I, Robot

Color, PG-13, 124 min. plus supplements, Dolby Digital 5.1, widescreen

Street: Dec. 14

DVD only $29.98

First Run: W, July 2004, $145 mil.

FOX

At a time when feature film budgets are skyrocketing to the cosmos to meet the demands of marquee movie stars and state-of-the-art special effects, filmmaker Alex Proyas claims to still be feeling the pinch by those who control the cash. "It sounds ridiculous to be saying that we had a tight budget on a film this ambitious, but we really did," offers Proyas on the DVD commentary track for I, Robot, his $100 million-plus adaptation of Isaac Asimov's landmark compendium of sci-fi stories. A little later, Proyas follows that statement--one of the most outrageous we have heard on a commentary track this year--with a direct slam of his film's production managers. "The problem I find is that production managers don't have any idea of what you want to see on the film," he says. "They have no sense of visual imagination quite often." Jeez, this coming from a director whose last film, Garage Days, had a budget of $6 million. Also on the commentary with Proyas is screenwriter Akiva Goldsmith, who introduces himself as the film's "final writer," a clue to some of the problems the picture apparently encountered during its production. The only other substantial extra is a pretty standard making-of featurette by Thomas Grane and Sam Hurwitz. It's interesting to note that though there are more than 1,000 effects shots in the film credited to some 10 companies, including such noted outfits as Digital Domain and Weta Digital, their presence is virtually non-existent on the DVD's supplemental materials. An effects-filled summer blockbuster with nary a look at the effects on its DVD adaptation? When is the next DVD edition coming out? --Cyril Pearl

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