I, HATE, I, ROBOT,

The most prolific writer of science fiction is Isaac Asimov. Usually when I write a sentence like that, I add a few weasel words like one of the most prolific ones, mainly so that Pedins can't correct me in the comments, but in this I feel like it's literally true Wikipedia has five separate pages that simply list the Mob's bibliography in his own words over a period of 40 years. I published an average of 1,000 words per day for the second 20 years. I posted an average of 1,700. words a day, it's true that most of his work is nonfiction, but he still wrote enough fiction that there's actually quite a bit of disagreement among scholars about how to count it.

The number I have seen of novels and short stories is around 400. 400, so he wrote. He even wrote books about how he had written so much and obviously it's not just that he wrote a lot, but he wrote some of the most fundamental pieces of science fiction that we need a new Foundation, but you would think that with over 400 scientific works. fiction stories and with how popular science fiction is at the box office, there would be like a hundred and fifty or 25 or even 10 adaptations of Asimov's work but no, there are only eight, it would be nine, but Fantastic Voyage doesn't count, it's often It is confused with an Asimov book because the novel appeared before the film, but in reality the film's script was written first and then Asimov was hired to write the novelization.

He managed to get the book on shelves six months before the movie came out. because he's as fast as a damn writer no, no, this is different, this is different without a spoon and I have this fine ass, small and delicious, I mean, she is completely nice, I mean, ass, tall spanking spoon, what? what does that mean? So today I want to talk about that. the quote-unquote 2004 adaptation of iRobot starring Will Smith and nothing more this video is only going to be about the quote-unquote 2004 adaptation of iRobot starring Will Smith Wait why do I keep putting the word adaptation and quote the reason why I wanted to talk about this movie is not just insisting on a more or less forgotten Blockbuster from a bygone era because it's fun, but because last year Apple launched a great adaptation of the Asmov Foundation's most important series and before talking about that I wanted the context of someone else.

Sometimes people have adapted the work from it, which is what we're doing here, but we're only going to talk about iRobot. I wouldn't, I wouldn't read or watch every Asimov adaptation out there, no matter how dark the record of 60 years of flops or Underfunded Productions is as a prelude to a different video that would be crazy, there's a whole field of film criticism focused on categorizing the different types of adaptations, but unfortunately all of that scholarship is compromised because they would all need to put the 2004 iRobot adaptation in their own special category because the making of this film is really strange, so over the years 90s screenwriter Jeff Vinter wrote a completely unrelated script called Hardwired, the movie was an Agatha Christie-style murder mystery where the suspects were all

robot

s. or other types of artificial intelligence, enough champagne to fill the Nile, there was a

robot

named Sunny, a supercomputer named Vicky and the hologram of Dr.

Lanning, the man who had been murdered, it was originally written more as a play that was It took place entirely on one floor of a building and with FBI detective agent Dell Spooner tasked with discovering which of the robots he killed upon landing and how it is like a science fiction Knives Out. The script was first acquired by Disney, where it went into a hellish development period and was rewritten several times. times with an iteration taking place on a space station and an entire team of Space Marines taking on the role of the detective from the original script.

When that version of the film flopped, Fox became interested in the idea and Vinter expanded the film's scope. from the original play as a murder mystery to a big-budget studio film that expands the scope of the story to an entire metropolis and brings back the central detective character now, shortly after that fox acquired the rights to the collection of short stories by Isaac asimov, iRobot and us. They are telling themselves how can we make money with this thing we just bought. I know why we don't have poor Jeff Vinter rewrite his script again so it can pass as an Asimov adaptation.

Poor Jeff Winter who had rewritten it. this like 11 times already, how about we make some Asimov references in the new script? Changes include changing the name of the main female character. They changed the name of the company that made the robots to us robotics. They inserted the three laws of robotics into the plot and the inventor's own words. That's it, so yeah, they basically just put some Asimov paint on an old script I've been kicking around for a decade. That's why in the credits of this movie it doesn't say based on iRobot, but rather suggested by Isaac Asimov's book. suggested by Isaac, thanks for the suggestion, so they started making the movie and there is a big debate about how big of an action movie it should be, which was resolved once Will Smith joined the project, that's funny, It's a good robotic call.

