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Bicentennial Man

1999, Movie, PG, 130 mins

Bicentennial Man: Review

BICENTENNIAL MAN
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A big, shiny and resoundingly empty fable in which an android, cursed with immortality, dreams of becoming human. In the not too distant future -- 2004, to be exact -- wealthy Richard Martin (Sam Neill) buys his family an NDR114 (Robin Williams), a fully functioning, self-maintaining robot. Designed to obey and serve, "Andrew" is programmed to carry out household chores, including cooking, cleaning and looking after the Martin children. But due to some quirk in his wiring, Andrew also seems to have a soul; he's curious, creative (he carves little animals out of wood) and even has feelings. Andrew's also built to last and, over the course of the film, he outlives three generations of Martins, only to fall in love with Richard's great-granddaughter Portia (Embeth Davitz). Andrew also hooks-up with an android technician (Oliver Platt) who's developed a way of replicating human physical appearance, and provides Andrew with a fleshy-looking face, artificial internal organs and an ersatz nervous system, all in an effort to make Andrew more or less a human being. It takes well over an hour to transform Andrew the silver Android into twinkle-eyed Robin Williams, and that's only half of it. Everything from the Andrew's pneumatic eyebrows to James Horner's typically sappy score and the shaggy mutt abandoned in the rain is designed for maximum awwww effect. But the play for the heartstrings is so cold and calculated that the movie's sentimentality feels as synthetic as its hero, and the philosophy is simpleminded and lazy. We're asked to ponder what it is, exactly, that makes us human; the best the film (based on a short story and novel by Isaac Asimov) can come up with is that we're less than perfect and we die. This is one tin man with neither heart nor brains. leave a comment --Ken Fox
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