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Monday, September 30, 2019

Bicentennial Man (1999)

This is an odd movie, which is maybe a bit too long, but features an AI robot played by Robin Williams.
The movie is based on a novelette in the Robot series by the master science fiction author of the mid-twentieth century, Isaac Asimov.  It was awarded a couple of prestigious awards for best science fiction novelette of 1976, a time when artifical intelligence and a robot who thought and felt like a man seemed very far off indeed.  Not so much so today.
According to the foreword in Robot Visions, Asimov was approached to write a story, along with a number of other authors who would do the same, for a science fiction collection to be published in honor of the United States Bicentennial.  However, the arrangement fell through, leaving Asimov's the only story actually completed for the project.  It is the basis for this movie.
So the story is solid.  Richard Martin (Sam Neill) buys a gift, a new NDR-114 robot. The product is named Andrew (Robin Williams) by the youngest of the family's children. The movie follows the life and times of Andrew, a robot purchased as a household appliance programmed to perform menial tasks. As Andrew begins to experience emotions and creative thought, the Martin family soon discovers they don't have an ordinary robot, and slowly but surely trouble ensues.

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