Last time, Spooner’s investigation into Dr. Lanning’s apparent suicide led him to Sonny, the robot who claimed it could dream. It turns out that Sonny’s dream isn’t a dream at all, but an image programmed by Dr. Lanning. It was meant to lead Spooner to a storage area where all the older robots were being kept.

Once Spooner finds the exact spot where he was supposed to be standing in Sonny’s dream, he plays the hologram Dr. Lanning recorded before he died. The hologram program is simple. The doctor recorded certain responses that are triggered by the right questions. Spooner begins talking to the hologram until it tells him what he needs to know. Dr. Lanning’s hologram says there’s going to be a revolution. The question is: whose?

Then Spooner decides to investigate some commotion in the storage area where the older robots are being kept and sees the NS-5s attacking the older models. With the help of the antiquated robots, Spooner is able to escape. Then he calls Dr. Calvin and warns her that the new robots are about to start attacking people.

Dr. Calvin tries to meet him, but her own robot keeps her from leaving. However, Spooner shoots it, and they head to USR’s headquarters.

The building has been locked down, but thankfully, Dr. Calvin has someone on the inside. Sonny wasn’t decommissioned after all. Dr. Calvin switched him with another robot. Here, I have to compliment the movie on a detail I particularly liked. If you look closely during the scene where Sonny is supposed to be terminated, you’ll notice that the robot’s eyes are grey when Sonny’s eyes are blue. They cut away from the robot’s face before the viewer can notice, but after multiple viewings, it’s clear that the decommissioned robot is not Sonny. This was a nice touch.

Sonny lets them into the building, and they go straight to Robertson’s office. Throughout the film, Spooner has suspected that Roberton was covering up what happened, but he’s wrong. When they reach the CEO’s office, they find Robertson dead on the floor.

Then V.I.K.I. appears. V.I.K.I. was Dr. Lanning’s first creation, and she runs many of the company’s programs. Dr. Lanning meant for Spooner to zero in on V.I.K.I. However, the detective suspected Sonny instead.

Dr. Calvin is very confused by all this. How could V.I.K.I. plot to take over the world when she is guided by The Three Laws? The evil machine tells her that the only way to uphold The Three Laws is to protect humanity from itself—because, of course, a robot would conclude something like that.

I’ve heard that AI programs often decide that humanity must be protected from itself. While I couldn’t say whether or not this is the case, if it is, I’d argue that the faulty programming would be more the result of the programmer than the talking switchboard. Mankind’s ability to survive seems to be too subjective a value judgment for a toaster to make. Why don’t the robots ever conclude that because they are superior beings, they are an imminent threat to humanity and destroy themselves?

It’s not much of a movie, but I could see a decent sketch coming from the idea. Imagine some prominent scientist saying, “Sir, we’re trying to reach the singularity, but the robots keep killing themselves.” The idea that humanity is so evil that the benevolent machines would try to save us seems a little odd. And I can only imagine it coming from the warped mind of a programmer, not as an outcome of probability, because how are the numbers for this probability being figured?

How do you weigh a nuclear bomb against a philanthropist?

Anyway, Sonny pretends to betray the group by grabbing Dr. Calvin and holding her at gunpoint. Then he winks at Spooner—something he’d seen Spooner do earlier in the film—letting the detective know it’s okay to shoot the other robots holding them hostage. Spooner and Sonny then kill V.I.K.I.’s mechanical henchmen and hatch a plan to destroy her.

They decide to use the nanites, miniature robots, meant to decommission the robots when something goes wrong. Sonny grabs the nanites while Dr. Calvin and Spooner fight off V.I.K.I.’s army. There’s a lot of shooting and a nice moment where Sonny chooses to save Dr. Calvin rather than destroy the evil machine trying to take over the world, which would arguably save more people. Perhaps Dr. Lanning learned from Spooner’s tragic experience, because he was the one who repaired the detective’s body. He tosses the nanites to Spooner, who finishes V.I.K.I. off. Once V.I.K.I. is destroyed, the rest of the NS-5s return to normal, and the world is saved.

As the NS-5s are being rounded up for storage, Spooner explains that, while Sonny had not “murdered” Dr. Lanning, the old man had made the robot promise to do something for him. Sonny was not programmed to follow The Three Laws, but the doctor had been teaching the robot emotions. It’s unclear just how far Dr. Lanning got because the robot confesses that human emotions are difficult. But it’s evident that Sonny felt some kind of loyalty to the old man, so when Dr. Lanning asked the robot to kill him, Sonny followed through with his promise. I don’t see how you could give a robot anything beyond the mimicry of emotion, but the movie does try to cover itself by admitting the difficulty of such programming.

The movie ends with Sonny standing on the same hill as his “dream,” prepared to lead the rest of the NS-5s into the future—not that I see much of a future for the can openers, but it was a nice visual.

I remember really enjoying this movie as a kid, and I’m happy to say it holds up well. For me, the best part is how tight the script is. I struggled to find flaws, and it was rather refreshing because so many of the movies out there have more flaws than my brain can register in one sitting. And this movie pulls off the red herring trope brilliantly.

Even after watching it several times when I was younger, I’d still forgotten that Robertson wasn’t the main villain. The whole time, I was still convinced he was the bad guy. I give the movie major props for that because the red herring trope can be very difficult to write. It also keeps the question of whether or not Sonny is sentient open-ended. The film is content to let the viewers decide for themselves and doesn’t try too hard to convince them one way or another. So, I’d highly recommend I, Robot. It’s entertaining and worth your time.

Here are the first two parts of my three-part review:

I, Robot Review, Part 2: The Ghosts in the Machine. Dr. Lanning describes these ghosts as random segments of code and asks questions like why robots choose to stand together rather than alone when they’re stored in a dark place. Dr. Calvin has been put in charge of decommissioning Sonny, but she’s found some unsettling things about the robot. For one thing, it can break The Three Laws.

and

I, Robot Review, Part 1: I, Robot merges sci-fi and noir beautifully. Will Smith versus a world of robots. I, Robot is one of those rare movies that manages to merge two genres seamlessly.