I, Robot – 2004
It’s a good thing I am reviewing this movie’s visual effects and not its script and its acting. That being said, the visuals were actually pretty good. It seems to me there are two things that people came to see this movie for: Will Smith, and the cool CGI robots, and there certainly were a lot of them, attacking cars, attacking people, and attacking each other.
In most cases, when a CGI character moves a little stiffly and mechanically, it would be a bad thing, but here, the filmmakers had an advantage since the robots were actually mechanical, so it was acceptable that their motion looked slightly unrealistic. Their design was pretty well thought out, and allowed us to see just enough of their metal joints and moving parts to make them appear plausible. Even today, while robots that can walk and perform complex operations like climbing stairs do exist, they are slow and clunky compared to the robots in the film. Here, they can run, climb, and jump like spider monkeys.
One of the greatest action sequences in the film is when our hero, in his self-driving car that is moving at over 160 miles per hour through a tunnel, is attacked by two giant automated trucks full of evil robots. We even know they are evil because their red chest lights turn on to make sure we know they are murderous. They leap onto the speeding car and punch through the windows, trying to kill Detective Spooner. Yet he survives by shooting the robots, crushing them under his wheels or against the side of the tunnel, or making them fall beneath the wheels of the automated trucks. The digital robots were created using a combination of motion capture software and keyframing animation techniques, perfectly blended together. It was a wonderfully exciting sequence to watch!
Then there was the climax of the film in which Detective Spooner and Doctor Calvin are trying to kill the evil murder computer, VIKI, with deadly nanites. They are attacked by dozens of red-chested robots that crash through the glass ceiling. The camera is furiously swirling around the action, above, below, and to the side, sometimes making it difficult to tell what is right-side-up. I also liked the design of the visual representation of VIKI’s digital face.
There were many other noteworthy effects in the film, like when the bad guys attempt to kill Spooner by destroying a house that he is in, using a demolition machine with giant claws. Anther cool effect was the street battle between an angry mob and the robot army. But I think the most impressive visual was the way in which the digital artists were able to give the NS-5 robots complex and varied facial expressions, especially the only good one, Sonny, with very limited movement in the facial features. It was pretty impressive. Its just too bad the script and the acting weren’t as good as the visual effects.