CinemaNow - Robots

Reviews of Robots are decidedly mixed. Joel Siegel of ABC's Good Morning America remarks that the look of the film is riveting -- even the rivets -- and that Robin Williams' vocal performance is fall-down funny. However, he adds, what really lays an egg: the story. There isn't one. That means Robots has none of the emotional impact that made The Incredibles so incredible or made so many of us want to find Nemo. A.O. Scott in the New York Times likewise praises the look of the film, but concludes that in the end, Robots is hollow and mechanical, an echo chamber of other movies and an awkward attempt to turn the intrinsically scary sensitive-robot theme into something heartwarming and cute. Jami Bernard in the New York Daily News notes that the film's wow factor is enhanced in the IMAX version, but adds: For a movie that rails against the notion of creative artists toiling amid corporate gloom, Robots often feels calculated and mass-produced. It's a colorful scrap heap, but no more than the sum of its bells and whistles. That theme is repeated in numerous reviews. Jan Stuart in Newsday writes that the animators had a whale of a time designing their balloon-colored robot world, but the ingenuity stops there. The script is mostly recycled parts. That's OK, Stephen Hunter suggests in the Washington Post. While noting that the story fails to engage on any level save the kinetic, he remarks that some of the scenes display marvelous ingenuity. Cleverness for its own sake is still cleverness, he writes. And Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times puts it this way: This is a movie that is a joy to behold entirely apart from what it is about.

This is a really good movie.