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I, Robot > Spider-Man 2

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6.8

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Kabuki Waq said:
"IM RUINED IM RUINED"

That scene brought back bad memories of the "I HATE SAND" scene, I don't know why. I was probably associating the incredibly bad acting and script said by pretty boys.
 
I have to tell you I, Robot looks extremely bad from the previews and that seems to be the general opinion here for a lot of ppl. But a lot of ppl also seem to have come out pleasantly suprised by the movie so I think I might give it a chance and go see it.
 

belgurdo

Banned
Red Dolphin said:
I have to tell you I, Robot looks extremely bad from the previews and that seems to be the general opinion here for a lot of ppl. But a lot of ppl also seem to have come out pleasantly suprised by the movie so I think I might give it a chance and go see it.


If GAF has taught me anything, it's to toss aside all opinions and just judge for yourself
 
Spider-man 2 is better if just for "Raindrops keep falling on my head" scene or the classic Rimi-esque scene of Doc Oct in the operating room (it wasn't really that great, but it gave me joy to be reminded of Evil Dead/Army of Darkness).

That, and which movie had Bruce Campbell?

Besides those factors that got me giddy with fanboyism, I really was more entertained with Spider-man 2.
 

hiryu

Member
I robot is a total ripoff of the movie Colussus. Although, I did enjoy the movie. What I didn't like were the cheesy action scenes like the car chase and the ending. I think Spiderman 2 was a much better movie.
 
ConfusingJazz said:
or the classic Rimi-esque scene of Doc Oct in the operating room (it wasn't really that great, but it gave me joy to be reminded of Evil Dead/Army of Darkness).

I thought it was an awesome scene, probably my favorite of the movie, and I never even watched Evil Dead/Army of Darkness. Loved the fact that there was no music and it was nothing but the whipping sounds and loud screams.....that created more intensity IMO.
 

Prospero

Member
Gary Westfahl reviews I, Robot for Locus here. An interesting read. Not all the things he has to say are negative, despite the title:

A.I.: Artificial Incompetence, or, Robots Just Don't Understand: A Review of I, Robot
 
Spectral Glider said:
I thought it was an awesome scene, probably my favorite of the movie, and I never even watched Evil Dead/Army of Darkness. Loved the fact that there was no music and it was nothing but the whipping sounds and loud screams.....that created more intensity IMO.

You would probably love Evil Dead 2 then. Great movie.
 

Ristamar

Member
I suppose I may now have to check out I, Robot, despite every preview making the film look like a total snoozefest.
 

effzee

Member
just saw the movie...its awesome. dont think its better than spiderman 2 which was a lot more engaging and epic but i robot is really damn good.

will smith isnt horrible as most feared. and it is true that he excels in dramatic roles...he can act.


ill post more later about my thoughts on it but yeah for now just wanted to give a thumbs up to i robot.
 
D

Deleted member 1235

Unconfirmed Member
Red Dolphin said:
I have to tell you I, Robot looks extremely bad from the previews and that seems to be the general opinion here for a lot of ppl. But a lot of ppl also seem to have come out pleasantly suprised by the movie so I think I might give it a chance and go see it.

Enjoy being one of the pleasantly surprised.
 

AlphaSnake

...and that, kids, was the first time I sucked a dick for crack
AI sucked the biggest dick. Arguably one of the worst movies I've ever seen.
 

Dead

well not really...yet
Bizarro Sun Yat-sen said:
Glad to see some respect for AI in this thread. It's the most underrated recent movie I've seen.
yep, one of the most thought provoking and accomplished pieces of science fiction of the past 15 years. It works on pretty much every level it aims to. fantastic filmmaking in almost ever sense of the word.

The fact that such a pedestrian flick as I, Robot is being praised and being called a great work of sci fi while AI is trashed by many, says levels about the judgement of the average movie goer.
 

AlphaSnake

...and that, kids, was the first time I sucked a dick for crack
DeadStar said:
yep, one of the most thought provoking and accomplished pieces of science fiction of the past 15 years. It works on pretty much every level it aims to. fantastic filmmaking in almost ever sense of the word.

The fact that such a pedestrian flick as I, Robot is being praised and being called a great work of sci fi while AI is trashed by many, says levels about the judgement of the average movie goer.

