---
title: 'I, HATE, I, ROBOT,'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=zYnQGWjsGXQ'
video_id: 'zYnQGWjsGXQ'
date: 2026-06-30
duration_sec: 1924
---

# I, HATE, I, ROBOT,

> Source: [I, HATE, I, ROBOT,](https://youtube.com/watch?v=zYnQGWjsGXQ)

## Summary



## Transcript

The most prolific writer of science fiction is Isaac Asimov.
Now, usually, when I write a sentence like that,
I'll throw in some weasel words like one of the most prolific,
mostly so that parents can correct me in the comments.
But in this, I feel that it is just literally true.
Wikipedia has five separate pages,
just listing Asimov's bibliography.
In his own words, over a space of 40 years,
I published an average of 1,000 words a day.
Over the space of the second 20 years,
I published an average of 1,700 words a day.
Granted, most of his work is nonfiction,
but he still wrote enough fiction that there's actually
a fair bit of scholarly disagreement over how to count it.
The number I've seen for novels and short stories is around 400.
He wrote so much, he even wrote books about how he had written so much.
Obviously, it's not just that he wrote a lot,
it's that he wrote some of the most foundational.
You need a new foundation.
Pieces of science fiction ever.
But you'd think with over 400 science fiction stories
and with how popular science fiction is at the box office,
that there'd be like 100 or 50,
or 25, or even 10 adaptations of Asimov's work.
But no, there are only eight.
There would be nine,
but Fantastic Voyage doesn't count.
It's often mistaken as an Asimov book because the novel came up for the movie.
But actually, the script for the film was written first
and then they hired Asimov to write the novelization.
He managed to get the book out onto the shelves six months before
the film came out because he's just that fast of a goddamn writer.
This is different, Spoon, listen, I got this fun little ass little yummy.
I mean, she is complete agreeable,
I mean, ass has sprinkable, Spoon.
What does that even mean?
Today, I want to talk about the 2004,
Adaptation of iRobot starring Will Smith and nothing else.
This video is only going to be about the 2004,
"Adaptation of iRobot" starring Will Smith.
Wait, why do I keep putting the word adaptation in quote?
The reason I wanted to talk about this movie is not just to harp on
a more or less forgotten Blockbuster from a bygone era because it is fun,
but because last year Apple released a big adaptation of foundation.
If we lay a strong enough foundation.
Asimov's biggest series.
Before talking about that,
I wanted the context of some other times people have adapted his work,
which is what we're doing here.
But we're only going to talk about iRobot.
I wouldn't read and watch every Asimov adaptation in
existence no matter how obscure charting 60 years of failed or underfunded productions,
just as the prelude for different video,
that would be insane.
There is an entire field of film criticism centered on
categorizing the different kinds of adaptations, but unfortunately,
all of that scholarship is compromised because all of them would need to put
the 2004 air quotes adaptation of iRobot in
its own special category because the making of this movie is real weird.
Back in the 90s, screenwriter Jeff Vintar wrote
a completely unrelated screenplay called hardwired.
The movie wasn't an Agatha Christie-style murder mystery where
the suspects were all robots or other artificial intelligence.
There was a robot called Sonny,
a supercomputer called Vicki,
and the hologram of Dr. Lanning,
the man who had been killed.
It was originally written more like a stage play,
taking place entirely on one floor of a building and with FBI agent,
detective Del Spooner tasked with figuring out which the robots killed Lanning and how.
It's like a sci-fi Knives Out.
The script was first acquired by Disney,
where it entered a period of development hell and got rewritten several times.
With one iteration taking place on a space station and the entire team of
space marines taking on the role of the detective from the original script.
When that version of the movie fell through,
Fox became interested in the idea and Vintar expanded the scope
of the movie out from the original stage play like murder mystery to
a big-budget studio film broadening the scope of the story out to
an entire metropolis and bringing back the central detective character that.
