Slashdot Mirror
I, Robot Trailer Available
thehomeland writes "A new 'I, Robot' movie is coming out based on the Isaac Asimov book series, starring Will Smith. I saw a teaser at the theatre back at the LOTR:ROTK showing, but it looked so much like a commercial I didn't even realize it was a trailer until I saw a logo that said '3 Laws Safe'. Now there's a regular trailer as well as a nice featurette for better details."
When people first heard the WotW broadcast, they thought it was a real Martian invasion. There was widespread panic (mainly I think because everyone trusted what they heard on the radio, thankfully we're all far more cynical now), probably because of stunts like that, but a lot can be put down to marketing spin as well I suppose.
:-)) Anyone know of a way to query google for that sort of thing ?
It's interesting that they've chosen to take the same sort of approach on the website for "I Robot" though - they've really tried to make it look as though a personal robot (NS-5) exists and will be used for the film... Perhaps it ought to drive a car around if so...
I'd really like to know what the search-count is on google for 'NS-5' or 'Android Mechanics' now that this has hit Slashdot
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
I remember playing this game bak in '84. From the trailer it seems that the "Fresh prince of Belaire" will be playing the part of the little guy jumping around in a crudly rendered, polygon filled world, shooting pixels at a massive eye! Fun for all the family!!
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
by Allen Parsons Project?
What?
Anyone know if Wil Weaton got the part?
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
They made a friggin' Will Smith Action Movie.
Why do they even bother buying the rights to something they couldn't really care less about, artistically?
Feels more like MiB3 than the book I read. Looks like it could be good but at the moment I wish that they would not call it I Robot...
------- Code to try when you're bored: qsort( 0, UINT_MAX, sizeof( int* ), IntCompare );
I just watched the featurette, the trailed and looked through the web site. While the 3 laws of robotics are mentioned plenty of times and of course the movie is named after an Asimov story nowhere do they give credit to Isaac Asimov. The man may be dead but I'm dissappointed for him.
http://www.apple.com/trailers/fox/i_robot/
irobot_m480.mov.torrent
I, Robot Trailer Was Available
It is too bad that this is neither a remake of the old Outer Limits episode, nor Harlan Ellison's screenplay.
Sigh this sucks, they are making all these sci fi movies too late. The concepts in them aren't really fantastic anymore they are just not here yet.
I hope they make some of the really great ones while there is still time such as Ender's Game and Ringworld
The most distressing thing I see from this trailer is the fact that they have in one of their text snippets "Rules are made to be broken" or some equally stupid garbage. One of the things Asimov made perfectly clear in all his writings was the fact that whatever else the roboticists did they NEVER EVER EVER broke the 3 laws. It really pisses me off that there marketing automatons have the nerve to include the phrase "as suggested by the writings of Issac Asimov". He suggested no such thing!
It's Isaac Asimov, spinning in his grave.
You'd need to have a crack team to do a screenplay. Asimov himself admitted that his earlier stories lacked character depth. Note the difference between the original Foundation/Robots series and 'Foundation's Edge' or 'Robots of Dawn'.
Even so, you're not going to have 2 hour in-cabin discussions on the basics of relativity, hyperspace, or robot theory (as Asimov would often do). It made for interesting reading, but not good movie material.
Now, 'Robots of Dawn' would make an INCREDIBLE movie because it has everything a MOVIE would need to make it a hit (sex, violence, dramatic tension, good special fx with a point, etc.) If the original series are ever done as movies - prepare for major rewrites aka, LOTR.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
From what I heard, the new movie isn't directly based on any of the stories. It started as an original work & was adapted to add parts of the Asimov universe.
I just got out my Matrix Revolutions soundtrack CD, and though I only viewed the I, Robot trailer once...track 16, Juno Reactor vs. Don Davis - Navras sure sounds like the music heard in the trailer...
Ok, I'll check again in the trailer...the relevant part in the trailer starts right at the city shot after Will Smith says "when people were killed by other people." Relevant part in song on soundtrack starts at about 16 seconds in.
Anyone agree? Anyone know if both the trailer and soundtrack got that section from a mutual source, or if the trailer just got it from the soundtrack?
'I, Robot' was the first *adult* (ie, no pictures in it) book I ever read as a kid, at the age of maybe 4 or 5. I still have the exact copy of the book even now. I remember being very disappointed when I found out that robots didn't really exist.
