I was surfing through the channels on Sunday evening, waiting for the next Stanley Cup Playoffs game to begin, when I stopped on TNT’s presentation of Alex Proyas‘ I, Robot starring Will Smith and I couldn’t help but notice just how bad the visual effects looked.
I remember really liking I, Robot when I first saw it back in 2004 and I went back to read my (ten-year-old) review and it appears I liked it even more than “really” liking it, giving it an “A” upon its initial release. For the sake of this post I will note the following bit from the end:
I, Robot has got to be the front-runner for Visual Effects Oscar. There has never been a movie that matched the CGI work this film employs. The robots seem so much a part of the landscape that you never question their reality.
I, Robot‘s effects, were nominated for an Oscar, they lost to Spider-Man 2, but wow, I was really digging this thing ten years ago. I wonder how even more of these CG, digital effects films would look now compared to the advancements in digital technology today. One person on Twitter told me they had the same reaction to I Am Legend on a second viewing and that one is only seven years old.
For me this speaks, once again, to the advantages of using practical effects. Like digital effects, we, for the most part, know when what we’re looking at is fake, but practical effects, fake or not, always feel a part of the world they’re in… because they’re actually in it. The most jarring aspect of the effects in I, Robot is they seemed, not only a little simple, but a layer above the action on screen. They certainly didn’t seem as if they were actually in the scene taking place.
I can’t remember another film, outside of some ’80s features with very early digital effects, where I was this impressed with the effects on my first viewing and so jarringly distracted by them when viewing the movie several years later. Can you?
I will say this for I, Robot, however, the voice performance from Alan Tudyk helps in overlooking the effects, one example being the following scene:
[yt id=”05bGPiyM4jg” width=”610″]