That for once, their taste actually makes sense? I'll never understand why AI has a cult following. That movie was beyond bad. I'm all for the trippy shit, but that had to have been Kubrick's worst film, despite his rather limited involvement with it and all. The whole
Neo Ice-Age and the aliens visiting Earth was the end of it for me...especially the aliens.
 

aaaaa0

Member
http://www.locusmag.com/2004/Reviews/07_Westfahl_IRobot.html

In this film, destroying any hopes for a truly Asimovian story, Spooner
just pulls out his gun and starts blasting robots in the head, figuring that the frightened culprit will soon run away.
Clearly, neither the Spooner character, nor the filmmakers who created him, are competent enough to figure out a better solution.

On the contrary, I thought that was one of the better scenes in the movie.

What Spooner did was IMHO quite logical and expedient.

Commanding them to stand there without resisting, then threatening them with destruction brings the second and third laws into conflict.

All the correctly functioning robots would be required to follow the second law and allow themselves to be destroyed. Since the robot had previously demonstrated the ability to ignore the second law, only that robot would be able to satisfy the third law and try to save itself by attempting to escape.
 
D

Deleted member 1235

Unconfirmed Member
Bizarro Sun Yat-sen said:
There were no aliens in any part of AI!

You beat me to it. Even though I didn't particularly enjoy the movie, I did love the people trying to convince me trying to hate it yelling "But the aliens bit was so LAME"

Shit some people missed a large point in that movie.
 

dorio

Banned
Spidey2 was boring and cheesy, but I was pleasantly surprised by IRobot. At least I didn't have to roll my eyes throughout IRobot and the science and cheesiness were nearly as bad as it was in Spiderman 2.
 

dorio

Banned
catfish said:
You beat me to it. Even though I didn't particularly enjoy the movie, I did love the people trying to convince me trying to hate it yelling "But the aliens bit was so LAME"

Shit some people missed a large point in that movie.
How about enlightening us.
 

maharg

idspispopd
Ok, here's the enlightenment. All the way through the movie, Joe is talking about how robots will outlast humans. That they fear robots because they know this is true.

The ending is that prophesy coming true. The robots survived the ice age, we didn't. David presents their only direct connection to their past, their creators (Joe also has some monologues about god and his relation to robots, I believe).

Furthermore, and this is the cincher, if they're robots, the movie makes sense. If they're aliens, the movie does not. You may as well insist that the aliens in ID4 were actually human made robots and therefore the movie sucks. (well, it sucks anyways, but that's another matter -- but that's the point, really. It doesn't matter if you like or hate the film, if you think they're aliens, something is seriously wrong with your understanding of the movie)
 

fart

Savant
Prospero said:
Gary Westfahl reviews I, Robot for Locus here. An interesting read. Not all the things he has to say are negative, despite the title:
holy shit this review was awesome. two thumbs up!
 

Flynn

Member
maharg said:
It doesn't matter if you like or hate the film, if you think they're aliens, something is seriously wrong with your understanding of the movie)

I don't care what if they were aliens, robots, evolved humans or ghosts.

They were deux ex machina crap.
 
By the way, there are some comments on the Rotten Tomatoes forums from the original screenwriter for I, Robot that some may find interesting:

My spec script "Hardwired" was a classical-style murder mystery that played like a kind of sci-fi Agatha Christie stage play. One lone cyberphobic investigator named Del Spooner was called to the scene of a crime and found himself in the middle of a locked room mystery: a scientist was killed in a room that was locked from the inside. Was it a murder? And if so, who did it, and how? And of course all of his suspects were robots, holograms, supercomputers, and the like. [Spooner was actually the only 100% human being in the cast!] During the course of his investigation he uncovered a prime suspect in a robot that called itself Sonny, and came to realize that the outcome of the case may affect the long-term future of the human race.

Despite what the rumors may be on the internet that my script was just another dumb Hollywood "shoot 'em up," there was in fact no shooting of robots at all. It was a talky intellectual mystery, like I said, very much an old-style murder mystery but infused with elements of science-fiction.

Now, over the years, this script always garnered comparisons to Asimov.

