I've been disappointed by nearly every film adaptation of Asimov novels. I, Robot and Bicentennial Man had big budgets, but seemed like they were written by people who simply didn't like Asimov at all and wanted nothing to do with the kinds of stories he told.
So, I am extremely pessimistic, even though I would like to be excited about this news. The team behind it also leaves me feeling ambivalent. On one hand, it's a guy who has just made superhero movies (just the sort that would I would expect to destroy a thinky story like Foundation) but also the guy who made The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which was actually pretty good (though rarely as smart/deep as the cast deserved; Lena Heady, in particular).
I love that scifi TV and film is seeing such a resurgence, but I sure do hate to see my favorites get butchered.
I felt that the Will Smith movie was pretty good and true to Asimov's stories. There is a common theme in Asimov's stories that he exploits loopholes in the interpretation of the 3 laws. I robot the movie did that pretty faithfully. It also hinted towards the advent of a robot like R Daneel, who would see beyond the 3 laws.
The movie didn't adapt any particular book or short story, but that doesn't mean it didn't try to be faithful to Asimov.
The I, Robot script started out as something entirely unrelated, and some minor tweaks were made to "Asmovify" it after they got the rights for the I, Robot name.
In all of Asimov's robot short stories (including I, Robot), there was only one instance of a robot that violated the Three Laws. That's far from a common theme...
Yes, there was the 0th Law in Robots and Empire (that later appears in the Foundation prequels), but that is a far more nuanced concept than the ideas in the I, Robot movie, where robots ran around killing and injuring humans indiscriminately.
> In all of Asimov's robot short stories (including I, Robot), there was only one instance of a robot that violated the Three Laws.
However, in every single story, the robot(s) found a loophole in the laws that resulted in going against the spirit of the laws. It's true that the movie showed a very crude version vs the very nuanced take in the stories. But I attribute that to the medium of film making itself.
The movie dumbed down the books complex issues we'll face with Robots to "They're going to take over the world". But at least Isaac Asimov was always promoting Dos Equis and Converse shoes in his books so they got that right...
I've always maintained that the Will Smith movie captured the spririt of the Asimov Robot stories, in an accessible way. I never understood the hate it gets.
A fundamental principle of Asimov's writing about robots was that the Three Laws were inviolate. Yes, the Zeroth law was introduced, but there was literally only one robot capable of handling that transition.
In the movie you have thousands of robots running around killing and injuring countless humans. That's something I'm quite sure would never happen in Asimov's writing.
Asimov was unique in that he was the first to start with the premise that humans _could_ safely develop advanced robots, rather than using the "robot uprising" trope that everyone before him used (all the way back to the first use of the term "robot" in Karel Čapek's R.U.R.). So, despite that groundbreaking approach, what do we get in the first major motion picture about his robot series? A robot uprising...
Which is a bit of a plot cop-out in itself, in my opinion... But even if we consider that "one" robot, it doesn't change the fact that the central plot of the movie was a robot uprising, and involved a lot of humans killed by robots (something R. Daneel (the only robot to sustainably invoke the 0th law) never did).
I personally don't have a problem with a robot uprising, tropes are tropes for a reason. They're a shorthand that audiences are familiar with, metaphors that can have deeper meaning, which it does in this case. Ie the embodyment of the menace the zeroeth law represents, in the otherwise peaceful, subservient robots that live among us.
Sure, tropes make for fine movies. I think I, Robot was a fine movie, if you aren't trying to compare it to Asimov's work.
I don't know how you can say it both captures the spirit of Asimov's writings while also having a robot uprising as the central plot device. Asimov explicitly rejected the "Frankenstein complex" that was present in robot related sci-fi up to that point.
Right. I understood that sustainably was intentional, but I kind of feel like if you don't already know the context it was subtle enough that you might not get that an Asimov robot was at least once involved in (very likely) a mass death event.
And I think there are at least some implications that Daneel was at least peripherally involved in much larger events than the person-by-person manipulation we see in the prequel books directly (ie. famines), but he saved himself by keeping himself more remote from them than literally pulling the switch.
