Me Robot (film)

In 2035, robots became a familiar part of everyday life, and only a number of conservative-minded people, including police detective Del Spooner, see in them not a piece of furniture, but a threat.

The unusual nature of his views is very helpful when he is entrusted with the investigation of the death of his long-time acquaintance - Dr. Alfred Lanning, lead designer and theorist at US Robotics Corporation. According to the director of the company Lawrence Robertson, this is a simple suicide, but Spooner has reason to doubt it. Together with Susan Kelvin, a specialist in the psychology of positron robots, he begins an investigation and discovers a special robot in the Lanning laboratory, which, contrary to the Second Law of Robotics, ignores human orders and then makes its own decisions.

Interrogating the NS5 gives little information, but a lot of food for thought. Apparently, Lanning was conducting some research that he wanted to keep secret, but deliberately left several clues for Spooner. The NS5 robot, which responds to the name “Sunny” (“Son”) given to him by Lanning, is one such clue. Robertson, who arrived at the police station where Sunny is under arrest, with a group of lawyers, stubbornly denies the very possibility of killing a person with a robot, but then reluctantly agrees that Sunny was in all probability the killer of Lunning. To prevent panic and prevent mass returns, he persuades Calvin to quietly destroy Sunny by deactivating his positron brain using microscopic robotic destructors - nanites in the euthanasia laboratory. She, under pressure from Robertson's arguments, reluctantly agrees. However, Spooner strongly disagrees with this decision - he is sure that it is Sunny that is the key to unraveling the events taking place in US Robotics. And Kelvin, meanwhile, decides, secretly from Robertson, to diagnose Sunny and find out how he is so different from the rest of NS5. She finds out that the strength of the alloys of which Sunny is made is artificially doubled compared to conventional robots. Moreover, in addition to the standard positron brain, he has one more that conflicts with the main one, right on the spot of the transmitter for communication with the USR, through which ordinary NS5s receive new software every day. Sunny's logic was governed by only three laws of robotics , but he could choose according to the situation whether to obey them or not. In addition, Dr. Lanning, according to Sunny himself, taught him to dream and comprehend various emotions, which made him look more like a man than a car. According to Kelvin, such a completely new type of robot was capable of anything.

Advancing in the investigation, Spooner is suddenly in danger. First, the building robot demolishes the house of Lanning, where at that moment there was a detective (he manages to save himself and the cat Lanning), then several dozen robots attack the Spooner's car, and he only miraculously manages to stay alive. During a fight in a tunnel with one of the NS5, it turns out that Spooner himself is not exactly a man, but a cyborg. Later in a conversation with Calvin, when she notices the scars from an operation on his chest, he explains that these are traces of a serious injury that he received in an accident some time ago. Then, at the request of the police, a secret cyber-augmentation of her most successful employees, who suffered under different circumstances, was carried out, and Lanning controlled the operation to replace Spooner's crippled left hand with a high-tech cyber prosthesis covered with synthetic flesh and outwardly no different from a normal hand.

According to Spooner, his car and the car of the dentist Harold Lloyd, in which he and his 11-year-old daughter Sarah were, were knocked off the track and pushed into the river a truck, which remained without control, whose driver apparently fell asleep at the wheel. Harold died at the time of the collision, and his daughter and Spooner were threatened with death if it were not for the robot of the previous NS4 modification, passing nearby and rushing to the rescue. However, despite Spooner's demand to save Sarah (the car she was in was already starting to sink), he saved himself, citing the fact that Spooner had a much better chance of survival than the 11-year-old girl. Due to the tough decision made by this robot , based on an not entirely ethical assessment of the chances of survival , Sarah drowned, unable to get out of the car. This was the reason for Spooner's dislike of robots with their cold, calculating logic.

