Friday Night Movie - Week 39 - I,Robot

I, Robot - 2004 movie - sci-fi/action - 1 hr 55 min

from wiki:

I, Robot is a 2004 American science fiction action film directed by Alex Proyas. The screenplay by Jeff Vintar and Akiva Goldsman is from a screen story by Vintar, based on his original screenplay Hardwired, and named after Isaac Asimov's 1950 short-story collection. The film stars Will Smith in the main role, Bridget Moynahan, Bruce Greenwood, James Cromwell, Chi McBride, and Alan Tudyk. In 2035, highly intelligent robots fill public service positions throughout the dystopian world, operating under three rules to keep humans safe. Detective Del Spooner (Smith) investigates the alleged suicide of U.S. Robotics founder Alfred Lanning (Cromwell) and believes that a human-like robot called Sonny (Tudyk) murdered him.

The film I, Robot originally had no connection with Isaac Asimov's Robot series. It started with an original screenplay written in 1995 by Jeff Vintar, entitled Hardwired.

The script was an Agatha Christie-inspired murder mystery that took place entirely at the scene of a crime, with one lone human character, FBI agent Del Spooner, investigating the killing of a reclusive scientist named Dr. Alfred Lanning, and interrogating a cast of machine suspects that included Sonny the robot, VIKI the supercomputer with a perpetual smiley face, the dead Dr. Lanning's hologram, plus several other examples of artificial intelligence.

The project was first acquired by Walt Disney Pictures for Bryan Singer to direct. Several years later, 20th Century Fox (which Disney acquired the studio as part of Disney's acquisition of former parent 21st Century Fox in 2019) acquired the rights, and signed Alex Proyas as director.

Arnold Schwarzenegger was attached to the project for several years, and Smith pursued taking over the role when Schwarzenegger's schedule delayed his participation in the film. Denzel Washington was offered the role of Det. Del Spooner, but turned it down.

Jeff Vintar was brought back on the project and spent several years opening up his stage play-like cerebral mystery to meet the needs of a big budget studio film. When the studio decided to use the name "I, Robot", he incorporated the Three Laws of Robotics and renamed his female lead character from Flynn to Susan Calvin. The end credits list the film as "suggested by the book I, Robot by Isaac Asimov".

The film renames Asimov's "U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men" to U.S. Robotics (USR), the modem manufacturer named after the fictional company, and depicts the company with a futuristic USR logo. Other product placements include Converse's Chuck Taylor All-Stars, Audi, FedEx, Tecate and JVC among others.

The Audi RSQ was designed especially for the film to increase brand awareness and raise the emotional appeal of the Audi brand, objectives that were considered achieved when surveys conducted in the United States showed that the Audi RSQ gave a substantial boost to the image ratings of the brand in the States. It also features an MV Agusta F4 SPR motorcycle.

The final script used few of Asimov's characters and ideas, those present were heavily adapted and the plot of the film is not derived from Asimov's work in some cases explicitly opposing them.

• Sonny's attempt to hide from Spooner in a sea of identical robots is loosely based on a similar scene in Little Lost Robot.

• The positronic brains of Sonny and his fellow robots first appeared in the story Catch That Rabbit.

• Sonny's struggle and desire to understand humanity resembles that of the robot protagonist in The Bicentennial Man. His dream about a man coming to liberate the NS-5s alludes to Robot Dreams and its main character Elvex.

• The premise of a robot, such as VIKI, putting the needs of humankind as a whole over that of individual humans can be found in The Evitable Conflict where supercomputers managing the global economy generalize the first law to refer to humankind as a whole. Asimov would further develop this idea in his Robot series as the Zeroth Law of Robotics ("A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.").

• The premise of robots turning on their creators, originating in Karel Čapek's play R.U.R. and perpetuated in subsequent robot books and films, appears infrequently in Asimov's writings and differs from the "Zeroth Law." In fact, Asimov stated explicitly in interviews and in introductions to published collections of his robot stories that he entered the genre to protest what he called the Frankenstein complex, the tendency in popular culture to portray robots as menacing. His story lines often involved roboticists and robot characters battling societal anti-robot prejudices.