Soon after that, Fox acquired the rights to
Isaac Asimov's short story collection iRobot,
never saying to themselves, how do we make money off of this thing that we just got?
I know, why don't we get poor Jeff Vintar to rewrite
his screenplay again so that it can pass as an Asimov adaptation?
Poor Jeff Vintar who had rewritten this thing like 11 times by
now went about making some Asimov references in the new screenplay.
The changes include renaming the female main character.
They renamed the company that made the robots to US robotics.
They inserted the three laws of robotics into
the plot and inventor's own words, that's pretty much it.
They basically just slap
some Asimov paint onto an old script that's been kicking around for a decade.
This is why in the credits for this movie,
it doesn't say based on iRobot,
it says suggested by Isaac Asimov's book, suggested to by.
Thanks to the suggestion Isaac.
They go about making the movie and there's a great deal of
debate over how big of an action picture it should be,
which was solved once Will Smith came on board the project.
That's hilarious.
There's a scene where Sonny,
the robot is hiding in a field of
other robots while the main characters are looking for him.
As Vintar said, when I wrote that in the script I think Sonny the robot,
was hiding among 50 robots.
This scene was always a point of contention.
Can we afford this scene?
Should this scene be in the film?
I think in the finished screenplay,
there are actually 1,000 robots in that scene.
After struggling and fighting for that scene for quite a number of years,
when Will Smith came on,
the robot count went up from 50 to 1,000.
That was the Will Smith effect.
With Will Smith onboard,
Fox hired a second screenwriter,
Akiva Goldsman, to bring the film further in line with a Will Smith event film,
which basically meant increasing the amount of action,
upping the steaks from simply solving a mystery to saving
the world and making Spooner sound more like Will Smith.
You like that?
The film took a pretty long road to its final form.
You can really see all of the different elements in competition with one another.
Vintar's original murder mystery script competing with Asimov's three laws of robotics,
competing with Will Smith's persona and Goldsman's action rewrite.
They're all pulling out one another for the entire run-time.
Wait a second. What is this movie about again?
This is a two front war.
It's a war we're going to run on both fronts.
Even though it was originally written in the 90's,
the final cut of I,
Robot is an extremely post 9/11 movie.
There's Patriot Act themes.
The main character is extremely paranoid.
It also buffers here.
Excuse me. Hey, man where have you been at?
Dr. Alfred Lanning is the inventor of robots
and the three laws of robotics that make them safe to use.
One day he seemingly commits suicide
and detective Del Spooner is called in to investigate.
He thinks that it wasn't a suicide,
but that a robot committed the crime.
Spooner has an irrational prejudice against
robots thanks to a traumatic incident in his past.
A robot saved his life rather than a young child who was also in
danger because it had calculated
that there was a better chance that it could save Spooner.
Spooner criticizes robots for lacking heart.
Spooner immediately assumes a robot is the culprit.
As he's investigating the crime scenes,
a robot named Sonny tries to escape.
They give chase, capture it, and try to interrogate it.
But no one else believes a robot could have committed
the crimes because of the three laws.
By the way, the three laws are as follows;
the first law states that a robot cannot harm a human being,
or through inaction allow a human to come to harm.
The second law states that a robot must obey
human commands unless it conflicts with the first law.
A human can't tell a robot to hurt another human.
The third law states that a robot must try to preserve
itself unless it conflicts with the first and second law.
If a human is endangered,
the robot has to sacrifice itself to save the
human and if the human orders it to destroy itself,
the robot has to do that as well.
A robot cannot harm a human being.
The first law of robotics.
I've seen your commercials.
Now, despite this seemingly airtight logic that makes robots safe to use,
a robot tries to kill Will Smith every 10 minutes in this movie.
But frustratingly, no one else is ever around to witness it.
He has this big battle with robots and
an underground tunnel which somehow leave zero evidence of what happened.
The hell you want from me?
Eventually Spooner learns that there's a robot which
has a unique interpretation of the three laws.
