This is a single post from deeden.co.uk made during the period May 2002 to April 2009. During a previous grand redesign I decided to make a break with the past and consign the old entries to history. This entry is from August 2004 and lives here forevermore.

Nay, Robot

Let me start by saying that I’m a big Isaac Asimov fan. Michèle and I own roughly 40 of his books, including less-sf-based ones like Opus 200 and Asimov on Astronomy. Therefore it was with trepidation that I went to see I, Robot last night. Science-Fiction adaptations tend not to be much good, in my view. Most take a perfectly good story and mangle it. I, Robot isn’t much different sadly. It’s better than most, but really has little to do with the original short stories. There are the occasional nods to the stories with Susan Calvin and US Robotics used as names, and the short story “Little Lost Robot” alluded to, but these are cosmetic and appear to have been added to the script as “in-jokes”.

This doesn’t mean that the film is a bad film. It’s fairly enjoyable, although not as good as it could be. It loses it’s way in the last third and finishes pretty much as you’d expect. It wouldn’t have lost anything by removing pretty much all mention of the Asimov stories and standing on it’s own merits.

One day I hope to see a good adaptation of Asimov’s robot stories, with Susan Calvin as she should be. I won’t hold my breath though.