Real Man of Steel

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July 11, 2004 -- IT'S hard to steal a scene from Will Smith. Tommy Lee Jones couldn't do it. Martin Lawrence couldn't do it. Jazzy Jeff definitely couldn't do it.
But just wait until you meet Sonny, Smith's android co-star in his new high-tech thriller, "I, Robot."

Despite a great performance from the Fresh Prince, Sonny manages to upstage Smith in scene after scene of the hard-edged futuristic mystery story.

In one sequence, he does it with super-human skills, leaping 20 feet across the room and then skittering up a wall faster than Spider-Man.

In another, he captivates with his amazingly expressive computer-generated face - the most touching display of computer generated acting since Gollum in "The Lord of the Rings."

It was important to get the robot right in this movie, which is based on the "I, Robot" collection of short stories of the most respected science-fiction writer of the 20th century, Isaac Asimov.

The movie takes place in the Chicago of 2035, at a time when there's one robot for every five people on planet Earth.




These animated beings smile and speak just like we do. They cook and clean for us and come to our rescue when we get hurt.

But then one of them - Sonny - appears to go berserk.

The movie stars Smith as Del Spooner, a police detective who is trying to unravel the mysterious death of the world's leading robotics researcher, Dr. Alfred Lanning (James Cameron).

On first glance, the death looks like a suicide, but Spooner isn't so sure, especially after he meets Sonny, the highly advanced prototype robot that Lanning was working on when he died.

Sonny not only has super-human powers but also something else that the other robots don't - feelings. Including anger.

You really sense Sonny's emotions in the movie, even though he was actually created on a computer.

That's because Sonny was made in much the same way that Gollum was for "Lord of the Rings" - with an actor, Alan Tudyk, acting out all the scenes dressed in a special green-screen suit and computer artists going in afterward to animate Sonny's robotic features.

It took three years and 41 different designs to come up with Sonny.

"We had one Sonny that looked more like the Terminator, with gleaming metal," recalls art director Oana Bogdan.

"Others were just plastic shells."

In the final design, Sonny has a semi-transparent plastic shell over a metal body - a design influenced by iMac computers, according to Bogdan.

His innocent-looking face comes from angel statues Tatopoulos saw in churches.

"We liked how they looked really androgynous," Bogdan says. "We wanted you to think that Sonny could be either male or female."

Androgynous robots aren't the only odd things in the movie's future. As he works on the case, Det. Spooner walks through a future world in which the cars drive themselves, with spherical wheels that turn in any direction.

It's a world almost completely devoid of trees and grass, in which Lake Michigan has become, of all things, a landfill.

But while it's odd to see Smith's car park itself in a huge, revolving parking garage, other elements of the movie's future seem very familiar.

When Smith pays for a couple of beers at a bar, he doesn't drop cash on the table - he just swipes a card over a scanner. When the price comes up, it reads "$46.50," which isn't that far from what you have to pay for two drinks at some of Manhattan's swankier boites.

"We've gone with a believable and realistic view of the future," says the movie's director, Alex Proyas.

"I didn't want to have flying cars and stuff. I wanted it to feel like a real and natural 30-year progression from now."

And indeed, much of the sci-fi technology that would make Sonny possible is already science fact in cutting-edge labs around the world.

Driverless cars, for example, is a dream shared not only by sci-fi buffs but also by real-life Defense Department officials, who have a Congressional mandate to make sure that at least one-third of all military ground-combat vehicles are unmanned by 2015.

In April, the Pentagon sponsored a race for robot cars, offering a $1 million prize for any team that could build an unmanned car that would drive across 142 miles of desert from Barstow, Calif., to Las Vegas.

The contest, unfortunately, was something of a disaster: Only 13 of the 25 cars entered were even able to even start, and the best performer only made it 7.4 miles before veering off the road into a ditch and bursting into flames.

But driverless cars are coming, and so are androids with faces as expressive as Sonny's.

In February, a Texas company called Human Emulation Robotics unveiled a robotic head that can smile and frown.

Hertz, as company president David Hanson calls the head, is hooked to a laptop computer "brain," and has features modeled on Hanson's girlfriend. Her skin is made of a high-tech polymer called "f'rubber," and she has video cameras in her eyes follow you across the room.

Some scientists believe "social robots" like Hertz (or Sonny) will one day take care of disabled people or work menial jobs.

Today's scientists are even working on robots that can think on their own - although none of them are even close to drawing the sort of beautiful pictures that Sonny can. So far, the smartest ones can only play catch.

Recent science also inspired Proyas' vision of Sonny in "I, Robot," - especially some of the amazing breakthroughs that doctors have had with bionic artificial limbs.

Just last November, the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago attached a mechanical arm to an amputee and connected it electrically to his nervous system. Unlike the old-fashioned prosthetics, this one reacts just like a real muscle.

These sort of artificial limbs - which sound like something out of the 1970s TV show "The Six Million Dollar Man" - inspired the cords on Sonny's joints, which will remind you of anatomical drawings of human muscles.

But all this technology, and even the $100 million Fox reportedly spent making "I, Robot" isn't what brings Sonny, and the film, to life.

At the center are compelling human performances, including Tudyk's.

"When we were shooting, it was just an actor running around in a little green suit," says John Davis, one of the movie's producers.

"But on screen, Sonny has humanness to him that's not like Terminator or any other robot I've seen before."

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