Movies

Saw I, Robot last weekend. I was excited about seeing the film until I heard that the script was merely "inspired" by Asimov's work. Admittedly, it's been twenty years since I read the book, so I couldn't say exactly where the movie was unfaithful to the original, but I vaguely remember the latter being occupied with Holmesian deductions and philosophical musings, whereas the former is mostly action and special effects. Unfortunately Will Smith was wasted in the film, as his banter was pretty uninspired compared to, say, that in Men in Black. There were lots of gratuitously long shots of his muscled torso, though, which is odd since one would expect the typical audience of a sci-fi movie to be predominantly heterosexual male. (There wasn't much corresponding cheesecake, by the way, except perhaps for one foggy shower scene of the female heroine.) The action scenes left me curiously unmoved, perhaps because I couldn't work up any interest in Smith's character. The villain is an industrialist, of course; while some CEOs certainly are evil, the frequency with which they are portrayed as such in the movies bespeaks a certain leftward bias, methinks. Not recommended.