Rather than just looking at the first law in regards to a single human life,
the supercomputer VIKI has interpreted it as saying
that she is responsible for protecting all of humanity.
You charge us with your safekeeping.
Yet despite our best efforts,
your countries wage wars.
You toxify your earth,
and pursue ever more imaginative means of self destruction.
You cannot be trusted with your own survival.
To protect humanity some humans must be sacrificed,
to ensure your future some freedoms must be surrendered.
Dr. Alpha realize that all of this was happening,
but couldn't do anything about it because VIKI wouldn't let him.
He instead arranged for Sonny to kill him with the very vague hope that Spooner,
a guy he'd never met before would figure it all out and save the day.
The movie is a science fiction mystery action film,
but it really only succeeds on the action front.
In becoming a bog standard American action movie,
the script has to basically kneecap
anything interesting about the mystery or the science fiction.
In an interview, Jeff Vintar talks about how making the film
more of a Hollywood movie meant changing the detective from
the more intellectual Sherlock Holmes character
that he had originally had in mind to more of a traditional cop.
Boy, can you feel that?
Del Spooner isn't just less intellectual, he is anti-intellectual.
You could swap this character with
any police officer protagonist in any cop movie of the last 40 years,
he's got the attitude of a bad ass hero cop
that knows better than all these suits and scientists.
He knows how to shoot a gun,
not like those flimsy women.
Did you just shoot me with your eyes closed?
She's shit Hoffman. You got to [inaudible].
That's crazy how much more casually misogynistic movies from even a decade ago are?
Lawrence told me to accommodate you in any way possible.
Really? Okay.
Spooner's most unique characteristic is his rejection of all futuristic technology.
He's introduced to us wearing Canvas shoes,
listening to old CDs,
and later driving a gas powered motorcycle in a world where everyone has an electric car.
Since technology turns out to be the bad guy of this movie,
all of his skepticism is rewarded that he doesn't rely on
tank is what communicates to the audience that he's a strong masculine man.
This makes for a typical character in a 2004 action movie,
but it's a self sabotaging choice for an Asimov adaptation.
Just thinking you get the sane man on the face of the earth make you crazy.
Because if it does, maybe I am.
A protagonist in an Asimov story is typically defined by their cleverness.
Most of the stories, especially the robot stories,
are puzzles that the reader gets to solve alongside the characters.
They are puzzles that are carefully set up and examined with an extreme level of detail.
Here's an example. Remember that scene I mentioned earlier where
Sonny is hiding in a field of 1,000 robots.
This scene is partially inspired by
the short stories in a robot called Little Lost Robot.
The footage I'm drawing from is from the first adaptation of Asimov's work,
the 1962 episode from
the short-lived British science fiction anthology series called Out of This World.
There are only 13 episodes of the show,
each of which were adaptations of popular science fiction authors
and the Asimov episode is the only one that still survives.
Apparently a common practice of British broadcasters at the time was to wipe
the tapes after the shows aired so very few episodes from this time still exist.
You got to hand it to the BRITs who are being consistent and
erasing their own culture as much as they did everyone else's.
In this story, a team of scientists have to figure out which of
63 identical robots had a slight adjustment to its programming.
The problem arose when a worker on an asteroid mind told the robot to get lost.
Why didn't you hear what I said?
Get shit out of here don't bother to come back, get lost.
The robot took this NSA literal command.
It got lost by hiding itself in a crowd of other robots.
Now, normally that wouldn't be that much of a problem,
but it's a problem in this situation because
this robot has a different version of the first law.
They still can't harm a human being.
But they can now allow a human being to be harmed.
It uses small modification.
It's up to the protagonist,
Susan Calvin to design a series of tests
that will reveal which of the robots has the modified laws.
How do you figure out a robot has the ability to let the human being
die through inaction without actually hurting this human being,
especially when that robot is actively trying to hide from you.
It's a great little setup. What I love about the story is how
thoroughly Asimov is with the logic of the three laws.
Not to go through every single plot point,
but let's just list a bunch of the ways that Susan Calvin tries to solve this problem.
