The Bicentennial Man

I am not the most emotional person in the world- I have always had a slightly more rational rather than emotional bent of mind. And I very rarely get sentimental about fiction – A live play could still perhaps tug at heartstrings but a film or a book almost never. I do remember feeling a bit sad during the end of Great Expectations as Pip’s great expectations go down the drain but rarely anything else. I have even seen Lady and the Tramp without getting all overwrought. But there is one story which gets me every time I read it – if you have read the title of this post, it’s fairly obvious – The Bicentennial Man, by Isaac Asimov.

By the time Andrew actually says “Little Miss” at the end of the story I almost always have a lump in my throat and am slightly moist in the eyes – every time I read it. It’s a bit difficult to understand why a story of a robot should be so emotional. And as you read the story it doesn’t initially hit you as very emotional. Most Asimov’s robot stories are not emotional at all. In fact, the short stories are often based on word play or hard, cold reasoning. And as Bicentennial Man proceeds it follows the same route- you can see the rational steps in the story as it progresses. But somewhere towards the end it begins to change. Is it the fact that a robot is trying to make himself (itself?) human which is so emotional? Or is it the fact that the robot embraces a human life? After all, when Flint no longer remains immortal in “Requiem for Methuselah” (Star Trek – TOS), it doesn’t create the same impact (even though when Spock learns of Flint’s mortality and that he would die he says that “on that day he shall mourn”) Why should this be different?

Or is it simply Asimov’s genius in narrating the story? Asimov himself has said that this is perhaps the best story he has ever written. But the narrative style is not very different from other Asimov stories. So, what makes this so heart- wrenching? I really don’t have an answer to this question. But it still gets me every time.

I suspect that many people would not have read the story but watched the Robin Williams film. That was a disaster! They completely ruined it and actually had Andrew ending up marrying Little Miss’s grand daughter – Portia (played by the same actress as Little Miss)! They created a female Andrew in Galatea and generally messed up the entire emotional feeling of Andrew wanting to be human.

Which brings me to another point- why has Asimov been so badly brought on to screen. I can think of only two of his books on screen – Bicentennial Man and I, Robot (Fantastic Voyage was an original screen play which Asimov adapted into a book) and both are disasters!

Now, let me rephrase that - If you have never read an Isaac Asimov and indeed, not read the stories which go into I, Robot (the film) you might conceivably like these films. They are well made, slick productions and certainly in the case of I, Robot contains pretty decent action. But the films go so much against the grain of what Asimov stood for that they qualify as disasters on the adaptation itself.

I have already mentioned a bit about The Bicentennial Man where they needlessly introduced a romantic angle (which completely misses the point that Andrew remains a robot and cannot fall in love) …and if I remember correctly wanting to marry Portia is one of his motivations in wanting to be declared human – which goes against the very basis of the story of wanting to be a human for the sake of being human. They also brought in Galatea, a female Andrew – when the uniqueness of Andrew is one of the key points of the story.

But I, Robot is worse. It uses ideas from Asimov’s collection of short stories I, Robot but eventually ends up as a “robot as a menace” story when the entire thrust of I, Robot (the book) and indeed most of Asimov’s robot stories, was to move away from the “robot as a menace” concept. To that extent, the movie is a complete betrayal of Asimov’s ideologies as shown in his books.

It’s not that good science fiction can’t be made on the screen. Both Star Wars and Star Trek (TOS) are pretty good. Jules Verne and H.G. Wells have been adapted quite faithfully. And of course the 2001 series from Arthur C Clarke is good. But for some reason Asimov has not been shown well on screen.

But then, when he writes stories like the Bicentennial Man, who cares about the screen? Magic in prose, is all I can say!