review

I, Robot and Minority Report

The really logical comparison would be between I, Robot and AI, both Movies About Robots. Or between Minority Report and Paycheck, both blockbuster reworkings of Philip K. Dick. But I don't know AI, and a boozy late-night AVI screening means I don't remember Paycheck beyond its screwing up Dick's 24-carat premise. But the ballpark still stands: both set at a worrisome technological turnpoint in the near future, both starring big names, both pull from literary sources.

It's the direction of this pull which makes the difference. While Minority Report aims to make a science fiction movie with action, I, Robot aims to make an action movie with science fiction. Even for one who hasn't read Asimov's books and doesn't subscribe to his veneration, 'suggested by...' set ringing alarm bells which didn't subside until the lights came up. Fidelity to source would clearly give way to fidelity to commercially-proven formula.

So, if you have no objection to formulaic movies, I, Robot is perfectly passable. Its visual pyrotechnics are top-flight, piling on claustrophobia, fear of crushing and vertigo by turns. The sacrifices in plausibility they demand - why is the inventor's house to be demolished? why are there no guard-rails on that mile-high platform? - are just about forgotten.

But I, Robot's future world has problems which can't be ignored. Like too many sci-fi projections, it's incohesive in the wrong way. While they're right to envision a future as muddled between new and old technology as the present, their new is gleaming and silvery and juxtaposed with an old which is just our present. Minority Report often shares the problem: both films' high-speed auto-roadways are suspended surreally over familiar cities (and are impressive excuses for clambering excitingly on top of cars.)

But only I, Robot tries to make this incohesion its central drama. It draws its line between old and new for the sake of easily-polarised arguments for the hard of attention. Will Smith's reactionary persona is picked straight off the shelf; literally so, as he's defined by a slew of product placement. (The thirty seconds about his '2004 vintage' Converses would slot nicely into any ad break, and his distinctly familiar Audi already has.) He needn't, in fact, play more than a few tics more than everyone's favourite Will Smith, complete with wisecracks to constitute the film's only comic relief. Arguments with his equally flat sexpot counterpart run along predictable lines. 'But I don't trust them!' 'But they're perfectly safe!' 'But!' 'Etc!' Having little to say about its theme's ethics, it says it loudly and often.

Mispunctuate its title and you point up its signal problem: they are iRobots, all pearly plastic and translucent components. Presently, we can cope with them on desks: on two legs, provided with a cool, symmetrical, surreally expressive face, they're creepy. Of course I, Robot wants them to be: one if its Big Points is the unnaturalness of making slaves in our own image, and our desensitization to that unnaturalness. (So, we're shown plenty of hugging children and eased pensioners.) But it's the filmmakers who insist the robots' look serve those purposes by occupying that uncomfortable middle ground between man and machine. Any actual robot designer would realise that faces suggest humanity, and that no-one with a soul wants anything human for a slave. So much for the premise.

Minority Report, despite the apparently greater implausibilities of its premise, is the better-realised film. It's rich enough in ideas to throw them away in the confidence that we'll pick them up. Of course, we think, the fantasy-designer (itself a developed but unobtrusive stroke of inspiration) falls to his knees and crosses himself before the 'precog' as before a deity. Of course the 'temple' technician has a queasily romantic affection for them, confiding in them as they confide in him. Its comic flourishes are few, bleak, funny and useful: grippy sentient plants which put him at their owner's mercy during explication, or Cruise dropping his (later crucial) original eyeballs. Spielberg's grasp of both overall shape and fine detail is solid.

Take an exemplary scene. The Precrime unit, searching for Cruise, dispatches a brace of robotic retinal scanners into a towerblock. They resemble spiders: eerily, yet (note) not implausibly, their form enabling them to scuttle unhindered. We then watch an extended overhead sweep across several flats. Their inhabitants, busy in arguing, having sex or going to the toilet, don't recoil at the intrusion of the bots: they merely pause, allow the spiders to clamber to their faces and fire a scanning beam into their eyes, and resume. The increasing invasiveness of security technology, the spiders in the walls, is fused our increasing, instinctively worrying acceptance of it. Or pursue a chain of visual motifs. At the start, precognitive visions swim to the surface from the fluid depths of the psyche. The precogs themselves are immersed in amniotic water. Cruise's son disappears as Cruise holds his breath in a public pool; he must do the same in a freezing bath (containing those replacement eyeballs) to escape the aforementioned spiders. The climax sees a vital character drowned in a lake. Even the film's product placement is turned to use: advertising has become unavoidable, every surface a billboard, which in turn demonstrates a flaw in precognition as they waste time identifying the face of a fashion campaign. These are depths I, Robot simply doesn't bother with.

Yet Minority Report ends on an abruptly fairytale note. The programme is shut down, but the rise in crime that would entail goes unmentioned. The precogs retire to perfect seclusion. A voiceover informs us that they lived happily ever after. Its world's complexity has suddenly failed. We might suspect that Spielberg's nerve has to: that he'll stretch Hollywood formulas a long way, but won't break them. But it's still heartening to find possibilities for humanity inside this commercial machine.