|
 "I, Fuckbot" (or) "God Bless You, Mr. Asimov"
by Dangling Chad
 Yeah, that's right. I said Fuckbot. In big bold letters, right on the homepage, for all the world to see. Not that anyone will care, since every last shred of decency the public had left went right down the shitter with this assuredly awful piece of tripe pretending to be a movie. And you can blame Al for this piece of writing - he started a conversation about sci-fi at the pub tonight, so here we are, full of beer and rage and itching for a fight to the death with the producer who ok'ed this project.
Ah, where to begin? Perhaps with a brief review of the series that spawned this handbasket. Why do I call it a handbasket? Because it's going to be the vehicle responsible for SENDING WILL SMITH TO HELL.
The trilogy and collection of short stories that began with I, Robot and ended with Robots of Dawn introduced a question that has since been asked and re-asked by nearly every robocentric science fiction film in the past decade (Terminator, The Matrix, Screamers, AI...): What are the ramifications and subsequent consequences of creating a self-aware, artificially intelligent being (which also happens to be 10x stronger, faster, and smarter than any human)? Asimov's Earth dealt with this question by imprinting every robot with a set of directives known as the Three Laws (RoboCop, anyone?).
These laws were, (stated from memory, so don't quote me on this...):
1.) No robot shall ever harm a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2.) No robot shall ever disobey orders given to it by a human being unless such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3.) A robot must always protect itself unless such protection conflicts with the First or Second Law.
Now, with these laws firmly in place, Asimov took a very unique route and wrote each and every one of his robot books as good old detective stories. Typically, someone is killed or otherwise harmed, and a robot is the only suspect (Asimov came up with enough variations on this theme to write a plethora of short stories about it, all of them equally engaging). The crime itself is left to be solved by either a jaded cop, the world's most brilliant robopsychologist, or, of course, another robot. The book under attack (by the movie, not myself), in this case, involves all three. The interactions between these three characters, as well as the situations they invariably become involved in, make for what could've been a brilliantly adapted noir mystery flick. However, boys being boys, and Hollywood being shitasses, they opted to take the "Hey, he saved the world from an alien cockroach, now let's make him save the world from an army of stupid-looking robots!" approach. See the picture if you don't know who I'm talking about. ----------->
Now, given, this article may be somewhat reactionary, considering the movie hasn't even been released yet and I've only seen the preview twice. However, from the gratuitous explosions, the swarms of robots destroying everything in their path, and the Fresh Prince trying to pull the "Bad Boy" gangster cop routine on a talking hunk of metal and plastic, I think my feelings of dread may be justified. To be fair, the movie may turn out to be a rather fun sci-fi CG-fest. But frankly, if I wanted to see something like that, i'd just get Spielberg or John Woo to direct a Philip K. Dick flick.
Oh, wait... damn.
|
