FABIO wrote:

laudablepuss wrote:

Fullofkittens wrote:

FABIO wrote:



The movie is set in 2035, which is stupid considering how hi-tech everything is. I thought the public got over the "everything will be so advanced iand futuristic in just 20 years" back in 80's time travel movies. Was it just because that's the year the book was set in?

No, because the book is a collection of short stories that are set, IIRC, all the way from the late 90's to the middle of the 21st century.

The film is not based on the book in any meaningful way.

IMDB Trivia wrote:

The movie originally started as a screenplay entitled "Hardwired", a classical-style murder mystery that read like a stage play, and was very much in the spirit of Asimov's "three laws" mysteries. When the original "Hardwired" script eventually reached Fox, after being developed at Disney with director Bryan Singer, new director Alex Proyas and writer Jeff Vintar opened up the story to fit a big budget studio film. When Fox acquired the rights to Isaac Asimov's story collection, Vintar spent two years adapting "Hardwired" to serve as a tenth story in the Asimov canon, complete with Susan Calvin and the Three Laws of Robotics. Writer Akiva Goldsman came on late in the process to tailor the script to Will Smith.

If it's supposed to be the "10th story," they should have read the first nine. Every single one of the stories describes Susan Calvin as an ugly man-hater that could only relate to robots. One of the stories is actually *about* the fact that she never managed to attract a human being.

And Will Smith's wise-cracking cop character appears to be even more one dimensional and cliched than Asimov's much-maligned characters.

It's pretty fucking hard to get past the fact that the movie's message is directly opposite the message in all of Asimov's robot stories partly because it's named after a collection of those stories and partly because Hollywood appears incapable of making a sci-fi movie involving some great new invention or inovation that DOESN'T go Frankenstein. Even Spider-Man 2 has a little bit of this: machines with AI? Of course they're evil. But most important of all, the entire point of the Three Laws was to refute this idea that technology will must necessarily run amok. Dangerous machines can be built, but machines can also be built with safeguards to prevent accidents.

Who cares? Did you have a checklist ready to deduct points from the Lord of the Rings movies every time it deviated from the book? What was Tom Bombadil worth? Minus seven? How about the pointless elf queen scenes just because they were in the book? Plus ten?

I'm guessing that their rationale for having the robots run around killing people is blah blah blah blah blah blah

I'm guessing that their rationale is that it'd be a lot more fun to watch than everyone getting along peacefully, and you know what? They were right.

I don't expect anyone to care about this and if you liked the movie, that's great. But there's no chance that I could watch this movie and enjoy it.

Christ that's anal. Didn't you just admit that Asimov's characters sucked? Why is deviating from the book a bad thing then? Again, do not go by the gay trailers that make it look like nothing but 90 minutes of wisecracks and John Wooing it off of a motorcycle.