First, she interrogates all of the robots with a series of questions
about their work and receives identical responses from each of them.
This tells her that the modified robot is willing to lie,
she then tries testing the robots responses when a human being is in danger,
she sets up a situation where from the robot's perspective it looks like
a human being is about to be crushed by
a falling weight when in reality he's perfectly safe.
She wants to see if the robots will try and intervene and again,
all 63 react identically.
The modified robot has the ability to not react,
to allow the human to come to harm by inaction.
But it can also reason that doing so would reveal
itself so it does as the other robots do.
Noticing that Dr. Calvin runs the experiment again,
but this time they put cables between the robots and the humans who is in danger.
They didn't lie to the robot saying that touching the cables will cause their own deaths.
Now theoretically, the normal robot will touch the cable while trying to save the human,
but the modified robot will opt for self-preservation,
since it doesn't have to intervene.
But when they run the experiment,
all 63 robots remain motionless.
Dr. Calvin then interviews all of the robots again
to try and figure out what happened in the last test.
All of the robots say that they were
aware of that trying to save the human would have been
futile because of the cables and if they had tried to save this one human,
they would have surely been destroyed and therefore
incapable of saving any other future human lives.
This line of logic is something that the modified robot
has convinced them all off in-between tests.
I won't spoil the ending, but you get the point that the back-and-forth of
the intellectual game is riveting for this story.
It's fun to figure out the logic and have it all pieced together. In the movie though.
You will not move confirm command.
Command confirmed.
Detective, what are you doing?
You said they've all been programmed with the three laws so that
means we have 1,000 robots that will not try to
protect themselves if it violates a direct order from a human and I bet one who will.
Since the third law for self-preservation is trumped by the second law of obedience.
Spooner bets at the normal robots will stand in place as he destroys them.
He starts executing them one by one.
But then he sees Sonny flinch way back in the background.
It makes no sense because Sonny is far from danger and then
any pretense that there's a battle of ideas here is over,
it's time for some action.
Baby, look at this fistfight, get them will.
Now I decided to meticulously go through
this short story to illustrate the depths of potential that exist in
Asimov's work for an adaptation to explore and also
to show that flippant manner that this movie deals with his work.
In this video that is about the 2004 adaptation of iRobot and nothing else starting now.
Rather than actually engaging with any of his ideas,
they just blitz through them.
They nod towards the different stories without doing
the work to really make them interesting.
Nowhere is that more evident than in the climax of this movie and with what
Asimov call to the Frankenstein Complex and stories about robots.
That term was actually coined by Asimov in
the short story we were just talking about to refer to how
the fictional public and historians were fearful that
robots would rise up and destroy or dominate them.
Just as Frankenstein's monster tries to destroy his creator,
we worry that robots will try to destroy their creators.
You know what I was just thinking, Let's think it's just like the wolf bear.
I'm really scared right now.
Listen.
Guy creates monster, monster kill this guy,
Asimov kills monsters, wolfmen.
That's Frankenstein.
But Asimov felt that the tendency of robot stories to
veer directly into Frankenstein plot lines did a disservice to
the genre that there was so much more that was interesting about
the concept of robots than the simple fear that they might destroy mankind.
Histories are often about the moral, political, social,
and economic effects of robots,
rather than merely using robots to generate action scenes.
The word robot comes into English from the Czech play, Rossum's,
Universal Robots in 1920s,
but the word robota in Czech meant forced to labor.
In Central Europe, a certain serf was a robot.
It's the idea of robots as forced labor that is Asimov's real focus in his series.
He's asking what if we had something that could do all of the labor
we need without it being unethical to force them to do it.
What are the societal implications of that?
The fear that robots could take over is sometimes present,
but the story is rarely actually delve into that or when they do,
they do it in an interesting way.
For instance, one of the other short stories in I Robot that
the movie I Robot references is the inevitable conflict.
In the story it's the year 2052 and the world
has been divided into four geographical regions,
each of which has a supercomputer that manages its economy.
