Bicentennial Man at 25: Why Robin Williams’ sci-fi movie bomb is still misunderstood

By Blair Marnell Published December 16, 2024

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the death of actor and comedian Robin Williams, who embodied a wide variety of characters during his career. He voiced the genie in Disney’s Aladdin, he was an alien in Mork & Mindy, and he played a killer in Christopher Nolan’s Insomnia. 25 years ago this month, Williams played a robot named Andrew in Bicentennial Man, an adaptation of two Isaac Asimov stories. In this world, Andrew has uniquely humanlike qualities, but he also has difficulty being recognized as a sentient being by a world that isn’t ready to accept that he’s more than just a robot. 

At the time of its release, Bicentennial Man was savaged by critics who found it “mawkish” and “sentimental” while seemingly failing to grasp what it was supposed to be. This isn’t a robot action movie, and Andrew’s journey toward humanity is largely guided by the love he has for others. It’s not a perfect film by any means, but Bicentennial Man‘s best qualities have been overlooked for too long, and now the film is barely available to stream. It deserves a better digital afterlife than that.

Without Williams around to provide his insights on playing Andrew, we can only speculate about what the film meant to him. But Williams was dedicated enough to the role that he actually wore the Andrew robot for the first half of the movie when his character still outwardly resembled a conventional robot.

The actor also seemed to relish the opportunity to play an artificial man who goes on a two-century journey to be recognized as a unique sentient being.

Asimov’s novels and stories have sometimes been called clinical because he doesn’t always seem very interested in writing about the ways humans relate to each other or fall in love. That’s why there is no love story in the short stories that inspired this movie, but there is one in the film as it explores the different kinds of love that Andrew feels for his owners in the Martin family.

One of the more interesting relationships that Andrew has is with Richard Martin (Sam Neill), his direct owner. Richard shields Andrew from destruction when his creativity freaks out the company that made him. Rather than allowing the company to scrap Andrew, Richard protects him and urges him to explore his humanlike qualities. He’s a true friend to Andrew, which is why he’s so deeply hurt when Andrew offers him money for his independence. Richard never saw himself as a master, and the idea of that offended him so greatly that it severely strains his friendship with Andrew.

Andrew also feels deeply connected to Richard’s youngest daughter, Amanda “Little Miss” Martin (Hallie Kate Eisenberg), before eventually falling in love with Amanda’s daughter, Portia Charney (Embeth Davidtz), decades later. The love story of the film unfolds between Andrew and Portia, and that also fuels his desire to become even more human.

This future world isn’t very kind to robots, and it’s made clear early in the film that robots have no rights under the law. They are simply tools to be exploited by humanity. If there’s a major failing in the movie, it’s that Andrew never seriously questions if he should become human, given how imperfect our species is. Instead, Andrew realizes that his mind will never be enough to convince humans that he’s like them, so he undergoes body modifications to be more human. At that point, Andrew suddenly looks a lot like Robin Williams.

The movie portrayed Andrew’s slow transformation as a triumph, but it’s hard to call it that when the journey requires him to give up almost everything that made him unique in the first place. It is what Andrew wanted, but being human — or as close to human as possible — means that Andrew can’t go on forever. He’ll have to live and die as a man.

Although this film wasn’t meant to be connected to Will Smith’s I, Robot movie, Disney’s 2019 acquisition of Fox means that 20th Century Studios films like I, Robot are now Disney flicks as well. Since Disney already produced Bicentennial Man, we could argue that a shared universe is already in place.

It’s a little harder to make that work with Foundation since that sci-fi series is on Apple TV+. But I, Robot and Bicentennial Man were meant to be the distant past of Asimov’s Foundation universe. In that regard, it’s interesting to see that the universe never really became a paradise and that there were robot wars against humanity. However, Bicentennial Man embraces hope rather than mapping out an uncertain future. And it gives Andrew the happy ending (for him) he always wanted.

Rent or buy Bicentennial Man on Prime Video.