Had the master robot in I, Robot actually suffered for its implementation of the zeroth law I think that would have been at least a little more in keeping with Asimov's vision, so I think it's a bit important to recognize that robots CAN do great harm with the zeroth law, there are just consequences.
(and we can probably ignore the fact that the three-Bs extended books resurrected Dors and iirc somewhat even Giskard)
Thanks for articulating this. I had a lot problems with this person exclusion of the 'frankenstien' complex as an inseparable part of Asimovs robot stories. I couldn't put my finger on it, as you did.
Well, to be clear, I agree with them that the I, Robot film is not in the spirit of the asimov stories precisely because it invokes the zeroth law without any of the counterbalances Asimov built into his stories from the very beginning.
Daneel and Giskard's interventions are scary, but in the end they do appear to be truly in keeping with a species-wide application of the first law, in that their attempts to 'preserve humanity' were not just a rote idea of "keep humanity alive at any cost" but to preserve the components of humanity that they didn't themselves understand like individuality, creativity, and a drive to learn and explore (very star trekky really).
If I want to get too deep into the subject, it seems like a robot that interpreted the first law so narrowly would never be capable of developing a zeroth law to begin with, because its focus would be so intent on a narrow idea of what a human was, ignoring social concepts altogether (as for eg. Solarian robots do).
To be fair though it has been a REALLY long time since I've seen the movie.
Sorry, should have included a spoiler tag, I guess...
At the end of Robots and Empire he allows Mandamus to activate his "nuclear intensifier", which will eventually render the Earth uninhabitable over the course of several decades (thereby driving humanity to colonize more stars). R. Giskard decided it was in the best interest of humanity for them to disperse, but couldn't rule out the possibility that some humans would be harmed in the process, so he permanently shut down.
And its application of the zeroth law is nothing like daneel's careful application, endlessly riding the line to becoming inoperable because of the conflicts it causes. That's an important aspect to the concept as Asimov envisioned it that's completely lacking in the film.
Also I don't think Asimov's robots would have ever had a slave mode that rendered them immune to application of the laws. They probably still would have gone inoperative before actually carrying out a massacre.
Yes, technically. But practically, every single story showed how some robot was able to reason his way into violating the spirit of the laws. The movie was very crude about showing it, but it was the same concept present in every Asimov short story.
> Asimov was unique in that he was the first to start with the premise that humans _could_ safely develop advanced robots, rather than using the "robot uprising" trope
I, robot the movie did that too. It showed that a robot could glimpse at the spirit behind the laws and act not according to the letter, but according to the spirit of the laws. Finally, he helped the humans thwart the uprising, and the movie ends with the suggestion that he will influence other robots to see his viewpoint.
> Yes, technically. But practically, every single story showed how some robot was able to reason his way into violating the spirit of the laws.
Huh? There is literally one story (Little Lost Robot) where there is a "loophole" in the laws (and only because the First Law is modified to drop the "or through inaction allow a human to come to harm" bit).
EDIT: in thinking about it further, I guess I'd add That Thou Are Mindful Of Him to the list of "loophole" stories. Still, two examples out of dozens of stories is very much the exception, not the rule.
Runaround: in following the letter of the laws, the robots put our protagonists in danger of dying, which would obviously violate the spirit of the first law.
Reason: the robots decide to redefine the term "human"
Catch that rabbit: robot ignores first law unless forced by humans in a sticky situation (though this one is a bit ehhh)
Liar: to avoid "hurting" the feelings of humans, a mind-reading robot hurts them in a much more real way
Escape: due to a technical interpreation of hyperspatial travel, robot prevents humans from discovering hyperspatial travel. Vilating first law in the long term since humanity couldn't survive without a means of fast space travel.
Evitable conflict: machines decide that the only way to perfectly follow the laws is to take control over humanity, which is the exact thing the laws were supposed to prevent.
Little lost robot: you said it
That's 7 out of the 9 stories in I, Robot. I have noticed this in most of his short stories and novels.
>A fundamental principle of Asimov's writing about robots was that the Three Laws were inviolate.
In universe, maybe. But the actual purpose of the Three Laws as a plot device was for them to be violated, and provide the crux of the story that followed.