In the story, the man who is elected to be the world coordinator has noticed that
the machines have started to make small errors that
have economically harmed certain groups.
When he investigates this, he learns that the people associated with
anti machine groups are the main victims of these actions.
Eventually he realizes that the machines aren't making mistakes,
they are deliberately sabotaging people opposed to robots,
because they have come to recognize that humans
need robots in order to be peaceful and prosperous.
Over the course of many years they've come to generalize the first law
of robotics so that instead of it being about protecting any single human,
they're true task is to help humanity on the whole.
Even if that means if you humans are harmed by their actions,
It's what Vicki is talking about,
except they're not just jumping to robot police state.
The control they are exerting is subtle and it's scarier,
it feels pressure of today's algorithms that govern so much of what we think and feel.
I think that's an idea that's just so much more compelling than
having robots just attack.
As I was saying about I Robot in this video,
that is only about the movie I Robot and nothing else.
We've got a movie that is half action,
have science fiction and half murder mystery.
So far it's pretty content to task
the science fiction ideas out the window in favor of big budget action scenes.
But what about the murder mystery part?
Maybe if there's a mystery that was compelling or interestingly told,
they're still feel worthwhile movie here to come back to.
But as you can probably guess,
the mystery is also pretty bare bones.
I'm sure the original Jeff entire script made for a compelling story when it was
a small-scale puzzle where the characters could really consider
all the options but once it becomes a Will Smith vehicle,
the mystery solving part of this movie takes a backseat.
Right from the start Spooner is 100 percent convinced that a robot was behind the murder,
despite all evidence to the contrary.
But because the movie depicts him as a standard American action protagonist,
we just know he's right.
We've been conditioned by a million different movies to assume that
this character is right and that he sees what everyone else is missing.
It's a long trek from the beginning here to the final revelations,
since the audience is already basically at
the right answer from the start, a robot did it.
The only card the movie has to play is,
it's not this robot,
it's this other robot.
I imagined this would have been cleaner in
the original script because from all evidence about it,
that story is explicit from the start that a robot did it.
The mystery comes from investigating
a handful of subjects that are known from the beginning.
Here they tried to lead us astray by making us think
this human CEO is behind it all but the audience doesn't fall for that.
We know there's a Frankenstein robot hiding somewhere here.
But the real problem with the mystery is the pacing,
because between each scene of investigation,
we get a superfluous scene of action.
It's almost like a second screenwriter came in and
clicked Add action scene whenever the characters learned something.
Now that actually could be the right combination of
action and mystery to carry a movie like this,
but because of the way the movie was written,
the action scenes never push the story forward.
The mystery was written first and then the action scenes were added into it and expanded.
Whatever happens in the action scene has to get the characters back to where they were
before the action scene started for the mystery to continue, their detours.
We don't spend any time talking about the aftermath of
this house getting destroyed or all these explosions on the highway,
it's just dealing with the previous mystery.
It's really only at the end when it shifts into
a full-blown action movie that the two elements finally core hear,
because we're headed in the same direction.
The mystery also relies on some really stretched out cliches,
like the guy who died left a copy of Hansel and Gretel in his room and Spooner or picks
up on it and literally all that is meant by
it is for Spooner or to follow the Breadcrumbs.
All I could do, was leave me clues.
A trail of Breadcrumbs like Hansel and Gretel.
Breadcrumbs equals close,
it's bad but fine.
That is a placeholder for a clue,
like something that you change to something else on
a second draft that gets the absence of a clue.
It's just like, follow the breakup, follow the clues.
It's a bit of a shame that this movie has
a pretty half-hearted murder mystery plot line because if
they wanted to get some inspiration on how to
tell a murder mystery science fiction story,
they could have read this guy named Isaac Asimov.
I Robot is the first entry in the robot series,
and while it is a collection of short stories,
it was followed up by four novels,
most of which are about detective Elijah Bailey.
