Just got back from seeing I, Robot with my dad. As someone who read a ton of Asimov in my dark years (7th and 8th grades), after I saw the "robot army of doom" trailer I had pretty low expectations. Surprisingly, though, I thought the adaptation held up pretty well.

People have said that "these aren't Asimov's robots"; actually, they pretty much are. Basically every robot story Asimov ever wrote was about malfunctions of the Three Laws: robots that get locked in a conflict between two laws, robots that find a clever way to break them, robots that extend the laws to unexpected conclusions, robots built without some portion of the laws that behave in unexpected ways. Asimov--not to mention the three writers who continued the Foundation series past his death--was acutely aware that "3 Laws Safe" was anything but. [EDIT: Looking over my copy of Robot Dreams, which is a republication of several of Asimov's robot stories including some of those from I, Robot, it's apparent just how many of the individual bits in the movie were taken directly from the source material. This wasn't nearly as egregious an adaptation as people were saying.]

Granted, as some have said, the "hordes of killer robots" trope is a silly, action-movie way to explore it, but the seed is plainly there in Asimov's work.

Harry Knowles has the last word at AICN: this movie really should have been called iRobot. It really is the marriage of Asimov's more paranoid stories and the iPod-as-symbol of our dependence on gadgets.

It's a decent movie, though not a great one (and the climax has plot holes you could drive a supercomputer through). If you've ever read Asimov, you have no choice but to see it. And if you haven't read Asimov--well, if you're not in 8th grade and a nerdy boy, you probably missed the boat, but if you see the movie, you'll at least get the gist.