Det. Del Spooner is on the case. Will Smith plays Spooner, a Chicago Police Department detective who doesn’t think it’s suicide. He has a deep-seated mistrust of robots, despite the famous Three Laws of Robotics, which declare above all that a robot must not harm a human being.
The dead man is Dr. Alfred Lanning (James Cromwell), who, we are told, wrote the Three Laws. Every schoolchild knows the laws were set down by the good doctor Isaac Asimov, after a conversation he had on Dec. 23, 1940, with John W. Campbell, the legendary editor of Astounding Science Fiction. It is peculiar that no one in the film knows that, especially since the film is “based on the book by Isaac Asimov.” Would it have killed the filmmakers to credit Asimov?
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/i-robot-2004
