I, Willsmith

Monday, July 26, 2004 » food movies thought

Somehow I wound up seeing I, Robot. Reactions:

• This movie had the most blatant product placement ever, and there was a lot of it.
• The one-on-one, robot-on-robot fight scenes could have been longer and more creative. The robots actually looked fairly life-like (as in, not blatantly CG), so it wouldn't be a total tune-out moment like, say, insane computer-animated werewolves vs. insane computer-animated vampires.
• Will Smith has a ridiculously large torso.
• About halfway through the movie there is a completely unexpected plot development. (Like Matchstick Men-unexpected.) I was hoping it would have some mindblowingly clever explanation to it, but it did not. Disappointing.
• Of all the jokes they tried to fit into the script, exactly one of them was actually funny.
• The scene with Will Smith standing on a catwalk with the camera rotating about the x-axis: how did they do that
• People on the IMDb boards who seem think that the three laws of robotics were invented just for this movie: I love all of you.
• Eating entire sweet potato pies every morning for breakfast (let alone while walking down the street) is a GREAT IDEA, possibly second only to using a Nilla Wafer crust.

I didn't have very high expectations going into this. When the aforementioned plot twist occurred, I thought maybe the story could salvage itself, but in fact it was not as big of a deal as I had hoped. The final explanation of what's going on is interesting, but not quite as creative with the laws of robotics as I had hoped. All in all, the movie had a huge amount of potential but turned out to be just an average summer movie.