And now it looks as though Asimov is going to be fucked over by Hollywood. For Christ's sake, they had Akiva fucking Goldsman writing the script! The man who wrote 'Batman & Robin', 'Lost In Space' and a whole pile of other shit. Asimov can still write better than Goldsman, and he's *dead*. This fucktard shouldn't be writing v1agra spam, never mind major motion pictures.
In Asimov's stories, the whole point of the Three Laws was that they were never actually broken! Human error led to situations where robots were caught in conflict between their explicit orders and the Laws, or they *seemed* to be breaking one Law - but only to obey another. However, in the trailer we see crazed robots chasing and attacking humans left, right and centre. Somehow I don't think we're going to get Powell and Donovan puzzling out what's gone wrong, step by step.
Even the trailer is selling it as Bad Boys 3: Cybercops, what with Smith doing all his Fresh Prince schtick. I actually *like* Will Smith, but I don't want him doing wacky bullshit in an Isaac Asimov adaptation!
And we even get an emotional robot right there in the trailer. Again, Asimov's robots may have *seemed* to have emotional responses in the stories, but it was invariably due to orders-vs-Laws conflicts that made them act oddly, or projection on the part of the humans interacting with them. Some of the robots in his stories (especially Daneel Olivaw) may have had personalities, but they were still *machines*, and behaved as such.
Shit, and I had some hopes for this film - before I saw the trailer - too. It might even make money - "Will Smith vs killer robots? Keeeewl!" - but it's probably going to be even more insulting to Asimov than 'Paycheck' was to PKD.
You must think in Russian.
"I, Robot" reminds me of a Chris Cunningham video clip that he did for Bjork.
For instance they tweaked Asimov's three laws a bit to make them more accessible and relevant to modern moviegoers, they are now:
Law 1: A robot must not talk about injuring human beings in Fight Club.
Law 2: A robot must not talk about injuring Robots in Fight Club.
Law 3: A robot must protect itself from injury using a minigun and rocket launchers.
Isaac Asimov's "Three Laws of Robotics"
1: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2: A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
On the one hand, this movie has Will Smith in it. That definitely makes the film look unattractive, considering Will less-than-stellar work.
On the other hand, we've got Alex Proyas as the director, who did both Dark City and The Crow. Both were very good films, and I think we should give this film a chance to turn out just as well.
Of course, I knew lots of people who said, "You know the scene where Neo shoots everything? That was the best part!" Apparently the parts of the movie I enjoyed went right by them. Maybe I, Robot will be the same way. Those looking for an action movie will get that, and those of us wanting action and something thought-provoking to talk about afterwards will get our way, too.
Here's hoping. :-)
Yes, Will Smith starring in a hollywood remake of an Isaac Asimov series.
Imagine hearing this prediction back in the days of the Fresh Prince of Bel Air.
Back then I'd have sooner believed that the LOTR movies would someday made, and made very well by the same guy who made the campy horror comedy Bad Taste.
Oh wait....
nevermind.
That's because it's not I-Robot. They chose to use a script called "hardwired" instead of the script written by Harlan Ellison. The decision to name it 'I, Robot' was made by some fox execs after the fact.
There is no doubt that this is nothing more than Men In Black and Independence Day. Will smith is not a sci-fi actor and he shouldn't be. He turned sci-fi into a black commedy children's movie. I'm just glad that he declined the role of Neo in The Matrix, as he was originally casted to do.
Kind of like the mess they came up with for Starship Trooper. Sheech that was horrible!
In its own right I think that was a rather entertaining and at times superbly funny flick. I suppose that it wasn't quite what fans of the book were expecting but what Verhoeven came up with worked quite well as a movie.
Actually, I'm less concerned about Will Smith than about the fact that they cast some hot chick straight out of the Coyote Ugly Bar to pose as Susan Calvin. But let's keep an open mind.
Very rarely is technology itself the focus of the the story - even in the robot stories where a specific robot often seems to be in focus, as one of the main characters in the story, they tend to be only props used to make some point.
This is a common thread with most of the sci-fi that survives long term. HG Wells, the Time Machine stands the test of time because the technology of the time machine isn't relevant to the story line. For that matter, the story could more or less have been told without time travel - just like in for instance Gullivers Travels, the whole journey is just an excuse to set the scene the way the authors wants.
Gibson survives because he's detached enough from technology to write about it in very broad strokes - there are very few details to get hung up about as "dated".
