On Screen

...Both actors are dwarfed by the monstrous blasts and impalings central to Raimi's interests...

...I, Robot is advertised as an adaptation of a book of short stories published by Isaac Asimov in 1950...

...Moore's questions had merit, but his self-righteous grandstanding overshadowed his points...

...curses humanity for making war and destroying the environment...

...Like Doc Ock himself, Raimi and Proyas are enthralled less by any message their films attempt to convey than by their own mindless pyrotechnics...

...Two recent examples of the genre, Alex Proyas' /, Robot and Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 2, animate elaborate explosions while maintaining a cool disinterest in narrative coherence and psychological verisimilitude...

...In the film, we learn eventually that a supercomputer named V.I.K.I., whose smooth voice sounds like a female version of 2001's hal, controls the minds of a bestselling new model of robot...

...Asimov maintained a reverence for law, but Proyas and company think it corrupts...

...Instead, the screen goes black and we hear the screams of victims and witnesses...

...After the credit sequence, we come to the day of the calamity, and Moore wisely omits the all too well-known pictures of the Twin Towers in flames...

...This advance somehow endows him with a conscience, and he risks his existence to save his human friends and destroy VI.K.I...

...In the midst of what he considers a genuine political crisis, he has matured...

...As in the past, Moore dumbfounds his subjects, but such stunts ring hollow compared to the film's most effective sequences...

...Nevertheless, the picture is undeniably manipulative—to the point of resembling propaganda...

...As we might expect of a genius about to morph into a supervillain, he places the control chip in the most vulnerable spot available—in a tiny glass ball at the back of his neck...

...Moore's accusations are so severe that they could have become a shrill tirade, prompting viewers to tune out...

...Alas, that sort of intellectual innovation is beyond the imaginations of Proyas and his Neanderthal screenwriting team—Jeff Vintar, who cowrote Final Fantasy (2001), and Akiva Goldsman, responsible for gems like Batman Forever (1995), the sophomoric A Time to Kill (1996) and A Beautiful Mind (2001...

...The director is bent on convincing audiences not to vote for Bush in 2004...

...Returning to Flint, he shows military recruiters preying on young men living in depressed areas who trustingly sign up, perhaps to die for their country...

...Most disturbing is a scene where an Iraqi woman who has watched American bombs destroy houses and kill her loved ones cries out for God to visit his vengeance upon the U.S...

...These clips anchor Moore in the realm of fact, and they demonstrate that he is sufficiently confident of the President's foolishness to give him enough rope to hang himself...

...If hundreds must be killed in the process, the sacrifice is necessary...

...Besides their too obviously computerized violent special effects, these films have very little action...

...There are gory images of the Iraqi dead as well...

...In their scheme heroes function outside or in defiance of it...

...Similar juxtapositions occur throughout the film...

...They revise Asimov's universe to suit a hackneyed convention...

...While covering the 2000 election, the Administration's response to the September 11 attacks, the Bush family's ties to Saudi Arabia, and the combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, Moore distills his gripes into a single strenuous indictment...

...Crowing at Bush's slump in the polls, he says nothing about the years when his popularity rose and offers no explanation for why so many Americans still revere the President...

...Moore's earlier efforts, from Roger & Me (1989) to Bowling for Columbine (2002), led pundits to brand him a Leftist...

...He wants to do well in school and romance Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst...

...Fahrenheit 9/11 works powerfully to erode that trust...

...The film was made before photographs of the Abu Ghraib atrocities were released to the press, but Moore obtained plenty of footage of soldiers torturing prisoners...

...One obvious course would have been to exhort viewers to vote the Democrats into office, yet Moore never mentions John Kerry...

...He accuses Republicans in Florida, in Washington and on the Supreme Court of stealing the last election, then scolds Al Gore and Senate Democrats for failing to challenge the Electoral College vote...

...Those who disagree accept the Administration's policies, even though it keeps facts in the shadows...

...Fahrenheit 9/11 underscores why George W. Bush has polarized the nation...

...He uses footage shot by his crew but also draws heavily on archival material about the Administration, some of which viewers may recall seeing on television news...

...It is stunning to see the President's advisers before September 11 claim that Iraq poses no threat to the U.S...