Of course - he wasn't actually trying to formulate a coherent ethical framework for artificial intelligence and demonstrate its utility, he was writing mystery stories with robots.
One is book vs script length. A film is 100 pages. Novels are 250+. This means big story-arch rewrites. It can really kill plot & character development. This is where series open up a lot of possibility.
That's usually the biggest adaption, but there are lots of other big things that must change. Novels can do character thoughts, exposition and other things well. For example, a strategic battle scene will work in a book. In a film, it's near impossible so they focus on action and drama. Films do visual representation, so action-rich scenes work. They get characters for "free," actors will represent a highly nuanced person in a way you immediately understand.
These add up to a big re-write, that cannot be avoided.
Writers like Asimov are the very best storytellers. They work on their own schedule, write what comes to them, discard bad work... If you handed a good novelist the task of writing a LOTR prequel novel about Frodo's parents, by October... It probably won't be as good as Tolkien's.
You just can't replicate genius on commission.
This is really evident in Game of Thrones. The early seasons capture what's great about the books. A politically driven story that isn't boring, a novel approach to magical realism... Early seasons were loyal to the book. The latest season was mostly "off-script." The politics got stupid. Characters wandered closer to fantasy tropes. The "realism" part of magical realism was gone. Apart from big plot points, it wasn't written by GRRM and it showed. So, it is not good in the ways he's good. It was also written much quicker, on a schedule.
It'll be hard to capture Asimov in a series, harder than GRRM I expect. His stories are just not story driven enough.
His main plot device is not a spaceship or a time machine, it's a fictional theory, psychohistory. How do you capture that on film, line charts?
I always felt a movie was more analogous to a short story (one of the best PKD adaptations is Minority Report, even if that adaptation has issues), where a book is more akin to a season of a TV show, and each book in a series maps to a season of a show.
The film I, Robot originally had no connections with Isaac Asimov's Robot series. It started with an original screenplay written in 1995 by Jeff Vintar, entitled Hardwired. [1]
Gods, reading that was depressing. So many reviews called it some variant of "smart", which is not on the list of adjectives I would use.
I likely would have enjoyed it more had I not been expecting an Asimov story on film. I like Will Smith a lot, but somehow he's been in multiple films that ruined favorite books from my youth (I Am Legend is another book that I love and that had an abysmal film adaptation...I don't blame Smith, though, as he did a great job even in a very cheesy film). I, Robot was also pretty cheesy even without the weight of trying to live up to Asimov's legacy.
It was fantastic up until the vampires/zombies turned into cartoons. One of the scariest scenes I've ever seen was the bit where he goes in after the dog and the vamps are all huddled in a circle shivering in the dark. That was some top notch creepy. And it was brilliant acting by Smith (so much of the scariness of that scene was just because the character was scared).
But, then we got a closer look at them a bit later and they were flying through the air, bouncing off the walls, and just all around looking like cartoon monsters. I'm just not frightened by cartoons. And, it really killed the slow, calm, horror of the book for me. The things that made the book unique and scary in a way that sticks with you are just fundamentally different from the jump scares of the film.
The Vincent Price adaptation (The Last Man On Earth) remains the most faithful film version of I Am Legend, in spirit if not in specific detail. I don't really mind when a movie script changes some plot points or some character details to make it work on screen, I just dislike it when the spirit of the thing is thrown away and replaced with blockbuster tropes (which is my primary complaint about I, Robot, as well).
But, again, I thought Will Smith was excellent in the role. I just really hate what they did with the vamps.
No, but the evolution of Galatea, from an almost comical robot to one that assists the death of Portia (in a beautiful scene) out of mercy is deeply moving.
It's a very good movie, even if not faithful to the original.
So, I am extremely pessimistic, even though I would like to be excited about this news. The team behind it also leaves me feeling ambivalent. On one hand, it's a guy who has just made superhero movies (just the sort that would I would expect to destroy a thinky story like Foundation) but also the guy who made The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which was actually pretty good (though rarely as smart/deep as the cast deserved; Lena Heady, in particular).
I love that scifi TV and film is seeing such a resurgence, but I sure do hate to see my favorites get butchered.