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unixronin: Galen the technomage, from Babylon 5: Crusade (Default)
Unixronin

December 2012

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July 5th, 2004

unixronin: Galen the technomage, from Babylon 5: Crusade (Gargoyles: Hiro-ic)
Monday, July 5th, 2004 07:05 pm

We chanced to see a trailer for the upcoming I, Robot movie today.  We've all already long since heard how Hollywood, being Hollywood, just couldn't hold itself back from making Dr. Susan Calvin young and hot, rather than fortysomething, horse-faced, and lacking in human social skills.  But that's not the half of it.

Don't get me wrong, it looks like it'll be a decent movie, if you studiously ignore the title.  But, as far as is discernible from the trailer, the following is a comprehensive, exhaustive list of the aspects that the movie I, Robot has in common with Isaac Asimov's corpus of Robot stories:

  1. The title.
  2. Both have a character named Dr. Susan Calvin.
  3. Both feature robots.
  4. Both feature humans.

And as far as we could tell, that's IT, folks.  Paul Verhoeven's St er, Lust Among The Bugs had more in common with Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers than this movie has with anything Isaac Asimov ever wrote.  I mean, apart from anything else, it's totally obvious even from the trailer that these robots have not been imprinted with Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics.  In fact, I'd have to say the plot of the movie appears to positively revolve around that absence.  Hello?!?

"Hey, we kept the title and one of the characters.  What more do you want?"

I'm not saying, "Don't go see it."  I'm just saying, don't go to the theater with the slightest illusion that you're going to see a movie that even distantly resembles anything Isaac Asimov ever wrote.