kpduty

So it was with extremely low expectations that I entered I, ROBOT. In the end I was pleasantly surprised. It's not all that bad, although the brother hated it, but he's still into wrestling, so take his opinion as you will. It's decent enough for a summer movie, with lots of stuff blowing up, and a decent enough story that makes sense until you think about it later, but by then you're so struck by the coolness of the movie you don't care but you still do because yeah the plot holes are pretty big. But then again you don't care because you saw it in the afternoon so you didn't pay full price.

Will Smith stars as Will Smith, a cop with a grudge/secret emotional pain/bad attitude/chip on his shoulder/cynical streak/problem with authority/hatred of the world. Pretty sucky stuff happened to him that seriously messed him up, but of course he immediately goes back to work because it's better to be messed up in the head when you're at your cop job and have access to perps and guns, rather than recuperating at home where the worst you can do is eat a lot of Cheez-Its and watch Maury's "I'm fifteen, I was pregnant at twelve, You are the father of this baby" show. Will Smith hates robots and unfortunately for him this is Chicago 2035, where the cars don't fly but there are fifty kagillion robots running around. Everyone has one, because it's obviously better to dump that annoying illegal immigrant you can barely understand and who costs five dollars a day to scrub your toilets when you can pay ten thousand in one lump sum and get a robot to do it.

Seriously, just to jump in here: there are like NO HOMELESS PEOPLE in Chicago in 2035. I'm assuming they've all been killed and converted into Soylent Green. Because when you've got robots working at Fed Ex and tending bar at your local dive, where are all the people who used to have those jobs going to go? Bush is behind this, I just know it.

Just to jump in again: The aforementioned local dive in the movie is the OVALTINE, which even though is supposedly in Chicago is actually in Vancouver, and was featured in the third season X-Files episode "Jose Chung's From Outer Space." I am not a geek.

So Ephram Cochran is making robots, his discovery of warp drive apparently a side project he thought more of as a hobby. At the beginning of the movie he does a Greg Louganis out the window of his 20th floor lab. His hologram calls Will Smith in to investigate, and of course while everyone else is quick to write it off as a suicide, Will Smith knows that it's murder. Because the chip on his shoulder whispered it to him. He immediately fingers a suspect: Sonny, a Robot with Feelings. At first, Will Smith thinks Sonny killed Cochran just to see what it'd be like to kill someone, but Sonny keeps calling Cochran "Father," and I think this was supposed to have Jesus overtones, but I just kept thinking about Data on Star Trek and his evil twin, Lore. Which this is sort of like but not quite.

So then there's this hot chick and she's a psychologist working to make the robots more humanlike. Which of course is ironic because she's a severe, stone cold bitch. Get it? This movie is FILLED TO THE BRIM with ironies, like Will Smith hates robots who are marginalized in society and he's black so his people have been marginalized so you'd think he'd relate and then the chick has no feelings but she studies the human mind and tries to get robots to seem like they feel things. It's deep. Seriously.

So then the movie is kind of like a weird buddy-cop movie, because Will Smith is kinda working with the bitch scientist (because after overcoming an initial period of hate and distrust they grow to like and respect one another and recognize their own faults and attempt to overcome them while working together to acheive a common goal), but then he's also kind of working with the robot (because after overcoming an initial period of hate and distrust they grow to like and respect one another and recognize their own faults and attempt to overcome them while working together to acheive a common goal). And then the robot kicks ALL SORTS OF ASS!!! And Will Smith says some smart ass things which is incredibly endearing and everyone comes to realize that he was right all along and actually has a heart of gold and was working for the betterment of man- and robot-kind. And then there are more Jesus allusions. THE END.

Which is really sad because this movie would have been awesome had it been like Alien Nation, and Sonny and Will Smith become partners on the Chicago police force and get into zany adventures which are predicated upon some misunderstanding arising from an inadvertent miscommunication. And then there'd be homoerotic overtones.

Because you know this whole time you've been thinking about sex robots.

On a side note, the showing I attended featured a trailer for RESIDENT EVIL : APOCOLYPSE. Apocolypse is my favorite word because it makes me think of Acapulco. Which makes me think of The Love Boat. Gopher was so hot. Anyway, this trailer made me realize that giving up smoking was the worst thing I could have ever done because

A) Killing zombies is cool, but killing zombies while you're smoking is even cooler and

B) You never know when you're going to have to set something on fire, and you're guaranteed to have a lighter on you if you smoke. Imagine, just for a minute, if zombies actually did take over the world and you had just doused a warehouse full of them with gasoline and you're standing there wanting to set it ablaze but you can't because you gave up Camels and threw out your "Life's a Bitch and So am I" disposable lighter. I'm just saying.