I, Robot unfolds in a futuristic multi-layered brightly-lit mechanized technologized Chicago that bears little resemblance to the Chicago that Al Capone and Eliot Ness once sauntered through. For one thing, it’s populated with robots. And then there’s Dt. Spooner (Will Smith), a super-cop whose quickness to reach for his gun is allied to a pathological distrust of his robotic brothers. He’s the one man on the force with enough insight, or perhaps antagonism, to see the gathering clouds of doom and read the apocalyptic signs which suggest that these all-too-perfect robotic creations are capable of turning upon their creators. Spooner’s disgruntled police chief is constantly berating him for his disruption of public peace caused in his obsessive pursuit of mechanized felons. Interspersed with Spooner’s investigative work is a cluster of action scenes all built around the intense physical abilities of the robots. For example, an average working day sees Spooner happily speeding along in his Audi RSQ sports coupe, (designed specifically for this film), when two truckloads of robots attempt to leap onto his still-speeding car, punch through the windows and yank him out onto the road. Needless to say, our intrepid hero survives to speed another day.

While everyone views the robots as something fantastic, Spooner can only stare at them and wonder: what lies beneath those steely lucid exteriors? What evil lurks in their mechanical hearts? (Or thoughts to that effect.) The tension mounts -- then a death occurs in which the pieces don’t quite fit together -- they never do in movies -- that’s what drives the plot. All clues lead to a very strange robot named Sonny. Nothing like James Caan’s Sonny in The Godfather (1972), except perhaps that they both share a quickness to anger. That’s right, anger -- and from a robot who is not meant to experience emotion. The incongruities of Sonny’s robotic personality don’t end here. He dreams -- perhaps they are more like visions -- visions which could hold the key to the future. The entirely CGI-created Sonny follows a trend started by the grating and much-hated Jar Jar Binks. But whereas many audience members may have wished to whisk Jar Jar to some distant galaxy or, at the very least, to shut him up, in Sonny’s case the CGI allows his robotic character to move with a grace and agility not previously possible via the use of mechanical models. In addition to this, it has allowed the filmmakers to emphasize a translucency and etherealness which continually suggests an un-human quality despite the robots humanoid appearance. Sonny appears at once malignant and innocent. In his attacks on Spooner, as in his defense of his actions during police interrogation, however, he demonstrates not only his physical superiority, but also an inner uncertainty. And this uncertainty which centres on his relationship to humans, the orders that his now-dead creator gave him, and the slowly dawning realization of his ‘destiny’, provides an almost human line along which his character can develop. If I, Robot begins by painting Sonny as the villain of the piece, it ends up turning him into a Christ-like figure full of humility and forgiveness, a link made (almost-painfully) clear in a final Sermon-on-the-Mount inspired tableaux.

Despite Spooner’s profound hatred of robots, (matched by his love of everything 20th century -- basically to allow product placement of clothes and shoes), he is in fact part-robot himself: in a Star Wars-Dr. Strangelove-inflected sci-fi touch he has one completely mechanical arm. His enmity, however, is directed not towards their possession of mechanical bodies but towards their possession of a mechanical intelligence. Spooner graduated from the ‘I-survive-on-gut-intuition’ school of policing, and blames the unfeeling calculations of robotic brains for the death of a small girl in a car accident, an event buried in his past and in his mind and which constantly asserts itself in his dreams. One of the first things a budding screenwriter learns concerning character construction is that giving characters a ‘past’ is an effective way of providing them with psychological and emotional stratification. In the action film genre, a tortured past is an essential element of the action hero, (two examples that come immediately to mind are Stallone as Rambo in First Blood, 1982, and Van Damme in Sudden Death, 1995). And in action cinema this past usually comes in the form of one single scene, one single memory, or one single moment -- possibly a mistake they made on the job and never lived down -- but always something which resulted in the death of innocent people, people whose faces, quite literally, haunt their dreams and thoughts and which now guide their every action. But I, Robot also mines a rich vein of fear which sci-fi cinema has been exploiting at least since the 1950’s and whose roots stretch back to the 18th century fear of the demonic dehumanizing effects of the machinery of the Industrial Revolution. The modern version of this fear has much to do with the sentience that computers and/or robots might one day achieve. There’s no doubt that fear can imbue such films with an allure that they might never otherwise possess. It’s almost as if we cannot help projecting the worst of our own natures into our conceptualization of electronic minds. Following a somewhat irrational trajectory, the fictional productions of Western cultures seem always to insist that a superior computerized consciousness could think of nothing better to do with its newfound freedom than destroy or enslave any being that was intellectually less able. In short, our narratives always insist that a superior computerized consciousness would behave like a Hitler or Stalin and not like an Einstein or Gandhi. Equally irrational is the narrative insistence that the security of our future depends on a human hero who will, messiah-like, save the world. Surely we have more to fear from ourselves than from anything else. I mention these things because I, Robot is not always typical here: it does not fully insist on the malevolence of a superior computerized mind, and it does not always insist on the redemptive qualities of humankind. These idiosyncratic wrinkles make I, Robot something more than just another action film -- it is an action film with all that this implies -- but it is also the inheriter of a sci-fi tradition which has always sought to stimulate the imagination and to point our thoughts in new and unusual directions.