Any other fans of Issac Asimov here?

I loved the film up until the father's death, after which the pace sort of fell apart on me. That is, the first 20(?) years of Andrew's life took the first half of the film, while the last 180 years took the second half. As a result, some of the more interesting potential character developments were missed, while others simply vanished.

What happened to the mother, for instance? The film established tension between Andrew and her and seemed (during the "laughter" scenes) to imply a forthcoming resolution, which never occurred. The older daughter likewise disappeared after making a stereotypical older-rebellious-daughter appearance on the motorcycle and at the wedding, returning only for Sam's deathbed without any mention made of if, how, when, or why a reconciliation took place. Obviously, Andrew doesn't need to have witnessed her transformation, but to throw her back into the family without a word said about it simply begs the question of how it happened, especially when all indications suggested she was accelerating away from the family.

From there, I'm afraid, the film just worsened for me. Rhetorically, and in terms of narrative, I thought Andrew's quest for others like him was interesting, even if only as a device to demonstrate his uniqueness and for getting him to Platt's character. Thereafter, though, I was less convinced.

Each further step in his evolution, it seemed, was as easily executed as conceived. "I want skin," Andrew decides, and so he gets it. "I want organs," he decides, and so he gets them. "I want a nervous system," he decides, "I want functional genitalia," and so on. Never did it seem to me that there was any difficulty in achieving these fundamentally transformative goals, even with the weakly-implied groundbreaking research required for each new step. Worse, I had no sense that Andrew was passing points of no return, or that he was risking anything in making the transformation. It's one of those nothing-ventured-nothing-gained deals, where his gain is cheapened by the fact that he (seemingly) risked nothing.

What happened to the dog? As Andrew's only friend for a presumably considerable length of time, I was surprised that it only appeared for about 10 seconds and than vanished (like so much else in the film) without a trace. Especially considering that Wolfie implied a direct link to Lil' Miss v1.0, it's strange that it wouldn't serve a more important role, or at least something more than an afterthought. I would rather Andrew had held onto the stuffed animal than a flesh-and-blood dog whose only function was to provide a single one-liner. The stuffed dog, moreover, could have been a more subtle and interesting indicator of time's passage than whiz-bang CGI shots of San Francisco and its nifty hovercars.

I flatly didn't believe the romance between Andrew and Lil' Miss v2.0, much less the implied several decades they spent together. Did nothing noteworthy happen during this time, so that nothing had to be represented except a single chess game and a wistful gazing out the window while discussing their aging? What's the deal with the offhand mention of a "DNA elixir?" That's probably the most stupendous invention Andrew had come up with thus far in the film, but it occupied _no_ screen time, or at any rate far less time than clever, attention-grabbing surgical scenes.