glumshoe:

I don’t know if this is an unpopular opinion or not, but the I, Robot movie with Will Smith had a terrible design for the robots.

The bodies were honestly pretty cool. I don’t have a problem with them, really, except that it looks like things would get snagged or caught inside their naked musculature very easily. An android designed to work around humans probably shouldn’t look like your hair will get tangled in its thumbs or biceps and ripped out if it’s trying to rescue you.

They do look very unfinished. Sonny here looks like a weird prototype rather than a completed model – which I could dig, except that this is what all the robots look like in-universe. Why don’t they have skin? The weird translucent gel of the torso, forearms, and head looks like it’s meant to absorb impacts, which is cool, but… it’s executed in a really ugly way. It doesn’t say “futuristic and corporate” to me, it says “glob of mucus”.

Ultimately, though, I think the body is fine. The FACE, though! THE FACE!

Horrible! And not ‘Uncanny Valley’ so much as Regular Ugly. The extremely realistic, limpid eyes set into gooey mucus face are so unnecessary. I am unwilling to suspend my disbelief to the point of accepting that there is a fictional universe in which this design tested well with customers. 

Look. He looks exactly like Voldemort. 

I know, I know, it was 2004 and they were going for ‘eyes are the window to the soul’ symbolism, but Bicentennial Man was 1999 and Andrew’s hard plastic face managed to be much more expressive by virtue of not being a featureless blob:

Bjork’s sexy gay robot music video came out in 1999 as well, and the designs there managed to have the ‘obviously synthetic face with hyper-realistic humanoid eyes’ without being sinfully ugly.

I just. Augh! They somehow went with the ugliest possible robot design for that movie and I don’t know why. I’d take ‘creepy’ over ‘ugly’ any day. Why, 2004?! Why?!