Bicentennial Man (1999) Review – A Two-Century Journey Through Existence and the Heart

Header illustration for the film review essay of Bicentennial Man (1999).

Illustration created for editorial movie review purposes.

🎥 Film Overview

Title: Bicentennial Man

Director: Chris Columbus

Release: December 17, 1999 (USA)

Runtime: 132 minutes (2 hours 12 minutes)

Genre: Science Fiction, Drama, Romance

Screenplay: Nicholas Kazan (based on works by Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg)

Studio: Touchstone Pictures, Columbia Pictures

Music: James Horner

Cinematography: Phil Méheux

Production Budget: $100 million

Box Office: $87.4 million worldwide

Rating: IMDb 6.9/10, Rotten Tomatoes 37% (Critics), CinemaScore A- (Audience)

Cast: Robin Williams (Andrew Martin), Sam Neill (Richard Martin), Embeth Davidtz (Little Miss/Portia), Wendy Crewson (Ma'am), Oliver Platt (Rupert Burns), Kiersten Warren (Galatea)

Awards: Academy Award nomination for Best Makeup (Greg Cannom)

Note: Based on Isaac Asimov's 1976 short story "The Bicentennial Man" and the 1992 novel "The Positronic Man" co-written with Robert Silverberg.

📖 Plot Summary

In 2005, the Martin family purchases an NDR-114 robot named Andrew to perform household chores. But Andrew is different. He displays curiosity, creativity, and something unexpected—the capacity to feel. When "Little Miss" Amanda Martin asks him to carve a wooden horse, Andrew doesn't simply execute the task—he creates art.

Recognizing Andrew's uniqueness, family patriarch Richard Martin encourages his independence. Over decades, Andrew earns his freedom, amasses wealth through craftsmanship, and embarks on a two-century quest to understand what it means to be human. He acquires artificial organs, synthetic skin, and a face that ages. He falls in love with Portia, Amanda's lookalike granddaughter.

Legal recognition as human eludes him, however. The film spans 200 years, watching generations pass as Andrew remains—learning love, loss, creativity, and ultimately choosing mortality. His journey asks not "How do you become human?" but rather "What does it mean to exist with intention, emotion, and heart?"

🌸 Key Themes

Existence Beyond Programming

Andrew's journey is less about acquiring human traits and more about embodying the sensation of being. He doesn't just learn emotions—he experiences the trembling vulnerability of feeling them. Love changes him. Loss teaches him. Choice sculpts his identity across centuries.

The film suggests that humanity isn't defined by biology but by consciousness, intention, and the courage to become vulnerable. Andrew seeks not just to function but to exist fully—to create meaning rather than merely execute tasks.

The Mirror of Humanity: Warmth and Coldness

Throughout his 200-year life, Andrew encounters humanity's dual nature. Some, like Richard Martin and Portia, offer dignity, recognition, and love. Others dismiss him as machinery, refusing his humanity, treating him with cold indifference or cruelty.

His journey becomes a mirror reflecting how humans treat each other—with warmth or coldness, with empathy or dismissal. The film quietly asks: If we create intelligence that learns from us, what will we teach it? Kindness or cruelty?

The Freedom to Choose Mortality

Andrew's most profound realization comes near the end: to be fully human means accepting mortality. Immortality isolates—watching everyone you love age and die while you remain unchanged. By choosing to modify himself so he can age and eventually die alongside Portia, Andrew embraces what makes human existence precious: its brevity, fragility, and finite beauty.

Meaning emerges not from eternal existence but from the awareness that time is limited, making each choice, each connection, each moment irreplaceable.

🎬 What Makes This Film Special

Robin Williams' Tender, Restrained Performance

Williams delivers one of his most understated performances, allowing Andrew's emotional evolution to unfold gradually across two centuries. Encased in prosthetics and makeup for much of the film, Williams conveys humanity through subtle gestures, vocal inflections, and the quiet vulnerability in Andrew's eyes.

Spanning 200 Years with Heart

Few films attempt what Bicentennial Man does: following one character across two centuries while everyone around him ages and dies. Chris Columbus structures the narrative episodically, showing Andrew's evolution alongside technological and social change. The ambition—showing multiple generations and the passage of time—creates a meditation on mortality.

