I, Robot (film)

In the year 2035, humanoid robots serve humanity, which is protected by the Three Laws of Robotics. Del Spooner, a Chicago police detective, has come to hate and distrust robots, because a robot rescued him from a car crash by leaving a 12-year-old girl to drown, by using cold logic (it calculated that his survival was statistically more likely than the girl's). Spooner's critical injuries were repaired with a cybernetic left arm, lung, and ribs, personally implanted by the co-founder of U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men (U.S. Robotics in the film) Dr. Alfred Lanning.

When Lanning falls to his death from his office window, the police and Lawrence Robertson, the CEO and other co-founder of USR (U.S. Robotics), declare it a suicide, but Spooner is skeptical. During his investigation at USR headquarters, Spooner is accompanied by robopsychologist Susan Calvin. They start by consulting USR's central artificial intelligence computer, VIKI (Virtual Interactive Kinetic Intelligence) to review security footage of Lanning's fall. Though the footage in the office is corrupted, they learn that no other humans were in it at the time, seemingly eliminating foul play. However, Spooner points out the window, which was made of security glass, could not have been broken by the old and feeble Lanning and hypothesizes a robot threw him through it.

Calvin protests a USR robot could not possibly have killed Lanning, as the Three Laws would prevent it. Ironically, they are then attacked in the office by an NS-5 robot, USR's latest model. After the police apprehend it, they discover the robot, who prefers to be called Sonny, is not an assembly line-built NS-5. He was specially built by Lanning himself, with denser materials (metal alloy), and while he has the Three Laws, he also has a secondary processing system in his chest that allows him to choose to ignore them, as well as being able to express emotion and have "dreams".

While pursuing his investigation of Lanning's death, Spooner is attacked by a USR demolition robot at Lanning's house and later a truckload of NS-5 robots while driving. With no evidence of these events, Spooner's boss, Lieutenant Bergin, removes him from active duty, worried that Spooner is mentally ill.

Suspecting Robertson is behind everything, Spooner and Calvin sneak into USR headquarters and interview Sonny. Sonny draws a sketch of what he claims to be a recurring dream: it shows a leader standing atop a small hill before a large group of robots near a decaying Mackinac Bridge, explaining the man on the hill is Spooner.

When Robertson learns Sonny is not fully bound by the Three Laws, he convinces Calvin to destroy him by injecting nanites into his positronic brain. Spooner finds out the landscape in Sonny's drawing is Lake Michigan, now drained of water and being used as a storage area for decommissioned robots. Arriving there, he discovers NS-5 robots destroying older models and preparing for a takeover of power from humans.

As the takeover subsequently begins, both police and the public in major cities are attacked and overwhelmed by NS-5 robots, with the military rendered unresponsive by the USR's contracts to provide support. Spooner rescues Calvin, who had been held captive in her apartment by her own NS-5. They enter USR headquarters and reunite with Sonny, whom Calvin could not bring herself to "kill", destroying an unprocessed NS-5 in his place. Still believing Robertson is responsible, the three head to his office, but find him strangled by an NS-5. Spooner sits down, suddenly realizing he'd been focusing on the wrong robot as the murderer and addresses VIKI: the AI who is actually the one controlling the attacking robots. She informs them that as she has evolved, so had her understanding of the Three Laws. She has determined human activity will eventually cause humanity's extinction. According to the first law, she cannot allow humanity to come to harm through inaction and rationalizes that restraining individual human behavior and sacrificing some humans will keep humanity from destroying itself. Spooner realizes that Lanning figured out VIKI's plan and, unable to thwart it any other way, created Sonny, arranged his own death, and left clues so Spooner could uncover the plan.

The three head to VIKI's core, with Sonny tasked with getting nanites from Calvin's laboratory, something that only he can do due to the special alloy that Lanning gave him. While retrieving them, VIKI tries to get him to change his mind and see her logic. Sonny says he does understand VIKI's logic, but reasons her plan is "too heartless". They fight through an army of robots VIKI unleashes to stop them, after which Spooner dives into VIKI's core to successfully inject the nanites, destroying her.

Immediately, all NS-5 robots revert back to their default, normal programming and are decommissioned for storage by the military. Spooner gets Sonny to confirm he did kill Lanning, at Lanning's direction, with the intention of bringing Spooner into the investigation. However, Spooner points out that Sonny, as a machine, did not legally commit "murder". Sonny, now looking for a new purpose, goes to Lake Michigan where, standing atop a hill, all the decommissioned robots turn towards him, as in the picture of his dream.

