"[Very loosely] based on..."

[unixronin]

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.

Comments

A movie which matches the book

[sierra-nevada.livejournal.com]

If you want to see a film that matches a really good book in almost every respect, there's The Maltese Falcon (http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0033870/) from the Dashiell Hammett book of the same name. John Huston did an excellent job of translating that to the silver screen, both as director as screen writer.

Re: A movie which matches the book

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Oh, there's plenty. And a great deal more which, while frequently differing in details, nonetheless manage to faithfully capture the story and the feel of the original book. (For example 2001, Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings, the Sci-Fi Channel's Dune miniseries - Peter Lynch's comic-ified abortion need not apply - and The Hunt for Red October.) But there's a world of difference between a movie which, however poor a job it may do of it, is recognizeably attempting to retell the story of a classic book, and one where the producer clearly went looking for a big-name property and secured the rights to it for its sales value alone, without the least intention of producing a movie that had any more to do with the book than the bare minimum necessary to be able to put "Based on the book by ..." in the credits without the movie reviewers' heads exploding from sheer cognitive dissonance.
It's particularly idiotic in this instance because not only would the movie as apparently plotted be totally unworkable if the robots were imprinted with the Three Laws, whereas all of Asimov's Robot stories were written around exploration of the effects of the Three Laws, but the only people to whom the title is even going to mean anything and convey any name recognition are old-time hard-SF fans who are just going to be pissed off at the producer and director for taking the name of Isaac Asimov in vain. This movie, at least as seen in this trailer, gains nothing from misappropriating the title I, Robot; they could probably have come up with fifty titles more applicable.
(Robot Rising, for example, springs to mind right off the top of my head with only a few seconds' thought.)