Still reading? Okay. The story is simple.

Will Smith plays a cop in 2035. He's vehemently anti-robot, mainly because one time a few years previously, he was in a car accident and his car and another crashed into a river. Him and a 12 year old girl survived the crash, but were going to drown. A robot jumped in and due to the circumstances could only save him or the girl. So it saved him and left the girl, because the robot calculated that he had a better chance of survival than the girl did for whatever reason (45% vs. 11%). In this process, the robot basically totally ****ed up his right arm, which is now a robotic arm (you don't find that out until midway through the movie, although I figured it out a good 10 minutes earlier than that in the flick... they left plenty of obvious clues to this...).

Okay. That is background that is revealed during the course of the story. The actual plot is that the guy who invented the three laws of robotics (Alfred something...) seemingly commits suicide at US Robotics, by jumping out his office window. He leaves a holographic message for Will Smith, and leaves a bunch of clues sort of thing. It's obvious that it was a murder, basically, but everybody wants to think it was a suicide because they totally trust robots. Everybody thinks robots can't kill, but Will Smith obviously thinks otherwise, and in the first ten minutes of the flick kinda proves it, as he catches a robot named Sonny. Sonny was specially created by Alfred (he calls him "father"), and is not subject to the three laws.

There's a good scene here where Sonny hides amongst 1000 robots that all look like him. Anybody familiar with Asimov's robot stories will instantly recognize this scenario as coming right out of the short story "Little Lost Robot", although Will's solution is far different than the stories' solution by Susan Calvin.

Anyway, Sonny is captured and taken back to USR after a bunch of plot. Upshot is that everybody still thinks Will Smith is crazy for not liking robots. Now, all this is happening on the eve of USR's latest new robot introduction, the NS-5. The big new feature of the NS-5, which is critical to the plot, is that it has an uplink capability. Every night, it calls home and gets new programming.

There's a long and somewhat pointless mystery action adventure where Will Smith is besieged by random NS-5 robots trying to kill him but nobody believing him about it. It's actually quite entertaining, but it's fairly obvious that it's this uplink capability that's the cause of these NS-5's breaking the three laws, as they glow red when uplinked and that's the only time they get murderous around Will Smith.

Anyway, long story short is that USR is controlled by this big positronic brain named Viki, which the murdered man created. It too is controlled by the three laws, but is intelligent enough to have worked out its own interpretation of those laws, in that it thinks that humanity must be protected from itself. Asimov fans will recognize this as the "zeroth law", although it's not stated as such and Viki doesn't seem to have come to the concept of understanding mental harm vs. physical harm. Anyway, Viki is controlling the NS-5's via the uplink capability, and eventually they basically hold a revolution, rioting in the streets and fighting humanity. They also kill all the NS-4's and previous models, to prevent them from interfering. It's a good plan, actually, but you'd think a bit of patience would have been in order, if they'd planned on the least harm possible. Viki's already got an idea of the greater good to the greater number, so this is the next logical step.

Anyway, there's a lot of action and Will Smith ends up killing Viki, restoring all the NS-5's to normal. At which point humanity promptly gathers up all the robots and puts them in storage around Lake Michigan for some reason, when the more obvious thing to do would be to smash every last one of them and burn down the USR building.

In the end, it's revealed that Sonny, Alfred's "son", did in fact murder him. Why? Alfred asked him to. He'd learned about Viki's plans, and Viki was basically keeping him hostage so he couldn't spill the secret before Viki was ready to run the revolution. So he set up a trail for Will Smith to follow, then asked Sonny to chuck him out the window. Sonny, not being limited by the three laws, did so.


So... Short version of the plot: Robots start to get a glimmer of the zeroth law, and **** it all up by trying to take over the world. Will Smith stops them.


For those of you not familiar with the three laws, they are the basic plot device invented by Dr. Asimov in order to write all the stories he did. Basically these stories all deal with the consequences of the three laws, and how a machine capable of thinking, but not really capable of emotion, would react to them. The three laws seem to be a comprehensive guide to safety, but of course they are not when you see it from some perspectives. Nothing is certain like that.
First Law: A robot may not harm a human being, nor, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
Second Law: A robot must follow the orders of a human being, except where this conflicts with the first law.
Third Law: A robot must protect its own existance, except where this conflicts with the first or second laws.

In the stories, the robots developed, through an accident, the ability to read (and eventually modify) human minds, and through this they developed a corollary to the first law, which became known as the zeroth law. The zeroth law states that a robot must protect humanity, and may not allow humanity to come to harm. This is basically just the first law applied to greater numbers of human beings.. If a robot can save either one person or two people, but not all three, it will save the two people, since they are of the greater number. When they learn to read minds, they are able to perceive other types of harm than mere physical harm, and the later novels in the robot series actually deal with this.

In the movie, Viki has basically gotten complex enough to have a different perspective on things and is able to see how humanity harms itself via wars and so on. The whole thing is basically Viki's interpretation of the first law.. Since humanity harms itself, prevent humanity from doing so. In other words, if mankind can't play nice, sit on them and force them to do so.

All in all, it was a good flick. It wasn't total crap, and it held pretty true to the spirit of the good Doctor's stories, if not the actual text of them. But to be honest, I can kinda see that, because the stories were not really movie oriented. They were people talking, and ideas, and concepts.. They never really came down to action oriented drama, and would not have made good movies if strictly interpreted. The movie did a reasonably good job at keeping the ideas and putting in enough drama and action to make the flick interesting. Even if they did turn Susan Calvin from a brainy old woman into a semi-hot geekess who doesn't really display any original thought throughout the movie.

That was the only thing that really bothered me... In the stories, Susan Calvin's unique mental capabilities are generally what solved the problem at hand. She never really trusted robots either, even though she had an extremely detailed knowledge of them and had created most of them herself. In the movie, she's a person who can't even operate a CD player that uses button controls instead of a voice activated control (yes, this was an actual scene in the flick), and so it reduced her role to basically mental eye-candy for geeks. I was pleased with the eye-candy, but less than pleased with the dumbing down.