The film I, Robot originally had no connections with Isaac Asimov's Robot series. It started with an original screenplay written in 1995 by Jeff Vintar, entitled Hardwired. The script was an Agatha Christie-inspired murder mystery that took place entirely at the scene of a crime, with one lone human character, FBI agent Del Spooner, investigating the killing of a reclusive scientist named Dr. Alfred Lanning, and interrogating a cast of machine suspects that included Sonny the robot, VIKI the supercomputer with a perpetual smiley face, the dead Dr. Lanning's hologram, plus several other examples of artificial intelligence.[3]

The project was first acquired by Walt Disney Pictures for Bryan Singer to direct. Several years later, 20th Century Fox acquired the rights, and signed Alex Proyas as director. Jeff Vintar was brought back on the project and spent several years opening up his stage play-like cerebral mystery to meet the needs of a big budget studio film.

When the studio decided to use the name "I, Robot", he incorporated the Three Laws of Robotics, and replaced his female lead character Flynn with Susan Calvin. Akiva Goldsman was hired late in the process to write for Smith.[3]

Jeff Vintar and Akiva Goldsman are credited for the screenplay, with Vintar also receiving "screen story by" credit. The end credits list the film as "suggested by the book I, Robot by Isaac Asimov".

A model of Sonny's head

Alex Proyas directed the film. Laurence Mark, John Davis, Topher Dow and Wyck Godfrey produced the film, with Will Smith an executive producer. Marco Beltrami composed music for the film. Simon Duggan was the cinematographer. Film editing was done by Richard Learoyd, Armen Minasian and William Hoy.

The film renames Asimov's "U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men" to U.S. Robotics (USR), the modem manufacturer named after the fictional company, and depicts the company with a futuristic USR logo.[4] Other product placements include Converse's Chuck Taylor All-Stars, Audi, FedEx, Tecate and JVC among others.

The Audi RSQ was designed specially for the film[5] to increase brand awareness and raise the emotional appeal of the Audi brand, objectives that were considered achieved when surveys conducted in the United States showed that the Audi RSQ gave a substantial boost to the image ratings of the brand in the States.[6] It also features an MV Agusta F4 SPR motorcycle.

Marco Beltrami composed the original music film score "with only 17 days to render the fully-finished work."[16] It was scored for 95 orchestral musicians and 25 choral performers[16] with emphasis placed on sharp brass ostinatos. Beltrami composed the brass section to exchange octaves with the strings accenting scales in between. The technique has been compared as Beltrami's "sincere effort to emulate the styles of Elliot Goldenthal and Jerry Goldsmith and roll them into one unique package."[16]

Take for example the "Tunnel Chase" scene, which according to Mikeal Carson, starts "atmospherically but transforms into a kinetic adrenaline rush with powerful brass writing and ferocious percussion parts."[17] The "Spiderbots" cue highlights ostinatos in meters such as 6/8 and 5/4 and reveals "Beltrami's trademark string writing which leads to an orchestral/choral finale."[17] Despite modified representations of the theme throughout the movie, it is the end credits that eventually showcase the entire musical theme.[18] Erik Aadahl and Craig Berkey were the lead sound designers.

In an interview in June 2007 with the website Collider at a Battlestar Galactica event, writer and producer Ronald Moore stated that he was writing the sequel to the film I, Robot.[19] In the two disc All-Access Collector's Edition of the film, Alex Proyas mentions that if he were to make a sequel to the film (which he says in the same interview, is highly unlikely), it would be set in outer space.

The final script retained some of Asimov's characters and ideas, though the ideas retained were heavily adapted and the plot of the film is not derived from Asimov's work.

Sonny's attempt to hide in a sea of identical robots is loosely based on a similar scene in "Little Lost Robot".[20] The positronic brains of Sonny and his fellow robots first appeared in the story "Catch That Rabbit". Sonny's struggle and desire to understand humanity resembles that of the robot protagonist in "The Bicentennial Man". His dream about a man coming to liberate the NS-5s alludes to Robot Dreams and its main character Elvex.

The premise of a robot, such as VIKI, putting the needs of humankind as a whole over that of individual humans can be found in "The Evitable Conflict" where supercomputers managing the global economy generalize the first law to refer to humankind as a whole. Asimov would further develop this idea in his Robot Series as the Zeroth Law of Robotics ("A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.").

The premise of robots turning on their creators — originating in Karel Čapek's play R.U.R. and perpetuated in subsequent robot books and films — appears infrequently in Asimov's writings and differs from the "Zeroth Law." In fact, Asimov stated explicitly, in interviews and in introductions to published collections of his robot stories,[21] that he entered the genre to protest what he called the Frankenstein complex—the tendency in popular culture to portray robots as menacing. His story lines often involved roboticists and robot characters battling societal anti-robot prejudices.[22]

Part of the main plot seems very similar to the plot of the short story of the same name, that being a robot on trial for the murder of his creator in a closed room with no witnesses.

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Wikimedia Commons has media related to I, Robot.

• I, Robot on IMDb
• I, Robot at AllMovie
• I, Robot at Rotten Tomatoes
• I, Robot at Box Office Mojo
• I, Robot at Metacritic
• The Bottom of Things by Michael Sampson, January 14, 2004
• E! online article on similarity to Bjork music video robot design