There's a scene where Sunny the robot is hiding in a field of other robots while the main characters look for him, and as Winter said when I wrote that in the script, I think Sunny the robot was hiding among 50 robots. This scene was always a point. There's no discussion: can we afford this scene if this scene were in the movie? I think in the finished script there are actually a thousand robots in that scene, so after fighting and fighting for that scene for several years, Will Smith appeared in the robot. The count increased from 50 to a thousand, that was the Will Smith effect with Will Smith on board.

Fox hired a second screenwriter, Akiva Goldsman, to align the film even more with a Will Smith event film, which basically meant increasing the amount of action and raising the stakes. from Simply Solving a Mystery to Saving the World to Making Spooner Sound More Like Will Smith, so the movie took quite a long road to its final form and you can really see all the different elements competing with each other. Competing Vinter's original murder mystery script. with Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics competing with Will Smith's Persona and Goldsmen's action rewrite, everyone is breaking up throughout the entire runtime, so wait, wait a second, what is this movie about?

This is a two front war and it is a war that We are going to win on both fronts even though it was originally written in the 90's, iRobot's Final Cut is an extremely post 911 movie, there are themes from Patriot Act, the main character is extremely paranoid and also Shia LaBeouf is here, excuse me, excuse me. Oh man, where have you been? Dr. Alfred Lanning is the inventor of robots and the three laws of robotics that make them safe to use. One day he apparently commits suicide and Detective Del Spooner is called to investigate. He thinks 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 instead of a small child who is also in danger because he had calculated that there was a better chance of saving him.

Spooner Spooner criticizes robots for lacking heart, so Spooner immediately assumes that a robot is the culprit and while investigating the crime scenes, a robot named Sunny tries to escape, Chase is given to capture it and attempt to interrogate it, but no one else believes what a robot could have committed. crimes are due to the Three Laws. Oh, and by the way, the three laws are as follows: The first law states that a robot cannot harm a human being or, through an action, allow a human to come to harm. The second law states that a robot must obey. a human commands unless it conflicts with the first law, so a human cannot tell a robot to hurt another human and the third law states that a robot must try to preserve itself unless it comes into conflict. conflict with the first and second law, so if a human is in danger the robot has to sacrifice itself to save the human and if a human orders it to destroy itself the robot also has to do that a robot cannot harm a being human the first law of robotics yes I know, 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, there is never anyone else around to witness it.

He has a big battle with robots and an underground tunnel that he somehow gets out of. Zero evidence of what happened, well hell, was that Spooner eventually learns that there is a robot that has a unique interpretation of the Three Laws instead of simply looking at the first law regarding a single human life, the supercomputer Vicky has interpreted it as saying that. She is responsible for protecting all of humanity, you entrust us with her custody, but despite our best efforts, your country wars, you poison your Earth and pursue ever more imaginative means of self-destruction, you cannot be trusted with your own survival to protect humanity.

Humans must be sacrificed to guarantee their future. Some freedoms must be given up. Dr. Alf realized that all this was happening but he couldn't do anything about it because Vicky wouldn't let him, so he arranged for Sunny to kill him with the very vague I hope Spooner, a guy he had never met before, was Realize it all and Save the Day, the movie, is a sci-fi action mystery movie, but it really only manages on the action front to become a standard American action movie. The script has to Basically clarify anything interesting about the mystery or science fiction in an interview.

Jeff Inter talks about how making the film more like a Hollywood movie meant changing the detective from the more intellectual type of Sherlock Holmes character he originally had in mind to more of a cop and a traditional guy, can you feel that Del Spooner didn't Not only is it less intellectual, but it is anti-intellectual? You could swap this character with any leading police officer in any cop movie from the last 40 years, he has the attitude of a tough hero cop who knows more than all these suits and scientists, he knows how to shoot a gun, not like those ones do. flimsy women with me with my eyes closed, oh handsome man, it's actually a little crazy how many more casually misogynistic movies from even a decade ago. are really fine, Spooner's most unique characteristic is his rejection of all the futuristic technology that has been presented to us by wearing Converse shoes, listening to old CDs and then driving a gasoline motorcycle in a world where everyone has an electric car and since the technology turns out to be the bad guy in this movie, all his skepticism is rewarded.