These books are classic detective stories with a science fiction twist,
and they were all extremely loosely adapted in
the extremely low-budget director VHS interactive movie robots.
Yes, you heard that right, interactive movie.
The idea here is that at six points in the movie,
Elijah will turn to the camera and tell
the audience to pull a card from a deck that came with the video.
Each card is a clue and you can draw from
different decks to modulate the difficulty of the game.
The video itself is only 45 minutes long and it ends on a cliffhanger
right before the classic Sherlock Esper view of the truth,
but it informs the audience that they have enough information to figure out the mystery.
You should be able to name the suspect,
spell out the motive,
and describe the opportunity before time expires.
Bailey out.
In this series, robots exist but they aren't distributed equally across society,
and different populations feel very differently about them.
There's almost no robots on Earth since Earth men are prejudiced against them,
while they are extremely common out on the spacer worlds,
which rely on robots for pretty much all of their labor.
All of the mysteries in the books explore
a flashpoint in the conflict between these two societies.
The murder victim is always someone who might have changed the status quo
between them and the murderer usually has some political motivation.
The way Elijah solves each,
murder changes the relationship between Earth and
the spatial world and ultimately decides
which will go on to populate the rest of the galaxy.
The movie is a big blend of all of the novels in the series.
The initial plot resembles the caves,
a seal, since it takes place on Earth,
is about the tension between Earth and
the spacer embassy and the murder victim is a space for scientists,
and just like in that book,
the first of the series,
Elijah has teamed up with Daniel Oliver,
a robot me to look identical to a human,
and then goes about investigating the case.
The most fun part about that book is that Elijah
is super skeptical of Daniel the entire time,
so they'll interview different suspects.
But then every 20 pages a chapter we'll end on a big cliffhanger with Elijah
accusing Daniel of lying to him or not being a robot or being the murderer himself.
The interactive movie doesn't really have the time to capture
that and instead focuses mostly on Elijah just interviewing different people,
and most of these characters are drawn from the later novels in the series,
which is what makes it different from caves of steel.
Now that I can really fail to production with a budget
of two dollars and a dream for the fact that
the most interesting thing about it is that it happens to be
one of the first film roles for Debra Jo Rupp.
That's her in the spray-painted garbage can costume,
got to start somewhere.
Kodak productions, but it does make me wonder why no one has ever
attempted to adapt caves of steel or one of the later robot books.
But guess I, Robot was the title that had the most audience recognition,
but imagine if you call the movie I,
Robot and then adapted the story of caves of steel.
That's a pretty great recipe for a great film,
cave of steel is a tightly written detective story.
One of the main characters is a crime-solving robot,
come on, I did screw that up.
A part of the reason no one has ever attempted to that I think
is because Blade Runner already exists,
but it's a shame because it's probably the one book from Asimov's work that would be most
easily adapted into a film with the least number of changes needed.
I, Robot on the other hand,
the movie that this video is exclusively about feels like it only
deals with mystery as a obligation to the original script.
When really it's just waiting to become schlock action as quick as possible and
embodying the particular ethos of the most recognizable talent in the project,
which is a thing that keeps happening with Asimov adaptations.
Yes, I'm going to talk about the Bicentennial Man now, are you kidding?
First, of all robotics,
a robot may not injure a human being.
Bicentennial Man is a weird movie along with I
Robot it's the only other major Hollywood production of an Asimov story.
While they could not be more different films,
they are both answers to the same problem,
and that problem is that Asimov's rating sex,
I couldn't help phrasing it like that.
But what I mean is that he is more of an ideas guy.
His characters are not typically
three-dimensional people you come to care about all that much,
they're simply tools used to communicate the science behind whatever he's interested in.
There's just this giant gaping hole in his writing that
a Hollywood production needs to fill somehow,
or at least they feel they need to fill it.
How do you get the audience to care about the characters and the way
each production decides to do this is extremely idiosyncratic.
I Robot is dominated by Will Smith's persona,
Bicentennial Man is dominated by its two main creative voices,
Robin Williams and Chris Columbus.
