I've always wanted to review and place Bicentennial Man on the Millennium Museum's shelves, but have never found the time to sit down and watch it with "Millennium Item" status in mind. When I learned of Robin Williams' passing last night, I thought, "Now's as good a time as any to do it."
For the purpose of this review, let me put the collective mourning to one side and get on with analyzing the movie. Robin, I'll sorely miss you, but I'd much rather concentrate on your life than your death. Simply put, you lived, and will always live on, your body of work preserved on film and in video. Who knows? Maybe one day they'll put out "The Complete Robin Williams" as a three-holocube set!
Now: What makes Bicentennial Man a Millennium Item? Obviously its 1999 date and "turn of the millennium" sensibility, but its near-future vision is its central qualifier. Based upon Isaac Asimov's short story "The Positronic Man," Bicentennial Man's story concerns itself with an android who develops a soul and follows it through to gain his own freedom and eventually become a human.
Andrew, the main character, is "born" on April 3rd, 2005 (He's a member of the April 3rd Club--wa-hey!!), but it's a 2005 that's slightly removed from the real world. (When I reviewed a pair of Hallmark robot ornaments last Christmas, I stated my doubt that a humanoid, bipedal robot would ever really catch on, because the "walking" movement is too complex to pull off for a mass-market robot.)
The earliest indications of the future are subtle, restricted to cars, interior design, and the Andrew robots, which are very plain-looking, streamlined, and more than a little Art Deco. The first time we see anything that overtly screams "The Future!" is in the CEO's office at North-Am Robotics, from which I can only conclude that the wealthy are the first ones to get anything truly futuristic, and from that point on, it cascades down upon the world of the more ordinary folk.
Having said that, however, the future touches are always muted, nothing too overt, even as time passes. The wild fashions of tomorrow, long a staple of science-fiction movies (and codified in Back to the Future II and others), is presented here as fairly subdued. The clothing is firmly recognizable as clothing, but the design is somewhat different. Only as the decades go by does the future become recognizably "THE FUTURE!" Cars begin to fly, technology becomes a little more compact (Sam Neill as the father is seen using something like an I-Pad in his old age, but it's a little clunkier than the latter-day reality--it has a thick housing, a few manual buttons, and other "retro" accessories).
Bicentennial Man is also a Millennium Item because it is steeped in possibilities. I myself was most in awe of Andrew's self-designed artificial organs, which become commonplace in 22nd/23rd Century medicine. In fact, it provides the United Nations council with a bit of a moral dilemma: Can they deny Andrew humanity when they themselves are part machine thanks to his organ replacements? It's a variation on the "Voyage of Captain Theseus" philosophical dilemma, and, though the Council neatly answers the question, it's still excellent food for thought.
Spurred on by this denial, he takes the final plunge and becomes fully human. Finally freed, he dies on his two-hundredth birthday, a happy man.
All in all, Bicentennial Man is a vision of tomorrow that, like the year 1999, straddles past, present, and future. That it does so in a present day that's only somewhat distanced from our own only highlights the surprises that might lie ahead in the next century. It also makes a few interesting points, most notably this: If we're to live to see the year in which Andrew Martin finally becomes human, then we'd better start treating ourselves and our possessions with considerably more respect than we currently are.
