I, Robot (DVD 2004)

Synopsis
A future time, 2035, when robots have become man's best friend. Employed by everyone to do the manual tasks that everyone hates to do, a servile underclass... Detective Del Spooner (played by Will Smith) is investigating the death of a scientist. He hates robots and thinks that the suspicious death involved a robot.

Review
Having been a big fan of the works of Isaac Asimov since childhood, and having been a fan of sci-fi films in general for many years it was with a fair deal of scepticism that I entered the cinema to see this film. However my fears were mostly groundless as this modern version, while slightly 'Hollywood-ised', a good rendition of the old-fashioned murder mystery.

The use of Asimov's title was a little misleading as there is very little connection between the story collection and the film, with a couple of character names from the books thrown in but little of the story, but the world created for the film does draw heavily on the descriptions and designs provided by Professor Asimov. The feeling that I got from the film was that it's set just before the Asimov books and that it was laying the groundwork for them rather than being part of the series itself, wherein robots are outlawed on Earth and only used on space stations and colonies.

The film itself works well, with the various events flowing well into each other and the escalation of events following a logical path without jumping around too much, by this I mean that you could understand how the events are unfolding without distracting from the story. The effects used work very well, never overtaking the actual acting or becoming too extreme, I particularly liked the 'car chase' scene involving Will Smith's character and a couple of dozen droids.

Overall I would recommend this film to anyone interested in science fiction as well as those interested in action films, although the murder mystery may annoy people who don't like to think too hard while watching their entertainment.