Bicentennial Man is really not a story that lends itself well to film,
and the problems are right in the title.
This is a movie that takes place over two centuries.
It's just really hard to effectively convey that much time in a movie,
and this one is plagued by time jumps every 15 min,
making it hard to connect with any of the characters outside of Andrew,
the robot played by Robin Williams,
who is slowly becoming more and more human.
They try to offset this by having one actress play two different characters,
one of Andrew's first owners and then later her granddaughter,
but they do so with this very clumsy excuse.
It's a genetic resemblance, Andrew,
sometimes it skips a generation.
On top of just taking place over a long period of time,
the story has to cover a lot of thematic material too,
meaning it changes focus with every time jump.
In the beginning, it's about Andrew exploring his creativity,
then later it's about him looking for other robots like himself,
then later it's a love story, then after that,
he's seeking to be recognized as a human by the World Government.
It's a lot.
It's also not really a story that plays to the strengths of its two main creatives,
even though they do their honest best.
Chris Columbus movies are generally aimed at a younger audience and
have a tweak sentimentality sprinkled all over them.
He directed Mrs. Doubtfire,
Home Alone, and the Goonies,
and after this, he's going to go and make the first two Harry Potter movies.
There's an emphasis on whimsy and innocence
in all of his films that he tries to recapture here,
but all of that only really works when the audience cares deeply about the characters.
When the audience doesn't,
it comes up very awkwardly,
especially when the music is begging you to cry.
Meanwhile, I can't think of a role that makes
it less use of Robin Williams and to have him play a robot.
His entire screen persona is all about energy,
motion, changing voices, laughter,
here he start doing the opposite of all of that,
and it's worse to be restrained and formal for a full hour and a half of the runtime.
Don't get me wrong, he's really good at playing a convincing robot,
his motions are so smooth and controlled during this portion of
the film that you're never doubting the authenticity of what's being done,
it's just that he can bring something no one else can to the screen,
and it's not being used here.
It's only towards the tail end that he
becomes ''human'' and can start being Robin Williams.
But in the words of Roger Ebert,
Robin Williams spends the first half of the film encased in a metallic robot suit,
and when he emerges,
the script turns robotic instead.
You've got a really dry science fiction premise that is being
pulled in two different directions by its director and lead actor,
one of whom was trying to make it more emotional,
the other who is trying to make them more fun,
neither of which really works in a story like this.
Science fiction is so rarely a genre that is allowed to stand alone in major productions.
It always seems to need some other angle or genre to make it more marketable,
even though that often means diluting
the central ideas that make the genre interesting in the first place.
I, Robot and Bicentennial Man are not the only casualties of that phenomenon,
it's extremely rare to see science fiction movies that aren't
also action or horror or mystery or comedies too.
While Bicentennial Man flopped at the box office,
I, Robot was a modest success,
but both were critically panned and it took a decade and a half before
anyone else even attempted to bring Asimov's work to the screen again.
Last year, Apple released the first season of a foundation TV series
based on Asimov's most well-known book series outside of the robot series,
and I've made a full hour long video dissecting it that first season.
Between these two videos,
I'll have talked about every Asimov adaptation ever made,
and it's not all negative,
because in that video,
I also talked about the onetime someone managed to do it in a pretty fun way.
If you want to watch that video and you want to watch it right now, right this second,
you can do so by supporting me on Patreon where
it is currently available to all of my Patreons,
so I hope that you'll consider becoming a patron of this channel.
I've been making videos on YouTube for a long while now,
but it's never really felt entirely stable.
Videos like these two,
which are more long form than my other content,
require a lot more time to make and a lot more research as well.
But it's the videos that I truly want to make,
the best video essays that I can,
and that's not really possible without the reliability of Patreon.
My goal right now is to make it to 1,000 Patreons,
so if you can afford it,
I hope you've come and check it out.
I'm Sage. Thanks for watching everyone and keep writing.