The fact that he is not dependent on the tank is what communicates to the audience that he is a strong masculine man. This makes him a typical 2004 action movie character, but he is a self-sabotaging choice. for an adaptive asthma just thinking that you are the last sane man on the face of the earth drives you crazy because if so maybe I am a protagonist in an asthma story that is typically defined by its cunning and most the stories, especially the robot. The stories are puzzles that the reader must solve together with the characters. There are puzzles that are carefully set up.

They have been examined in an extreme level of detail. Here is an example. Remember the scene I mentioned earlier where Sunny is hiding in a field of a thousand robots. The scene is partially inspired by the iRobot short stories called Little Lost Robot. The footage I'm pulling from is from the first adaptation of Asimov's work. The 1962 episode of the short-lived British science fiction anthology series called Out of This World, There Is Only. 13 episodes of the show. Each of which were adaptations of popular science fiction authors and the asmov episode is the only one that still survives.

Apparently a common practice for British broadcasters at the time was to erase the tapes after the shows aired so few episodes of This Time Still Exists, you have to give the Brits credit for being consistent and erasing their own culture as much as they did. with everyone else's, so in this story a team of scientists has to discover which of 63 identical robots had a slight adjustment in their programming. Then the problem arose when a worker in an asteroid mine told a robot to get lost, how did you hear what I said? Get out of here, don't bother coming back, get lost, so the robot took this as a literal order, it got lost.

Hiding among a crowd of other robots now normally that wouldn't be a big problem, but it is a problem in this one.situation because this robot has a different version of the first law, they still cannot harm a human being, but now they can allow a human being to come to harm, it is a small modification, so it is up to the protagonist Susan Calvin to design a series of tests that will reveal which of the robots has the laws modified, how do you discover that a robot has the ability to let a human die through inaction without actually hurting a human, especially when that robot is actively trying to hide from you, it's a great little setup and what I love about the story is how thorough Asimov is with the logic of the Three Laws to not let's go over every plot point, but let's list some of the ways Susan Calvin tries to solve this problem.

She first interrogates all the robots with a series of questions about her work and receives identical answers from each of them. This tells it that the modified robot is willing to lie, then attempts to test the robot's responses when a human is in danger, sets up a situation where, from the robot's perspective, it appears that a human is about to be crushed by a falling weight, when in reality she is perfectly safe she wants to see if the robots will try to intervene and again all 63 react identically, the modified robot has the ability to not react, allow the human to be harmed in action, but can also reason that doing so would be revealed, so he does it like the other robots do and realizes that Dr.

Calvin performs the experiment again, but this time they place cables between the robots and the humans who are in danger, then they lie to the robot telling him that touching the wires will cause his own death. Now, in theory, the normal robot will touch the cable while trying to save the human, but the modified robot will opt for self-preservation since it does not have to intervene, but when they perform the experiment, the 63 robots remain motionless. Dr. Calvin then interviews all the robots again to try to find out what happened in the last test and all the robots say that they were aware that trying to save the human would have been useless because of the wires and if they had tried to save this human they would surely have been destroyed and therefore unable to save other human lives in the future.

This line of logic is something that the modified robot has convinced them all of. The proofs once intimidated me, but I think you get the point that the back and forth of the intellectual game is fascinating for this type of story. It's fun to figure out the logic and have it all come together in the movie, although you won't move. Confirm. Commando Commando to your detective What are you doing? She said they've all been programmed with the three laws, which means we have 1,000 robots that won't try to protect themselves if they violate a direct order from a handsome human. one that will, as the third law of self-preservation is superseded by the second law of obedience.

Spooner bets that the normal robots will stay in place while he destroys them, so he starts executing them one by one, but then sees Sonny Flinch back there. the backstory makes no sense because Sunny is far from danger and then any pretense that there is a battle of ideas here is over, it's time for some action, baby, watch this fistfight, catch them, foreign way will go over this short story to illustrate the depths. of the potential that exists in asmo's work for an adaptation to explore and also to show the kind of frivolous way in which this film treats his work in this video which is about the 2004 adaptation of iRobot and nothing else from now on and instead of really engaging with any of his ideas he just ran through them, nodding towards different stories without doing the kind of work that would make them really interesting and nowhere is that more evident than in the climax of this film and with what Asimov called the Frankenstein complex in stories. about robots, that term was actually coined by asmov in the short story we were talking about to refer to how the fictional audience and their stories feared that robots would rise up and destroy or dominate them.

Judge Frankenstein's monster tries to destroy his creator. He worries us. that robots will try to destroy their creators just thinking this thing is like the werewolf oh I'm really scared right now oh listen the guy creates a monster kills the guy everyone kills the monster Wolf Man that's Frankenstein but Asthma felt that the tendency of robot stories to veer directly into Frankenstein plot lines did a disservice to the genre because there was much more interesting to the concept of robots than the simple fear that they could destroy humanity. His stories often deal with the moral, political, social and economic effects of robots rather than simply using robots to generate action scenes.

The word robot comes into English from the Czech play Universal Robots by Rossum in 1920, but the word Robata In Czech it meant forced labor in Central Europe a certain type of surfer was a robot and it's the idea of ​​robots as forced labor, that's Asimov's real focus in his series. He asks what if we had something that could do all the work we need without it being unethical to force them to do it. What are the social implications of that? The fear that robots could take over is sometimes present, but the stories rarely delve into that or when they do they do so in an interesting way, for example one of the other iRobot short stories he does reference the movie I Robot is the avoidable conflict in this story, it is the year 2052 and the world has been divided into four geographic regions, each of which has a supercomputer that manages its economy.

In the story, the man chosen to be the world coordinator has noticed that the machines have begun to make small mistakes that have hurt certain groups economically when He investigates this and discovers that people associated with anti-machine groups are the main victims. of these actions. He eventually realizes that the machines are not making mistakes, but are deliberately sabotaging the people who oppose robots because they have come to recognize that humans need robots. To be peaceful and prosperous, over many years they have come to generalize the first law of Robotics, so that instead of protecting a single human being, their true task is to help Humanity as a whole, even if that means some humans are harmed by their actions, that's what Vicky is talking about, except you know they're not just jumping into a robot police state, the kind of control they're exerting is subtle and it's scarier, it feels prescient in a way. the current algorithms that govern much of what we think and feel and I think it's a much more compelling idea than having robots that just attack like I was saying about iRobot in this video which is just about the movie iRobot and nothing more, we have a movie that It's half action, half sci-fi and half murder mystery and so far it's pretty content with throwing sci-fi ideas out the window in favor of big-budget action scenes, but what about the murder mystery part, Maybe if there is a mystery that was compelling or told in an interesting way? there would still be a movie worth re-watching, but as you can probably guess, the mystery is also pretty basic.

I'm sure Jeff's original Interscript created a compelling story when it was a small-scale puzzler where the characters could really consider all the options, but once it becomes a Will Smith vehicle, the mystery-solving part of This film takes a backseat from the beginning. Spooner is 100% convinced that a robot was behind the murder despite all evidence to the contrary, but because the movie shows Him as a standard American action protagonist, we simply know that he is right. A million different movies have conditioned us to assume that this character is right and that he sees what everyone else is missing, so it's a long journey from the beginning. here to the final Revelations, since the audience basically has the right answer from the beginning, a robot did it as if the only card the movie has to play is not this robot, it's this other robot.

I imagine this would have been cleaner in the original. script because, according to all the evidence about it, that story is explicit from the beginning, that it was done by a robot and the mystery comes from investigating a handful of topics that are known from the beginning. Here they try to mislead us by making us think that this human CEO is behind everything, but the audience is not fooled, we know that there is a Frankenstein robot hidden somewhere here, but the real problem with the mystery is the pacing because between each scene of Investigation we have a superfluous action scene, it's almost like a second scriptwriter.

