Will Smith, James Cromwell, Bruce Greenwood in story based on Isaac Asimov
Studio: 20th Century Fox
Video: 2.35:1 anamorphic/enhanced for 16:9 widescreen, 1080p HD
Audio: English DTS HD 5.1 lossless, Spanish or French DD 5.1
Subtitles: English, Spanish, Cantonese, Korean, captioned
Extras: Smart Menu Technology (on screen during playback): Behind the Camera, Production diaries, CGI & design, Sentient machines, Robotic behavior, The filmmaker’s toolbox (how-to clips), Deleted scenes & alternate ending, Commentary guide, 3 full-length commentary tracks: director Alex Proyas, screenwriter & others, Annotated guide, Trivia track, Search index, Personal scene selection, Enhanced D-Box
Length: 114 minutes
Rating: *****
Now this is what I call making use of the larger capacity of Blu-ray discs and the latest firmware updates, which I have just installed on my Pioneer player. What they have dubbed the Ultimate Home Theater Experience is not just marketing hot air – this disc has an astounding number of on-screen features which can be easily brought up while viewing the film, ignored if you wish, or watched separately before or after seeing the unadorned film. They make use of the four colored buttons found on most Blu-ray remote controls: red, green, yellow and blue. Each one brings up a different set of materials tied in closely with exactly what you see seeing on screen. You can choose your avenue of study, such as robot design, the soundtrack music, the derivation of various portions of the plot from the writings of Asimov and other sci-fi authors. Some are lines of text that appear at the bottom of the screen, while others pause the feature film, go briefly to black and then present a little featurette that can be as long as ten minutes on a particular aspect of the story. For example, during a discussion between Smith and one of the experts on the robots, references are made to history of robots going back to the 18th century. Then a fascinating featurette on automatons is presented, showing the amazing actions of some of these clockwork creatures. Another featurette concerns the now widespread use of motion capture in movies, and you see the original photography of the many human robot standins – in their green-screen suits with white balls all over them – who had instruction from a choreographer on exactly how to move like robots.
While purists complained about the changes made to Isaac Asimov’s original writings about robots in order to turn this sci-fi spectacular into a chase/thriller/action movie, it’s still one of the best recent sci-fi films, and way superior to Smith’s current I Am Legend. There is still plenty of dialog in the film which gets into Asimov’s robotic philosophies, such as his Three Laws of Robotics: 1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
Smith’s detective character is a construct of qualities from several of Asimov’s characters. His back story concerns his distrust of the robots which have become a major part of life in 2035 Chicago. It began when he was in a car accident and plunged into the river along with another car trapping a little girl. A robot rescued him but left the girl to drown – Smith’s character Spooner felt a human would have rescued the girl instead of him. When the robot manufacturer’s chief scientist – who also installed a robotic arm on Spooner following the accident – is found dead, Spooner immediately suspects an errant robot did it, but runs into opposition from all concerned who lean on The Three Laws as proof that robots are harmless to humans. This goes even to his best friend the police chief. Spooner’s distrust of robots, out-front emotions, and lack of interest in the advanced technology of his day is contrasted with the scientist’s female assistant, whose back story has her distrusting humans and her emotions and placing her faith totally in the robots. A hologram left behind by the late chief scientist (a la Princess Leia in the first Star Wars) offers Spooner some clues to what is going on. Spooner’s love of the pre-robot past is shown in several ways – one of them centering on something from the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel in solving the mystery. The latest model of robots make increasing attempts to kill Spooner, though he is still not believed by anyone. In the end the assistant believes him and together they save the world of course.
This has to be one of the very best Blu-ray transfers yet – everything is super-detailed and the fast action bits don’t strobe or blur annoyingly as with most standard DVDs. The lossless soundtrack is terrific (though it still doesn’t sound quite as good to me as the uncompressed PCM counterpart). For those few HT fans with a D-Box setup, the film has data imbedded in it which will control your motorized chairs to shake and roll in sync with the screen images – such as when Spooner’s car is being attacked by crazed robots. (The transducer in my sofa does a shaky good job just with the LFE channel.) The idea of accessing all the bonus bits without having to leave the progress of the film is quite an advantage. Sometimes you get so involved in the material being presented you lose some of the sense of the feature. I could imagine (if I had the time) watching it several times with a different category of exploration selected each time.
– John Sunier
