![i robot i robot](https://pictures.abebooks.com/isbn/9781894689069-us.jpg)
So there aren't just divey local bars - there are divey local robot bars. I, Robot's vision of Chicago in 2035 is perfectly fine, if a little blandly functional it's one of those cinematic depictions of the future that only really has one technological change from the world where it was made, and that change seems to incarnate in literally every last detail of everyday life. And that last bit is doubly disappointing, since I, Robot was directed by Alex Proyas, who had at the very least proven himself as a director of sublimely well-realised, atmospherically dense film worlds with 1994's The Crow and 1998's Dark City. The rest is a dreary action-mystery that spends far too much time mucking around a villainous plot that isn't nearly as difficult to unravel as the protagonist makes it, stopping by a few action setpieces that suck, a few thriller setpieces that are actually pretty decent, and wasting a lot of time gawking and gaping at the sleek iFuture production design that would have been a lot more impressive if ther was more to it than just skillfully copying the then two-year-old Minority Report.
#I robot movie
The visual effects hold up, at least, and given what the movie is, I guess that's the only thing that time really needed to be kind to.
![i robot i robot](https://cdnb.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/007/854/887/large/joseph-x-20799982-1494226137314311-8167591238259424440-n.jpg)
None of which should be construed as claiming that time has been kind to I, Robot. Remember when crummy tentpole films had no franchise aspirations (there were plans for an I, Robot 2, but never very serious ones), and could be sold on the basis of a movie star? It was so recent, and yet feels so long ago, in our age of shared universes and God knows what. It's not very good, but is the not-very-good of a bygone age. This being a particularly beloved theme of Isaac Asimov, one of our greatest robot authors, where could I possibly go, if not to the film that got Asimov so spectacularly wrong?Ĭhalk up another film on the list of movies that I'd never have expected that I could possibly be nostalgic for: 2004's I, Robot, a half-baked "adaptation" of Isaac Asimov's genre-defining 1950 short story collection. This week: it appears that part of Transformers: The Last Knight - the part that isn't about King Goddamn Arthur, anyway - is about a robot we thought was good turning into a robot who we think is bad. Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases.