I have been writing reviews and expressing morals for a few of my favorite movies, which as it turns out, are mostly dramas and animations. Just to even things out, I want to mention a sci-fi movie this time. I particularly liked I, Robot because it had action, it had thought, it had a point, it was extremely funny in parts, it was not overly violent and guess what, there was no love scene. While sometimes I think no movie is complete without a love scene, because I am a hopeless romantic, sometimes, it really is not necessary and it gets overly used.
The film is set in Chicago in the year 2035, where robots have been developed to the point where they are used in nearly every household. The only person in all of Chicago who does not have a robot is homicide detective Del Spooner (Will Smith), who has an intense dislike for robots due to a personal experience with their lack of humanity.
The movie starts to gather momentum with the beginning of an investigation that lands in Detective Spooner's lap. A Dr. Alfred Lanning (James Cromwell) appears to have committed suicide by jumping from his office window. Dr. Lanning was the inventor of the Three Laws of Robotics, the laws by which all robots are bound in order to protect humans, and co-founder of U.S. Robotics (USR), a highly successful company that specializes in robotic technology.
USR have just released a new line of robots called the NS-5. Each robot is outfitted with an uplink to URS's central positronic brain V.I.K.I (Virtual Interactive Kinetic Intelligence). The more Detective Spooner investigates, the more he believes that Dr. Lanning's death was not suicide. When Detective Spooner examines Dr. Lanning's office an NS-5 robot bursts from hiding and flees.
When Spooner interrogates the robot from Dr. Lanning's Office, he finds out that this robot is quite unique; he even has a name, Sonny. During the interview Sonny displays emotions such as anger and fear, qualities that robots do not possess. Before Sonny can say anything incriminating, he is taken to be decommissioned by the CEO of USR.
After careful consideration and a search of Dr. Lanning's house which nearly gets him killed, Detective Spooner begins to think that something was threatening Lanning and that Lanning was trying to tell him that something is wrong with the robots.
There have long been debates about whether the development of technology is a positive step for humanity or if indeed we are fuelling our own laziness and destruction. I guess the thing to remember is that we as humans do not always think rationally and logically like computers, that weigh up pro's and con's, fastest routes, best results. We usually base decisions on feelings and past experiences. If we were to consider things like a computer, it would probably be better to have studied something different at university because it is worth more money, or it is probably better to buy only white cars because they are more practical, or there would not be any other food except meat and vegetables. I think it all comes down to the importance of finding the perfect balance between evolving to make lives better and creating machines to feed our inability to control our own lives.