Philip K. Dick survives because most of his stories are about his characters, not about the technology they surround themselves with.
And so on...
The sci-fi that dates badly is the techno-fetishist stuff that is about the technology, as opposed to the consequences of the technology.
Actually he was very good in Six Degrees of Separation.
There's a lot of talent there, but he's mostly using it to make cheap^H^H^H^H^Hexpensive action movies and some not-very-good dramas (Ali, Bagger Vance).
He's got a lot of on-screen charisma, which is actually one of the most important skills an actor can have. People respond well to him, and that's a hard thing to teach. (I'm a director, and I've tried.) He's got some range, though he's at his best when it's light-hearted (his rap career, his sitcom, Men in Black).
But I keep looking for him to follow up his very good (not brilliant, but very very good) performance in Six Degrees. I haven't seen that yet.
Keanu... well, Keanu tries. I was actually the only one on the world who liked him in Much Ado About Nothing. He was interesting in My Own Private Idaho. He was actually rather good in that awful Something's Gotta Give. He really, really wants to be a Good Actor, but he'll have to settle for being charismatic.
There are a number of comments here which suggest that Asimov would be spinning in his grave if he saw this movie...
Unless these people have worked on the movie and read the screenplay I do not understand how they can make that judgement right now. Sure, there are a few bits in the trailer that show some kind of fight going on involving robots, but that's not entirely inconsistent with the three laws. Many of Asimov's robot stories were concerned with situations where the actions of a robot seemed to break the laws of robotics and sometimes people did get hurt.
All we really have right now is a trailer and a brief interview-type bit with Will Smith and the director. From that we can see in a few very brief clips that some robots run amok, and we hear from Will Smith that some robots malfunction. From what I remember reading Asimov this is all still fairly consistent.
What all the naysayers need to bear in mind right now is that all of the footage we've been shown has been put together by marketing people. Most if not all of them will have no idea about the original material and will not have read Asimov. All they have to go on is the footage they've got of the movie. The writer and director rarely have much imput into what goes into this stuff.
I'm not saying that this movie is going to be consistent with Asimov. What I'm saying is that right now it's too early to tell for sure. We'll see in July.
Marketing Executive: "Oh come on, Terminator 3 was a great movie. I, Robot was a great book. If we merge the two, we will have something twice as great!"
Public: "That's what you said about merging Aliens and Beverly Hills Cop. Did Pluto Nash even have a script?"
Marketing Executive: "Everyone loves the Coz!"
Public: "You're thinking about Leonard Part 6."
Marketing Executive: "Exactly. How did it get to Part 6 if it wasn't great?"
Public: [sigh]
The ______ Agenda
The scene in the trailer with all of the robots attacking people makes no sense. My guess is that the writers have never read any of Asimov's robot books at all. I'll usually see a movie based on a book I like no matter how bad it looks just to get someone else's interpretation of the story. This looks more like pure fabrication than interpretation.
Asimov's Laws effectively ended the 'Frankenstein' phase of robot stories in written SF. Good SF at least takes a shot at taking into account the sociopolitical aspects of technology. It's obvious that we will never be legally allowed to build AI that controls potentially lethal force without some protection against it being used against us. [Exceptions will of course be made for DoD robots, but they will no doubt have their own safeguards.] Once Asimov's Laws were in print, SF authors could never get away with selling books about robots going amok and turning on their human masters. Everyone knew that the government would demand the Three Laws or a close analogue be installed in every robot
Ah, well. Movies tend not to be as intellectually evolved as books, so we're treated to the Terminator series, and now the greatest spectacle of script syncretism since The Tower and The Glass Inferno movie adaptations were forged into The Towering Inferno. I'll probably contribute to the insanity by paying to watch this bastard, then look forward to seeing it parodied in a future Scary Movie release.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
It would have been intresting to see what Will Smith would have done with Neo's character. The W. Bros did a good job of directing around Keanu's wooden acting "style", I'm sure they could have done a good job with Will Smith as well.
One of the intresting things is that Warner Bros retained casting control over the film. The W. Bros had no control over who played the leads...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Isaac Asimov's "Three Laws of Robotics"
1: A Hollywood Exec may not crate a good adaptation of book to film, or, through inaction, allow such a movie to be made.
2: A Hollywood Exec must obey orders given it by the Marketing Polls except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3: A Hollywood Exec must protect its own profit margins as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
You've never seen Six Degrees of Separation, have you?
[TMB]