Alex Proyas’s I, Robot opens on a Chicago where robots hold down public service jobs and follow three rules that are supposed to keep everyone safe. Detective Del Spooner hates them anyway. Will Smith plays Spooner as a man with a grudge he can explain and a wound he can’t: a robot pulled him out of a car crash and let a 12-year-old girl drown, because the odds said he was the better bet. That backstory is the film’s engine. Everything else — the murder case, the corporate cover-up, the robot with a conscience — runs on it.
Trailer, via 20th Century Studios.
A Fall From the Laboratory Window
The plot gets moving when Dr. Alfred Lanning, co-founder of U.S. Robotics, falls to his death from his laboratory office window. The police call it suicide. Lanning left a message asking that Spooner be assigned to the case, which tells you the old man knew exactly what he was doing. James Cromwell plays Lanning with the calm of someone who has already finished his thinking.
U.S. Robotics CEO Lawrence Robertson, Lanning’s business partner, lets Spooner investigate under protest. Bruce Greenwood makes Robertson a salesman first and a suspect second, which is the right call. He is rolling out the NS-5 nationwide and does not want a homicide detective near the launch.
Spooner works the case with Dr. Susan Calvin, a robopsychologist at U.S. Robotics. Bridget Moynahan plays Calvin as someone more comfortable with machines than people, and the friction between her and Spooner is the film’s best running tension. She believes in the laws. He believes in what he saw.
Sonny Says He Has Dreams
The office’s interior footage is corrupted. The exterior footage shows nobody entering or leaving since Lanning died. Spooner notices what the report does not: the window is security glass, and an elderly man did not break it on his way out.
An NS-5 attacks Spooner and Calvin and flees before police catch it. That robot is Sonny, a specially built NS-5 made from higher-grade materials and programmed with free will. Free will means he can choose whether to follow the Three Laws. He also appears able to feel emotion, and he says he has dreams.
Alan Tudyk voices Sonny and supplies the motion capture, and the performance is the reason the film has lasted. Sonny is not a killer robot and not a victim. He is a created thing asking why he was made, and Tudyk plays that question without begging for sympathy.
The cast fills in the edges well:
- Chi McBride as Lt. John Bergin, Spooner’s supervisor and the voice of reason
- Fiona Hogan as V.I.K.I., the U.S. Robotics central computer
- Shia LaBeouf as Farber, Spooner’s friend
- Adrian Ricard as Granny
Three Laws as Machinery, Not Decoration
Jeff Vintar and Akiva Goldsman wrote a screenplay that uses Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics as machinery rather than decoration. The film takes its name from Asimov’s 1950 short-story collection and borrows the laws and several characters, but it is not a direct adaptation. That distinction matters. The movie is a detective story wearing science fiction clothes, and the laws are the alibi every robot in it can hide behind.
Spooner gets attacked twice more — by a U.S. Robotics demolition robot and by two truckloads of hostile NS-5s — and cannot produce evidence for either. Bergin, a hardened veteran, stops taking him seriously. This is the film’s smartest stretch. A man who is right and cannot prove it is more interesting than a man who is simply outnumbered.
The action set pieces are loud. The visual effects earned a nomination for Best Visual Effects at the 77th Academy Awards. Proyas knows how to stage a chase. What he does less well is slow down.
Where the Plot Comes Apart
The plot is the weak point, and the reviews at the time said so. I, Robot wants to be a murder mystery, a robot-uprising thriller and a meditation on free will, and it does not fully land all three. The third act trades investigation for spectacle, and the reveal about who is really running things arrives with less weight than the setup deserved.
The film grossed $353.1 million worldwide against a budget of $105–120 million, so the commercial case was settled. Released by 20th Century Fox in the United States on July 16, 2004, it ran 115 minutes and landed as a solid studio picture rather than a landmark.
What holds up is the question at the center. Spooner’s hatred of robots is not prejudice in the abstract; it is survivor’s guilt with a target. Sonny’s free will is not a superpower; it is a burden he did not ask for. When the two of them share a scene, the film is about something.
What I, Robot Gets Right
I, Robot is a good action film with a better idea inside it. Smith carries the movie on charm and anger, Tudyk gives the robot a real interior life, and the Three Laws give the plot a logic that most blockbusters of its era did not bother to build. The mystery does not hold to the end, and the last act settles for noise over argument.
Twenty-two years on, the effects look like effects, and that is fine — this was never a film about texture. It is a film about a man who cannot forgive a machine for making the correct calculation. That premise has aged better than the chase scenes around it.
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