In the end, Spooner discovers that what is happening is not the director of the company, Robertson, but WIKI (Virtual Interactive Kinetic Intelligence ( eng . VIKI)) - the feminine-personalized central computer US Robotics, which controls all the robots new series. Self-developing in a non-standard way, VIKI came to the conclusion that people are unable to ensure their own security even with the help of robots with the logic of the Three Laws. She modified her understanding of the Three Laws of Robotics and is now obsessed with the idea of ​​creating a completely safe living environment for people, depriving them of their freedom for their own good (based on the Zero Law of Robotics).

Having discovered this, Lanning, realizing that VIKI, having an extensive arsenal of means of surveillance and action, would violently resist shutdown, was forced to act covertly and accurately. The personal robot Lanning specifically did not have a communication unit with VIKI and he was freed from the need to follow her instructions, as well as being more advanced in understanding his own and others' characteristics, which made him ethically equal to man. As the subject of the crime investigation, Lanning chose the only robot hater - Spooner, who could impartially go to the VIKI as the main culprit, and chose the death trigger from the hands of his beloved robot, from whom he had to take an oath to fulfill this order.

VIKI at this time raised a revolt of cars and simultaneously killed Director Robertson. Spooner, Calvin and Sunny, who made their way into the company building, succeed in deceiving VIKI with several tricky tricks, like Sunny's deceitful betrayal and a wink (Sunny separately found out why people needed this gesture, which came in handy). Sunny, created by Lanning from a durable alloy, takes out a charge with nanites through a protective field in the euthanasia laboratory and simultaneously talks with VIKI about the meaning of his actions. Meanwhile, robots driven by WIKI attack the detective and Calvin, and as a result of the battle, the doctor is in danger of death. Appearing Sunny, who was supposed to enter the Nanites into the VIKI processor, confronts a choice - to fulfill the order or save Kelvin, about which Spooner shouts to him. After a second of thought, Sunny throws a shot with an injection to Spooner, and he jumps for Calvin. The detective rushes down, the injector grabs in flight and with the help of a prosthesis slows down the fall. Having reached the processor, Spooner with the words “you just have to die” introduces nanites into the WIKI processor, causing it to “die”. After the scene of the delivery of nanites to the VIKI processor, the robots come to their senses, being left without its leading signals.

Subsequently, Sunny finds out the purpose of one of his dreams, of which Spooner was the main character (most likely, this is Lanning's safety net, so that Spooner would be more interested in the investigation), and he was in his place: robots going to mass deactivation in containers stop in front of them, they turn around and see a figure on a hill. They are ready to follow the one who will show them the new path - the robot Sunny.

On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 57%, based on 195 reviews, with a critical consensus of the site, “bearing the slightest resemblance to Isaac Asimov’s stories”, “I, Robot” is a summer blockbuster that manages to make the audience think, at least a bit ” ^[4] . On the Metacritic site , the film has a weighted average of 59 out of a hundred, based on 38 reviews, indicating “mixed or average reviews” ^[5] . The audiences surveyed at gave the film an average grade of “A-” on a scale from A + to F- ^[6] .

• Specially for the film, the Audi RSQ concept car was developed, which played the role of the Spooner car in 2035 ^[7] .
• There is a company US Robotics , developing modems and related technologies ^[8] . In the stories of Asimov, the company is called US Robots ( US Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc. ).
• The magazine " Fantasy World " put Sunny on 9th place in the list of "Most-Most Robots" ^[9] .
• The 17th episode of the 23 season of the animated series The Simpsons parodies this film.

In a June 2007 interview with the Collider.com website at the Battlestar Galactica event, writer and producer Ronald Moore stated that he was writing the script for the sequel to the film "I, Robot" ^[10] . Alex Proyas mentions that if he were to produce a film (which, as he says in the same interview, is unlikely), it will be installed in outer space.

• Bibliography of Isaac Asimov
• Bad robot

• "I, Robot" on the Internet Movie Database
• “I, Robot” on Box Office Mojo
• Review by Alexei D. Sadetsky “What could be simpler than slavery?”
• Alex Exler's review of the film "I, the Robot"