Why? Simply because Asimov stories are also classical-style mini-mysteries. In each story you are given the Three Laws, and then presented with a mystery: Why is the robot hiding? Why is the robot running around in a circle? Why is the robot lying? Like a good Agatha Christie, the mystery is always explained at the end--via the Three Laws--and the immediate pleasure of the story is in the figuring out and explanation of the events.

So after "Hardwired" had been in development at Disney for several years with director Bryan Singer attached, the project got picked up by Fox for Alex Proyas. I worked on a treatment that would open up the mystery and allow our main character to move around the whole city, but essentially the story was the same intellectual puzzle--with a heightened sense of thriller. The guy who worked with me on the project most closely was Alex Proyas' development exec, a smart creative man named Matthew Dabner. I recall him always thinking of it as a "sci-fi Chinatown." That's the sort of thing we were shooting for, I mean, we were shooting high!

Now when Fox picked up the rights to "I, Robot," it was not an outrageous suggestion that the murder mystery in "Hardwired" would be a great way to have a Three Laws mystery for the film.

In other words, my script and Asimov's stories had a lot in common. I think because we were both essentially writing Agatha Christie-style mysteries. In other words, they were both brain teasers involving robots. And Fox had one hell of a nice story in "Hardwired" already in front of them. It had big scope, a compelling mystery to drive the more abstract themes, and strong characters. Everything was wrapped up in a tight package. The design of the piece was always strong, dating back even to the spec. There have been many different versions of the script, but the basic dynamics of the story--the structure of the piece, the mystery, the themes, and the way the characters embodied those ideas--were the key to the uniqueness of the spec. Hey, not everything you write works. But there was always something about this one that kept it coming back from the dead for ten years of development hell. You don't get directors like Bryan Singer and Alex Proyas signing on to your work unless you stumbled onto something good, and in this case, the piece had that something.

No one wanted to make the kind of "Citizen Kane"-homage you would end up with if you tried to adapt several Asimov stories and bind them together with a framing device. I mean, I agreed with that decision, and I still do. Issac Asimov's original stories were not about looking back on the life of Susan Calvin or U.S. Robotics with melancholy and nostalgia. They weren't about the past. They were at their core just cool mysteries involving robots, and over the course of the stories you developed several continuing characters, and slowly created a future history.

If this film is a success, you can envision a whole series of films, also starring or co-starring Susan Calvin, that would recreate the experience of reading those early pulp stories far better than an episodic film ever would.

So I inserted a younger version of Susan Calvin into my script, and also the Three Laws of Robotics, and I spent several years fine-tuning the piece to meet all my hopes for "Hardwired" as well as do something that lived up to the title "I, Robot." I encountered that title first years ago when I read the original Eando Binder story, "I, Robot" [a tale which fits the title far better than the Asimov collection ever did, actually], and so I felt very protective of that name. And frankly, those early scripts kicked some serious Asimovian butt! I was told by one guy who represents the Asimov estate that the script was the "best Asimov story Asimov never wrote." He didn't have to say that, but I think he meant it. I'm still proud as heck of those drafts written in late 2000, 2001, and up to the summer of 2002.

Now the question on your mind, I know, is this:

Does the Akiva Goldsman final shooting script of the film starring Will Smith still live up to the title "I, Robot," or has the film become just a mindless shoot 'em up, just another big dumb summer product, as the very vocal on-line community is so sure it will be? Or is the film somewhere in the middle? (...)

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/vine/showthread.php?t=347898
 

DJ_Tet

Banned
Aliens in AI?


Will Smith acting in Ali rather than mimicking countless REAL Ali soundbites?


Remind me why I come to this message board anymore?
 

Prospero

Member
Bizarro Sun Yat-sen said:
By the way, there are some comments on the Rotten Tomatoes forums from the original screenwriter for I, Robot that some may find interesting:
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/vine/showthread.php?t=347898

Thanks for the link. He seems like an interesting and talented guy (ignoring the fact that he co-wrote the Final Fantasy movie).

It partly seems like he's doing just a little bit of positive PR for the movie, and partly like he's just thrilled that one of his screenplays finally got made, at least in some version. I'd love to see his original screenplay for the movie--as he describes it, it seems like it could have been made for half the cost of the version we got, and would be twice as good.
 
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