...Those who reject the President's insistence that war was necessary to destroy a deadly threat, quell the tide of terrorism, and free a populace hungry for democracy, generally agree with Moore that Bush has been deceiving us to serve that elite he calls his base...

...Rehearsing critiques that have long been leveled against the Administration, he delivers many of them as if they were his own original ideas...

...This garbled politics is nonsense reminiscent of the Clint Eastwood Westerns and other reactionary depictions of noble lone gunmen...

...Moore moves from sequences where Bush and members of his Cabinet waffle before the cameras, joke with wealthy constituents, shake hands with Saudi oil men, or lie to the public to scenes of suffering war victims, U.S...

...On Screen Lighting Fires By Raphael Shargel DURING A SUMMER filled with blockbuster exercises in senseless demolition, the most incendiary film of the season is a documentary, Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11...

...But it is when he drops by as officials are reciting scripted lines that they do themselves in...

...We learn that some troops fire at the enemy from inside their tanks while listening to hard rock music...

...After being told that most Senators and Representatives are unfamiliar with the full text of the Patriot Act, he rides through the city in a truck, declaiming it over a loudspeaker...

...He drastically downplays the threat posed by Osama bin Laden and by Saddam Hussein, particularly to their own people...

...Yet the reliably saccharine Maguire fails to re-create the heartsick Parker from the comic books, and Dunst, luminous in the 2002 installment, has grown wan and colorless...

...Fahrenheit 9/11 loses steam when Moore appears on camera...

...The director begins with the early months of Bush's Presidency...

...It is hypocritical, too, for filmmakers who adhere so closely to the clichés of their genre to preach nonconformity...

...The real hero of Moore's pictures was the director himself, who often appeared on-screen to humiliate his opponents...

...Moore has a wonderful grasp of irony and a gift for innuendo, but his George W. Bush is a twodimensional character...

...Not far from being a Right-wing parody of a Nanny State Liberal, VI.K.I...

...Moore still refuses to offer clear solutions to the problems he unravels...

...He brings his camera into Army hospitals and shows us how badly many have been hurt...

...Other soldiers, unaware of the fear their presence invokes, complain that the conquered are not grateful fortheir efforts...

...Raimi and Sargent steer Parker toward the moral of the first Spider-Man film and one of the credos of his comic book creator Stan Lee: With great power comes great responsibility...

...The first states that robots may not harm human beings or allow them to come to harm through inaction...

...Under their influence, the rechristened Doc Ock is given to flinging about taxicabs and defacing skyscrapers...

...in fact, those movies were scattershot polemics that called a plague on everybody's house...

...It shatters the moment his work goes awry, and the tentacles take over his mind...

...He resolved to create a universe of benign robots that genuinely aid humanity...

...The film's potent effects are the result of Moore's brilliant editing...

...casualties and their grieving families...

...He also nevermentions that bin Laden remains at large, nor does he refute the myth—apparently believed to this day by many Americans—that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction...

...It is unsettling to watch him goad interviewees into providing the answers he wants from them...

...His exercises in browbeating reached their notorious height at the end of Bowling for Columbine in a confrontation with Charlton Heston...

...Among the latter, the plaints of Lila Lipscomb, the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq, are especially moving...

...The hero is Del Spooner (Will Smith), a cop who spends two-thirds of the film trying to convince a young, sexy and quite dense Susan Calvin (Bridget Moynahan) that robots are evil...

...Raimi and screenwriter Alvin Sargent, who penned Julia (1977) and Ordinary People (1980), try to create a backdrop of human interest, but their hearts are not in it...

...Even more troubling was his habit of fudging truths and altering chronologies...

...Such lapses have become par for the course, but both films also contain disturbing rifts between form and content that make it hard to write them off as innocent summer entertainment...

...Moore lambasted the former leader of the National Rifle Association until the visibly ailing man hobbled helplessly away from the camera...

...He has found a new way to recall the gravity of September 11 and prepared us to be outraged at the ineptitude of the figures who dealt with it...

...The transition from the caustic, jaunty opening to this treatment of a horror too ghastly to behold is deeply stirring...

...The director does not allow Republicans the opportunity to defend their position...

...At points Moore descends to his customary egotism...

...It does borrow some elements from the volume, yet in so doing betrays the author's vision...

