Robot Stories (2003): *** out of ****
Written and directed by Greg Pak. Starring Tamlyn Tomita, Wai Ching Ho,
Greg
Pak and Sab ****mono.
by Andy Keast
"Robot Stories" is a movie in four parts. Some parts are better than
others,
but the script does have some heart and an admiration for vintage science
fiction. The first segment, "My Robot Baby," is a spin on the high school
bag-of-flour project, where a married couple must care for a robot infant
for
a
probationary period before being able to adopt a real one. With no time
in
her
schedule, the wife arranges to have the baby "fed" automatically ("I don't
want
to shut him down, I just want to pause him for a while."). The second,
"The
Robot Fixer," features a mother retrieving rare robot toys for her dying
son,
and we learn that mom hides some guilts and has long been estranged from
him.
The third and fourth segments are a little more thoughtful. "Machine
Love" is
about androids who live, work, love and reproduce just as humans do (in
office
buildings), and "Clay" features a dying sculptor who converses with a
hologram
of his late wife. Although in the movie's future one can have their
memories
uploaded into a computer system, where your consciousness is stored,
everlasting. This is a staple of science fiction that made me think of
speeches in Mamoru's "Ghost in the Shell" and Hirokazu's "After Life."
What I
saw was fine, but I wanted more: there's enough material in the fourth
segment
for an entire movie that might have some original things to say about
mortality
and memory.
Robot Stories is the first feature from writer-director Greg Pak, who has
made
an anthology movie with ideas. The stories are completely unrelated save
that
they all have something to do with robots, and are centered around
Asian-Americans (though the movie smartly doesn't address that point
specifically). It was nice to see some old-fa****oned sci-fi themes that
are
distilled directly from authors like Ray Bradbury and episodes of "The
Twilight
Zone." As a low-budget first effort, it's not bad.
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X-RAMR-ID: 37376
X-Language: en
X-RT-ReviewID: 1265201
X-RT-TitleID: 1129477
X-RT-AuthorID: 9883
X-RT-RatingText: 3/4
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