Androids loose in Hollywood

In “I, Robot,” a new science fiction potboiler starring Will Smith, androids see and speak no evil. With humans calling the shots, however, they hear plenty. Designed along the articulated lines of wooden artists’ mannequins, the robots serve their mortal masters, effortlessly performing tasks that were once the preserve of illegal immigrants and nonunion labor. But there’s a kink in this machine world: consciousness. One robot has begun to reason, dream and even doubt. More disturbing, yet another robot, or maybe two, seems to have written a Hollywood script and hijacked a major studio production.

Given the film’s assembly-line screenplay and mechanistic storytelling, no other explanation seems viable. Certainly no one with a heartbeat or taste would blow so much talent, time and resources on such rubbishy writing. “Suggested,” as the credits put it, by Isaac Asimov’s 1950 novel of the same title (the credited screenwriters are Jeff Vintar and Akiva Goldsman), directed by the imaginative visual stylist Alex Proyas and starring one of the most charismatic stars in movies, “I, Robot” seemed like a sure thing. The opening few minutes look nifty, and Smith, as a Chicago detective named Del Spooner, a.k.a. Spoon, looks niftier still. A man out of time (it’s 2035 and he’s sporting old-school Converse sneakers), the robot-allergic Spoon comes across as the kind of guy Harrison Ford would have slurped noodles with in “Blade Runner.” No such luck.

A man of few words, many of them vulgar, Spoon has recently returned to work after one of those traumas that yield copious night sweats and make for neat-o flashbacks. In time, we learn what happened to Spoon and why, but meanwhile there’s a dead body messing up the lobby of U.S. Robotics, the leading manufacturer of artificially intelligent machines. A robot developer (James Cromwell) has taken a swan dive off one of the uppermost corporate floors, leaving a trail of blood and Day-Glo clues. With the dead man’s hologram leading the way with crypto-Zen obscurantisms (“that is the right question”) and with the aid of a serious but, yes, beautiful scientist, Dr. Susan Calvin (Bridget Moynahan), Spoon discovers that the latest robot models, though hard-wired for submission, may no longer be under control.

The machine world is a staple of cinematic science fiction, animating films from Fritz Lang’s 1927 “Metropolis” to James Cameron’s 1984 “The Terminator” (starring you know who). Cautionary tales about human evolution and rational thinking, many of these films involve nightmares of authoritarianism, totalitarianism and total war. Asimov plays the dystopian blues with restraint in his book but in the shadow of World War II exhibited little optimism about a human future. The “I” in Asimov’s “I, Robot” isn’t just a clever nod to Descartes -- because the robots “think,” they now “are” -- but a dark warning. When robots develop something like human consciousness, it may not be long before they develop all the unpleasantness of that consciousness as well. What happens when robot needs and desires -- implicit in that ravenous “I” -- come up against ours?

What happens here, at least, is that Smith gets to kick robot butt, a lot of robot butt. Although Asimov’s core conceit remains intact, the movie essentially plays out like an off-the-rack 1990s action flick. Despite some futuristic flourishes, including cars that look like toasters (albeit really fancy Audi toasters) and disappointingly drab special effects, the movie world of tomorrow doesn’t look all that different from the movie world of yesterday. So much so that the action cliches aren’t just tediously familiar, they’re depressing. Something has gone seriously wrong when a filmmaker like Proyas, who made the beautifully moody thriller “The Crow” and the science fiction-noir hybrid “Dark City,” recycles moves from “The Matrix.” It’s even worse when he slows the action just to show a gun cartridge falling from a chamber as if from a John Woo movie.

In Ridley Scott’s landmark film “Blade Runner” (based on a Philip K. Dick novel), the brooding hero played by Ford hunts androids who try to pass as human. Like the novel, the movie employs the idea of runaway machines to score points about the man-made and nearly destroyed natural world. As in “I, Robot,” as in our world, the human population in “Blade Runner” has become increasingly machinelike while the machines have become more like people. Eventually, Ford’s character (in the director’s cut) is revealed to be an android too, a denouement that gives the film’s metaphysical grappling a deep poignancy.

The unhappy and presumably unconscious irony of “I, Robot” is that while Smith does his best to prove Spoon as all-too-fallibly human, the filmmakers have done their level worst to establish that he’s nothing of the sort.

*

‘I, Robot’

MPAA rating: PG-13 for intense stylized action and some brief partial nudity

Times guidelines: Vulgar language, gunplay, violent action, partial male nudity

Will Smith...Del Spooner

Bridget Moynahan...Dr. Susan Calvin

Bruce Greenwood...Lawrence Robertson

James Cromwell...Dr. Alfred Lanning

Chi McBride...Lt. John Bergin

Twentieth Century Fox presents a Davis Entertainment Company/Laurence Mark/Overbrook Films Production, released by Twentieth Century Fox. Director Alex Proyas. Writers Jeff Vintar, Akiva Goldsman. Screen story Jeff Vintar. Suggested by Isaac Asimov’s book. Producers Laurence Mark, John Davis, Topher Dow, Wyck Godfrey. Director of photography Simon Duggan. Production designer Patrick Tatopoulos. Film editors Richard Learoyd, Armen Minasian, William Hoy. Special visual effects and digital animation Digital Domain. Visual effects supervisor John Nelson. Music Marco Beltrami. Running time: 1 hour, 54 minutes.

In general release.