...He decried plant closings in his hometown of Flint, Michigan, and the escalation of gun violence in the U.S., but he never posed solutions to those crises...

...The second commands robots to obey the orders of human beings, so long as they do not violate the first maxim...

...On the other hand, satire, no matter how puerile, lightens his tone...

...Moore has been criticized for showing Bush and the members of his Cabinet at their most awkward, particularly in satellite feeds where, moments before making public announcements, they nervously primp for the camera...

...In Asimov, each robot is governed by its own "positronic brain" into which the laws are ingrained...

...With bad guys at large on all sides, however, he does not have time to hold down a job, write his term papers or keep a date...

...Occasionally a robot or two turned renegade, but they all buckled docilely under their constraints...

...Convinced the government is plotting against him, he takes sole credit for pressuring it to release certain papers...

...Otto Octavius (Alfred Molina) surgically attaches four huge mechanical arms, with their own artificial intelligence, to his spinal column to assist him in conducting dangerous fusion experiments...

...Icame to Fahrenheit 9/11 with low expectations...

...AFTER WATCHING this summer's other box office hits, I have begun to think the term "action movie" is a misnomer...

...Reviewing Bush's first few months in office by scoring familiar images to upbeat beach music, Moore paints him as a weak leader who prefers vacationing at his ranch to the daily grind of running the country...

...In its stinging critique of the George W. Bush Administration's hypocrisies, this low-budget work musters the resources of the cinema more powerfully and persuasively than the majority of its fictional competitors at the multiplex...

...Alongside such shattering contrasts, vestiges of the old Moore remain: exaggerations and generalizations that sap some of the film's force...

...Scenes involving real, live human beings mostly offer static chatter...

...His robots are bound by three laws whose text appears in the title sequence of the new film...

...He leaves us pondering the folly of initiating a war that is not absolutely necessary...

...Startling as it is to hear dance music or to view clips from Dragnet or Bonanza just after witnessing real-life violence, the film's frequent doses of humor hold our attention, and make the dark matters it covers palatable...

...The one robot not under VI.K.I.'s spell is Sonny (Alan Tudyk), a yet newer model whose creator has freed his positronic brain from obeisance to the laws...

...In this sequel, nuclear physicist Dr...

...ALTHOUGH too little attention has been given to the American soldiers who have died in Iraq, even less has been devoted to the wounded, who Moore claims number in the thousands...

...I call you my base...

...Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire), Spider-Man's alter ego, spends much of the film pondering giving up crime-fighting to settle into a normal life...

...Asimov had great fun playing with ethical intricacies he teased out of these rales...

...After learning that only one member of Congress has a child fighting in Iraq, he accosts a few on their way to the Capitol and asks them to send their children to war and encourage their peers to do the same...

...The director voted for Ralph Nader in 2000, but has said on talk shows that he supports the Democratic candidate...

...The tales showcased the deductive powers of heroine Susan Calvin, an elderly, persnickety "robopsychologist" who had mastered the nuances of the code and could explain all sorts of apparently erratic android behavior...

...Spider-Man 2, though less offensive, also trots out the notion that technology out of control is evil incarnate...

...In line with one of the President's more infamous remarks, Moore doesn't "do nuance...

...The only choice, in short, is to denounce him or to trust in him blindly...

...Spider-Man 2 is in the vein of the director's early horror films, particularly his three Evil Dead movies...

...But that seems stale this time around...

...With Fahrenheit 9/11 he has made big strides as an editorialist and as a filmmaker...

...Following decades of films like 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Westworld (1973) and Demon Seed (1977), not to mention the RoboCop, Terminator and Matrix trilogies, hanging on the premise that artificial intelligence always devolves into a destructive rampage, amovie that took a different tack would be more than welcome...

...The third orders robots to preserve themselves, provided that poses no conflict with the other two precepts...

...Destruction movie" might be more accurate...

...Halfway through the 20th century, Asimov had read enough yarns about machines gone mad to have grown tired of the theme...

...Her solution— a reckless line of reasoning misogynistically characterized as feminine—calls for robots to enslave humans in order to save them from themselves...

...Perhaps he was hedging his bets, trying to protect the movie from charges that it is a campaign commercial...

...I felt a chill during a clip where Bush, speaking to a group of wealthy donors, smilingly says, "Some people call you the elite...