Thursday, December 30, 2010

Robot Stories

Spoiler Level: Fairly High

Robot Stories is an anthology film, featuring four different stories of four different types of robots...  but really they're stories about people.

The first story, "Robot Baby," is about a family who is interested in adopting a child... but first they have to spend a month practicing with a robot baby.  As a result, potential mother Marcia is forced to face her own lack of maternal instincts due to her poor relationship with her own mother.

The second story, "The Robot Fixer," is the story of a woman whose son is in the hospital lying comatose.  In an effort to reach him, she begins to re-assemble his collection of Microbots toys (played nostalgically by the Micronauts toys).

The third story, "Machine Love," is about the latest office androids of 2027, the iPerson.  The iPerson is designed to learn and expand based on its surroundings, but the people in Archie the iPerson's surroundings couldn't care less about him.  What lessons will he end up learning?

The fourth and final story, "Clay" is more of an artificial intelligence story.  In the year 2027, people can have their brains scanned so their minds live on after their bodies wear out.  But what happens if you don't want to be scanned?

Each tale is a wonderful character piece, not so much offering a commentary on humanity as a whole as it is a look into the individuality of each of us.  It's a wonderful movie and touching movie.

...And with this post, I now have successfully posted 31 reviews for December, the most posts I've ever done in one month, which also brings my biggest year of blogging reviews to a close.  (165 in 2010! Woo-hoo!) 

I'd also like to thank everyone who's been coming to read these reviews-- according to my stats, December 2010 has been my biggest month ever, with 3901 hits in the last 30 days!  I realize that according to the Traffic Sources links it's mostly been people being drawn to my blog for my images, but I'm cool with that.  Hopefully a percentage of you have stuck around to read the reviews that went with them and enjoyed what you saw.

So, I'm ringing in 2011 with a very special project that I've been working on over the last few months.  Tune in on January 1, 2011 for the start of It's Called Entertainment's "Top 100 Science Fiction TV Shows" Countdown!

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