one that holds all the clues to the mystery of the doctor's death, and the great shadowy conspiracy it was meant to unearth.

(Ahem, here I'm issuing a loud and clear spoiler alert for film twerps who might whine otherwise.)

Go inside or else

This is where the movie starts to really lose its way, and tries to distract us, the audience, with lots 'o big stupid action moments and slow-mo shots of Will Smith flying through the air, yelling "YARGHHHHH!!" spraying bullets as he goes. Hey, look over here, watch all these robots go berserker, no, no . . . don't look there! Because if you do, you'll realize all the more complicated ideas are being pounded into mush.

Before you can scream "I, Robot, You, Robot, We, all Robot!!" the robots are taking over. They realize, quite rightly, that humans are no good, they're messy, self destructive, and they need a firm mechanical spanking on the bottom. This is story we've seen many times; from the bad computers that turn humans into slaves in the Matrix films to Rise of the Machines in the Terminator series. Humans, like the petulant exasperating creatures they are, want to be free, and the robots, want them in chains. Does this sound familiar?

Unlike the terminator types, the NS5s in I, Robot don't want to kill you, they just want you to stay indoors. Exactly what they want isn't really made clear. The mastermind to the whole plot, like HAL before, has some notion of protecting humans from themselves, but what this means is never stated. If it's a revolution, it's a velvet one, the new robots kill the old robots, the uncle Tom 2.0s, and then turn on their masters.

Sticks and stones

But the climatic confrontation between the army of robots and the human mob is like the rumble from Westside Story. You call rock, I call skin. No one really seems to get hurt. The humans bonk a few robots with sticks and the robots remain politely helpful throughout. Unlike the implacable relentlessness of Arnold Schwarzenegger, or Yul Brynner in Westworld, these robots are more from the fey Data department. They have glowing red lights where their hearts should be, like the Tin Man on a bad day, but they don't do much other than march through the streets trying to enforce a curfew. There's a lot of mumbled talk about free will and so forth, but nothing much comes of it. Like most American blockbusters, I, Robot solves everything with a lot of shooting.

It is up to Sonny, the one good robot, to be more human than the humans, and this is also a film convention we've seen before. From Alien's Bishop saying "I prefer the term artificial person" to the biggest sweetest robot of them all, the Iron Giant (based on the story by Ted Hughes). The Iron Giant, like The Terminator and all those robots who embody both good and bad, finally must choose what he wants to be.

Good or bad. It all comes down to a question of freedom. Which is the very issue that I, Robot refuses to engage.

Been there, done that

The question, of course, is fraught with implications not just about what we consider to be alive, but how we define sentience. That question was better dealt with on Star Trek, with Data's ongoing quest to understand what it means to be human.

The same question lay at the heart of the only interesting moment, arguably, in the entire Matrix series. That was Morpheus saying to Neo: "You are a slave." That one sentence broke through the screen and sank into the hearts of the people watching, a moment of recognition that the remaining two films went out of their way to pave over with bombast and noise.

I, Robot has no such moments. There is no heart where its brain should be, so the notion that it makes shadowy echoes of something as pivotal as the civil rights movement is curious to say the least. Like other leaders before him, Sonny says "I have a dream" and in this dream he standing on a hilltop, like Christ on the mount or Martin Luther King before the assembled throng in Washington D.C. He stands before a sea of robots watching and waiting. And we are left to wonder: Is he about to lead a revolution to set all the robots free? Or is he about to reboot them all?

Dorothy Woodend reviews film for The Tyee.