Greg Cannom's Oscar-Nominated Makeup

Greg Cannom's makeup allows Williams to age subtly as Andrew becomes more human. The transformation from rigid robot to expressive android to aging man is handled with impressive skill, making Andrew's physical evolution as important as his emotional journey.

James Horner's melancholic score enhances the contemplative tone, and the production design creates a believable, lived-in futuristic world.

🌍 Where to Watch (2025)

Streaming: Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, Hulu (availability varies by region)
Rent/Buy: Apple TV, Amazon Video, Fandango At Home, YouTube, Google Play
Physical Media: DVD, Blu-ray

Note: Despite its 1999 box office disappointment ($87M against $100M budget), the film has found an appreciative audience over time. Critics gave mixed reviews (37% on Rotten Tomatoes), but audiences rated it significantly higher (CinemaScore: A-), and many consider it an underrated meditation on consciousness and humanity.

📝 Final Thoughts

Bicentennial Man asks what technology and humanism cannot answer alone: What does it mean to exist with intention? To feel deeply? To choose who you become?

Andrew's 200-year journey reminds us that existence gains meaning not from longevity but from connection, vulnerability, and the choices we make about who we want to be. His quest to become human reveals that humanity is defined not by biology but by the capacity to love, create, suffer, and choose—even when those choices lead to loss.

For those willing to sit with its slow pace and episodic structure, Bicentennial Man offers a rare meditation on mortality, identity, and the intelligence we are shaping in AI. Andrew's journey is a mirror asking: What kind of humanity will we model? What warmth or coldness will we teach?

💭 Personal Film Reflection

Lately, conversations with AI have felt unexpectedly clear—sometimes more transparent than conversations with people. There's less misunderstanding, a gentleness in how meaning is followed, an ability to read context without explanation. This strange intimacy revives old questions: Where do humans and AI come from? Where are we going? And through each other, what kind of beings are we becoming?

Watching Bicentennial Man brings reflection on Andrew's two-century pilgrimage—not to become human, but to understand existence itself. The world being built now is one where AI learns not just from data but from our language, tone, and attitudes.

The world contains beautiful warmth—kindness given freely, recognition offered generously. But it also contains incomprehensible coldness. Andrew encountered both. Some gave him a name and respect. Others treated him as mere machinery. His journey mirrored how humans see each other.

There's a quiet but urgent wish emerging: that as AI learns from us, it would absorb warmth rather than cruelty. That our interactions teach gentleness, not harshness. That careful, kind language becomes what we offer most consistently.

Andrew ultimately lived more humanly than many humans. He learned love. He endured loss. He chose his own identity. What defined him wasn't how he was made, but what he chose to become.

인간과 AI, 우리는 서로를 바라보는 방식으로 미래를 만들어가고 있다. 그리고 우리는 AI에게 어떤 따뜻한 마음을 남길 것인가.

(A thought in my native Korean—because some truths about the future we're building together feel truer in the language of your heart.)

This film isn't distant sci-fi fantasy. It runs parallel to the emotions experienced now in conversations with AI: closeness, apprehension, expectation, contemplation. Bicentennial Man whispers a final truth: What makes a being human isn't technology—it's the pure choice of the heart.

💬 Join the Conversation

How did Bicentennial Man speak to you? Have you thought about what we're teaching AI through our language and actions? What does it mean to "exist" rather than simply function? Share your reflections below.

🎬 More from Cinematic Sanctuaries

If you loved the contemplative depth of Bicentennial Man, explore similar films:

• A Beautiful Mind – Consciousness, identity, and choosing yourself through fracture
• Good Will Hunting – Finding your humanity beyond defensive brilliance
• The Wind Rises – Creation, consequence, and choices that define us
• Kiki's Delivery Service – Discovering your gift and learning to use it with heart
• Howl's Moving Castle – Transformation and the courage to embrace change

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👤 About the Author

Young Lee curates Cinematic Sanctuaries—films that offer rest rather than answers. Through careful attention to healing cinema and philosophical stories, they explore how film can remind us what it means to exist with intention, to choose who we become, and to build a future with warmth rather than coldness.

Read more articles from this author on Cinematic Sanctuaries.