Amazon.com video review:
Bicentennial Man was stung at the 1999 box office, due no doubt
in part
to
poor timing during a backlash against Robin Williams and his treacly
performances
in two other, then-recent releases, Jakob the Liar and Patch
Adams. But this near-approximation of a science fiction epic, based on
works by Isaac Asimov and directed, with uncharacteristic seriousness of
purpose, by Chris Columbus (Mrs. Doubtfire), is much better than
one would have known from the knee-jerk negativity and box-office
indifference.
Williams plays Andrew, a robot programmed for domestic chores and sold to
an
upper-middle-class family, the Martins, in the year 2005. The family
patriarch (Sam Neill) recognizes and encourages Andrew's uncommon
characteristics, particularly his artistic streak, sensitivity to beauty,
humor, and independence of spirit. In so doing, he sets Williams's tin man
on
a two-century journey to become more human than most human beings.
As adapted by screenwriter Nicholas Kazan, the movie's scale is
novelistic, though Columbus isn't the man to embrace with Spielbergian
confidence its sweeping possibilities. Instead, the Home Alone
director shakes off his familiar tendencies to
pander and matures, finally, as a captivating storyteller. But what really
makes this film matter is its undercurrent of deep yearning, the passion of
Andrew as a convert to the human race and his willingness to sacrifice all
to
give and take love. Williams rises to an atypical challenge here as a
futuristic Everyman, relying, perhaps for the first time, on his
considerable
iconic value to make the point that becoming human means becoming more like
Robin Williams. Nothing wrong with that. --Tom Keogh
