Remix of original review by Hasbro

The biggest question is “Is Greg Pak really Korean?” He looks white. Anyway, his debut film is a collection of four Robot Stories. The first is a solid drama but added little over A.I., which also added little—or some— but not a lot. The second is decent melodrama, but that’s what we pay Iñárritu for. The third, Pak goes all Spike Jonze on us and produces the best episode of the bunch. Notice near the end as the femmebot rechirpitates the line about “they could have at least made them a little bigger.” This puts another tooth in the satire just as the film is showing the underdog as beautiful, and the effect is a heightened exhilaration for the viewer/geek. What The fourth feels like a fancy Outer Limits episode, ambitious, philosophical, complex but, ultimately fails to deliver, in my un-backed up opinion. Robot Stories is promising, but not quite ready for prime time. There are moments where you see how the film goes too far this way or that, uses one bit of duplicate footage too many, or tries to say a guy is on a ventilator when he’s only on nasal oxygen. There are times where the dialogue stumbles or the acting is lame, the sister in two, the husband in one. But there are also some very sublime moments too. I choose to believe the films small failures are because Pak’s goals were very ambitious. I choose to believe when Greg Pak settles in, he will be one to watch. For now he just needs to forget Rebecca Miller and do more like the third one, “Machine Love.”