I went in and clicked Add Action Scene every time the characters learn something that might actually be the right mix of action and mystery to carry a movie like this, but because of the way the movie was written, the Action scenes never drove the story, the mystery was written first and then the action scenes were added and expanded, so w

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ver happens in the action scene has to take the characters back to where they were before. The action scene will begin so that the mystery continues with its detours. We don't waste time talking. about the consequences of the destruction of this house or all these explosions on the road, along with the previous mystery, it is only at the end, when it becomes a full-fledged action movie, that the two elements finally come together because we are heading In the same vein, the mystery also relies on some really stretched clichés, like the guy who died left a copy of Hansel and Gretel in his room and Spooner notices and literally all it means is that Spooner keeps going. the breadcrumbs.

What he could do was leave me clues, a trail of breadcrumbs like the clues in Hansel and Gretel, it's strange but it's okay, that's like a placeholder for a clue, like something that changes to something else in a second. eraser, as if it were the absence of a clue. it's like, oh, keep going, you know, follow the breadcrumb, follow the clues and it's a little bit of a shame that this movie has a pretty half-hearted murder mystery plot because if you guys wanted to get some inspiration on how to tell a murder mystery story Murder mystery science fiction. they might have read this guy named Isaac Asimov, so iRobot is the first entry in the robot series and, while it is a collection of short stories, it was followed by four novels, most of which are about detective Elijah Bailey , these books are classic detective stories. with a sci-fi twist and were all extremely loosely adapted into the extremely low-budget direct-to-VHS interactive movie Robots Yes, you heard that interactive movie right The idea here is that at six points in the movie Elijah will turn to the camera and will tell the audience to draw a card from a deck that comes 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 ends on a cliffhanger right before the classic. reveals the truth Sherlock-style, but informs the audience that they have enough information to uncover the mystery. You should be able to name the suspect, explain the motive, and describe the opportunity. Before time expires, Bailey exits in this series. Robots exist, but they are not evenly distributed throughout society and different populations feel very differently about them, which is why there are almost no robots on Earth, since Earthlings are prejudiced against them, while they are extremely common on Earth. the space worlds that depend on robots for almost all their work. of the Mysteries in the books explore a flashpoint in the conflict between these two societies, the murder victim is always someone who could 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 space worlds and ultimately decides which one will populate the rest of the Galaxy.

The movie is kind of a great mash-up of all the novels in the series. The initial plot resembles Seal Caves, as it takes place on Earth. The tension between Earth and the space Embassy and the murder victim is a space for scientists and like in that book, the first of the series Elijah teams up with Daniel Oliva, a robot made to look identical to a human, and then he sets about investigating the In this case, the funniest part of that book is that Elijah is super skeptical of Daniel the whole time, so they'll interview different suspects, but then every 20 pages a chapter will end on a huge cliffhanger with Elijah accusing Daniel of lying to him or not lying to him. a robot or being the killer himself, the interactive film doesn't really have time to capture that and instead focuses onmainly in Elijah just interviewing different people and most of these characters come from the later novels in the series, which is what makes it different. of the caves of steel and it's not like I can really fall into production with a two dollar budget and a dream because the most interesting thing is that it turns out to be one of Deborah Joe Rupp's first film roles, that's her in the guise of the spray painted trash can I have to start somewhere with Kodak Productions, but it makes me wonder why no one has tried to adapt Caves of Steel or one of the later robot books, but yeah, iRobot was the title that got the most recognition from the audience, but imagine.

If you call a movie iRobot and then adapt the Caves of Steel story, that's a great recipe for a great movie. Cave Steel is a well-written detective story where one of the main characters is a robot who solves crimes like, come on, he had to. Ruin that now, part of the reason no one has ever tried it, I think is because Blade Runner already exists, but it's a shame because it's probably the only book of Asimov's work that would be more easily adapted into a film with the smaller number. of necessary changes iRobot, on the other hand, the movie this video is exclusively about seems like it's just treating the mystery as some kind of obligation to the original script when in reality it's just waiting to devolve into silly action as quickly as possible and embody the particular spirit. of the most recognizable talent on the project, which is something that continues to happen with Asimov adaptations.

