20th Century Fox previously transformed Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot short story collection into a film where androids scuff up Will Smith’s Converse and send him on a robot-smashing rampage. And now Fox hopes to do it all over again with Asimov’s novel The Caves Of Steel, drafting Henry Hobson (best known for creating title sequences for films like Sherlock Holmes) and rookie writer John Scott (who spends his off hours working for NASA) to tell a similar story of a human detective with an inherent dislike of automatons who’s tasked with investigating a murder, this time paired with [MP3 SCRATCH] a robot partner whom he does not like one bit, no sir. With its vision of an Earth suffocated by overpopulation, and a paranoia about robots so prevalent that it’s resulted in strict anti-robot regulations, Caves Of Steel speaks to both our current, more grounded fears and our apparent growing conviction that the robot apocalypse is nigh. And with its premise of mismatched buddy cops, in Fox’s hands maybe it could be like a robot 48 Hrs., and be the film that finally teaches humans and robots how to talk to each other through terse exchanges of colorful epithets. We’re gonna need to learn that sooner or later.
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