“Bicentennial Man” asks a lot of its audience. The film runs 131 minutes and tracks a single robot across two centuries, from household appliance to something close to human. Chris Columbus directs. Robin Williams plays Andrew. The tagline promises “One robot’s 200 year journey to become an ordinary man.”
The trouble is that the journey is long, and the movie feels every year of it.
Trailer, via nat.
Andrew Arrives at the Martin House
The setup is plain. Richard Martin buys a gift: a new NDR-114 robot. The product is named Andrew by the youngest of the family’s children. Andrew is programmed to perform menial tasks. He introduces himself with a presentation of the Three Laws of Robotics.
Then he starts to feel things.
Nicholas Kazan wrote the screenplay, based on the 1992 novel The Positronic Man by Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg. The title derives from the main character existing to the age of two hundred years. That is the whole idea, and the film states it early. A machine that was built to dust shelves begins to want more than shelves.
Williams plays Andrew as gentle and eager, a butler with a child’s curiosity. It is a soft performance, and for a while it works. Sam Neill is Richard, called Sir by the robot. Embeth Davidtz plays Amanda, the “Little Miss” Andrew grows attached to. Wendy Crewson is Rachel, the matriarch. Hallie Kate Eisenberg plays Amanda at seven.
The eldest daughter, Grace, despises Andrew. Amanda is sympathetic. That split is the film’s first engine, and it does not run long.
A Wooden Figurine Changes Everything
Andrew accidentally breaks one of Amanda’s glass figurines. He carves a new one out of wood. Richard is surprised. He takes Andrew to NorthAm Robotics to ask whether creativity was part of the programming. The CEO, Dennis Mansky, calls it a problem and offers to scrap Andrew.
Richard takes him home instead and tells him to keep going.
One robot’s 200 year journey to become an ordinary man.
That is the tagline, and it is also the film’s trap. Once Andrew can make things, the movie has to decide what he is. Instead it keeps deciding, again and again, for two hours.
Andrew becomes a clockmaker. He earns a sizable fortune, managed by Richard, after they find that robots have no rights under current laws. In 2020, Richard encourages Dennis to retrofit Andrew with facial expressions to match his emotions. In 2032, Andrew presents Richard with all the money he has made and asks for his freedom.
Richard refuses at first, wounded. Then he grants independence on one condition: Andrew may no longer live at the Martin home.
That is the best scene in the picture, and it is over quickly.
Robin Williams Plays a Machine Learning to Be a Man
Andrew builds his own home by the beach. In 2048, Richard is on his death bed and apologizes for banishing him. After Richard dies, Andrew searches for other NDR robots like himself, communicating with Amanda, who has married and divorced, and who has a son, Lloyd, and a granddaughter, Portia.
In 2068, Andrew finds Galatea, an NDR robot modified with a female personality. Kiersten Warren plays her. Oliver Platt is Rupert Burns, the son of the NDR creator, who makes androids look more human-like.
The cast is deep. Stephen Root plays Dennis Mansky. Lynne Thigpen plays Marjorie Bota, a later President and Speaker of the World Congress. Bradley Whitford is Lloyd as an adult. John Michael Higgins is Bill Feingold, the family attorney.
None of them get much to do. The film keeps moving forward in time, and every jump costs it another relationship. Andrew outlives everyone, which is the point, but the movie treats each death as a beat to hit rather than a loss to sit with.
Williams is the reason to watch. He plays Andrew with a stillness that is unusual for him, and the early scenes between Andrew and Amanda have real warmth. But the script keeps handing him new stages of humanity like levels to clear: emotion, creativity, money, freedom, a face, a body, love. Each one arrives, gets a scene, and gets left behind.
A Makeup Nomination and a Box Office Failure
“Bicentennial Man” was released in the United States on December 17, 1999, by Buena Vista Pictures Distribution under the Touchstone Pictures banner. Columbia TriStar Film Distributors International handled other territories under the Columbia Pictures banner.
It received mixed reviews and was a box office failure, grossing $87.4 million against a $90–100 million budget. Makeup artist Greg Cannom was nominated for Best Makeup at the 72nd Academy Awards.
That nomination is the most interesting fact about the film’s reception. The makeup is doing the work the script cannot: it shows Andrew aging, changing, becoming. The movie around it never earns that transformation. Tim Allen was considered for the role of Andrew before Williams was cast, and turned it down because of his commitment to Galaxy Quest. It is hard not to wonder what a sharper, funnier version of this movie would have looked like.
What “Bicentennial Man” Gets Wrong
The film has one good question: what does a machine owe the people who made it, and what do they owe it back? Richard buys Andrew, names him, profits from him, frees him, and banishes him. That is a real story about ownership and love, and the film touches it without ever pressing.
Instead it reaches for scale. Two hundred years. A World Congress. A robot who wants to be declared human. The bigger it gets, the less it means. By the time Andrew is arguing his case before a legislature, the movie has traded a small, strange friendship for a civics lesson.
The romance with Portia is the clearest failure. Davidtz plays both Amanda and Portia, which is meant to suggest something about continuity and memory. It plays as a man falling in love with the granddaughter of the girl he watched grow up. The film does not examine that. It just presents it.
And the ending, which the film treats as a triumph, is really a surrender. Andrew spends two centuries trying to be recognized as a person, and the movie’s answer is that he should die to get there. That is a bleak idea dressed as a happy one, and “Bicentennial Man” never notices.
The Verdict
“Bicentennial Man” is not a disaster. Williams is good. Cannom’s makeup is good. The premise, borrowed from Asimov, is strong enough to survive a lot of mishandling. But 131 minutes is a long time to watch a movie refuse to commit to its own idea.
The film wants to be about a soul. It ends up being about paperwork. Andrew’s two-hundred-year journey should feel like an ache. It feels like a schedule.
For a story about a machine that learns to feel, “Bicentennial Man” never quite learns to make us feel it back. The parts are there. The assembly is not.
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