Yes, I'm going to talk about the bicentennial and now, are you kidding me? The first law of robotics of all time. Bicentennial Man is a strange movie along with iRobot. the only other major Hollywood production of an Asimov story, and while they couldn't be more different kinds of films, they're both answers to the same problem, and that problem is that, because Mom's writing sucks, I couldn't help but phrase it that way. but what I mean is that he's more of an ideas guy, his characters aren't typically three dimensional people that you care about as much, they're simply tools used to communicate the science behind w

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ver he's interested in, so there's just this giant .

A huge gap in his writing that a Hollywood production needs to fill somehow or at least they feel like they need to fill. How do you get the audience to care about the characters and is the way each production decides to do so extremely idiosyncratic?iRobot is dominated by Will Smith's Persona Bicentennial Man is dominated by its two main creative voices Robin Williams and Chris Columbus Bicentennial Man really It's not a story that lends itself well to a movie, and the problems are in the title. This is a movie that takes place. Spanning two centuries, it's really difficult to effectively convey that much time in one film and the film is plagued with time jumps every 15 minutes, making it difficult to connect with any of the characters outside of Andrew, the robot played by Robin.

Williams, who is slowly becoming. More and more attempts are made to compensate for this by having an actress play two different characters, one of Andrew's first owners and then his granddaughter, but they do it with this very clumsy excuse. It's a genetic thing, sometimes it skips a generation as well as just happening. Over a long period of time, the story also has to cover a lot of thematic material, which means it changes focus every time. Skip to the beginning it's about Andrew exploring his creativity and then it's about him looking for other robots like him and then.

It's a love story and then he seeks to be recognized as human by the world government. It's a lot, nor is it really a story that plays to the strengths of its two main creatives, even though they do their best. Chris Columbus' films are generally honest. Aimed at a younger audience and with a sort of Twee sentimentality sprinkled over them, he directed Mrs Doubtfire Home Alone and The Goonies and after this he'll go and make the first two Harry Potter films; There's an emphasis on fantasy 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 care it's very uncomfortable, especially when the music makes you feel uncomfortable.

Pray that you cry in the meantime. I can't think of a role that makes less use of Robin Williams than having him play a robot. His entire screen for Sona has to do with energy, movement, changing voices, laughter, here he was left doing the opposite of all that and it looks forced to be restrained and formal for a full hour. and a half run time and don't get me wrong, he is very good at playing a convincing robot, his movements are so smooth and controlled during this part of the film that you never doubt the authenticity of what is being done, it's just that. he can bring something that no one else can to the screen and it's not used here, it's only towards the end that he becomes, quote, human and can start to be Robin Williams, but in the words of Roger Ebert, Robin Williams flunks the first half the movie encased in a metallic robot suit and when he emerges, the script goes robotic, so you have a really dry sci-fi premise that's being pulled in two different directions by its director and the lead actor, one of which I was trying to do more of. emotional, the other trying to make it funnier, neither of which really work in a story like this, science fiction is rarely a genre that is allowed to stand alone in mainstream productions, it always seems to need some other angle or genre to make it. more marketable, although that often means diluting the core ideas that make the genre interesting in the first place. iRobot and Bicentennial Man are not the only victims of this phenomenon.

It is extremely rare to see science fiction films that are not also action, horror or mystery. or comedies too, while Bicentennial Man flopped at the box office iRobot was a modest success, but both were panned by critics and it was a decade and a half before anyone tried to bring Azimov's work to the screen again last year Apple released the first season of a basic TV series based on Asimov's best-known book series outside of the robot series and I made a full hour long video analyzing that first season and between these two videos I will have talked about every Asimov adaptation ever made . and it's not all negative because in that video I also talk about the only time someone managed to do it in a pretty fun way, so if you want to watch that video and you want to watch it right now, this second, you can do it. supporting me on patreon, where it is currently available to all my patrons, so I hope you will consider becoming a patron of this channel.

I've been making videos on YouTube for a long time, but I never felt completely stable. Like these two, which are longer than my other content, they take a lot more time to make and a lot more research as well, but they're the kind of videos that I really want to make, the best video essays I can and that's not really possible. Without the reliability of Patreon, my goal right now is to reach 1000 patrons, so if you can afford it, I hope you come and check it out. I'm Sage, thanks for watching everyone and keep writing lol.