Overall Rating
  Awesome: 26.32%
Worth A Look: 32.2%
Average: 14.86%
Pretty Bad: 10.84%
Total Crap: 15.79%
12 reviews, 251 user ratings
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| A.I.: Artificial Intelligence |
by Brian McKay
"From Kubrickese to Spielbergian, something got lost in the translation"
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If I had to sum this up in one sentence, I'd call it "The best movie I didn't like". Which is not to say I didn't like anything about it, because there is a lot to enjoy here, and in fact the first half of the film is pretty solid. But it begins to take on a schizophrenic nature as it bounces back and forth between Kubrick's and Spielberg's styles. The result never quite gels, and what could have been a dark but brilliant film drags on until it finally finds some kind of happy ending.I really was looking forward to A.I. Since one of my favorite films of all time is "Blade Runner", I was excited to see the Kubrick--by-proxy view of robot slavery, rebellion, and the question of whether a machine can have a soul. While A.I. admirably attempts to explore these themes, It seems that these weightier issues are pushed to the side in this high-tech re-telling of Pinnochio.
A.I. takes place in a future where polar ice caps have melted and destroyed many major coastal cities (this is it's only resemblance to "WaterWorld", thank God). As a result, resources are limited, so human procreation is allowed by license only and robots have been created to do all the dirty, dangerous work. The term robots is replaced by the label "Mecha", while humans are referred to as "Orga" (for organics). Of course, the inevitable "pleasure models" have emerged (and really, who among us wouldn't mind keeping one of those in the closet "In Case of Emergency"). However, nobody has ever created a child robot, or a robot that can love. Professor Hobby (William Hurt) sets out to be the first A.I. designer to do both, modeling the David prototype (Haley Joel Osmont) after his own dead son. David is placed to live with the Swinton family, whose real son is in a cryogenically induced coma, awaiting a cure for his terminal illness. David is imprinted to love his human "mother", Monica (Frances O'Connor), who grows to love him in return.
After the Swinton's human son awakes from his coma and comes home, however, the inevitable sibling rivalry takes place. When David nearly drowns the Swinton's flesh son by complete accident, he is percieved as malfunctioning and dangerous, and Monica takes him back to the factory to be destroyed. Her love for the machine/child won't let her carry it through, however, so she instead turns him loose in the woods and urges him to run away and find others of his own kind. Through a series of bizarre events, he hooks up with Gigolo Joe (Jude Law), a pleasure model mecha who becomes his guide through the perils of the world. He aids David in his quest to find the "Blue Fairy" from the story of Pinnochio, who David thinks is a real being with the power to turn him into a boy of flesh and blood.
The first couple of hours of the film are fascinating and entertaining. The performances are fantastic, especially from Jude Law and Haley Joel Osmont. The characters are richly developed. David is a perfect mixture of a boy's behavior and that of a machine. Gigolo Joe is reminiscent of Alex De Large from "A Clockwork Orange", providing both comic relief and a cold voice of reason when he tells David about the plight of A.I.'s in the world. Even David's constant companion "Teddy", a robotic teddy bear that resembles Snuggles the Bear on Valium and sounds like H.A.L. from Kubrick's "2001 a space oddessy" manages to be more interesting than many of the film's humans. In fact, the film boasts a bizarre collection of A.I. that make the Mos Eisly Cantina scene from "Star Wars" look about as racially diverse as a Shriner's convention (and look for voice cameos from Chris Rock and Robin Williams). It is a fascinating world that Spielberg builds up, one that I would have like to explored in more depth.
Unfortunately, here's where the movie starts to go south. When David does, in a manner of speaking, find the "Blue Fairy" he prays to her over and over, begging her to make him a real boy of flesh and blood. The camera pulls back and away, the scene grows dark. I'm thinking "What a depressing but perfectly fitting ending. The boy prays and prays for what can never be, not realizing that, at least mentally and emotionally, he has become what he sought to be all along. This is fucking brilliant!"
Then the movie goes on for another twenty minutes, and I'm thinking "What the fuck happened here?" While those final 20 minutes have somewhat of a Kubrick vibe to them, they feel like they were tacked on by Spielberg, as if he didn't want to end the movie on such a down note, but wasn't sure how he could get it back on track to a more positive finale'. I kept watching and thinking, "Oh, okay, I guess it will end here". Wrong again. Like some futuristic mecha Energizer bunny from hell, It just kept going and going, until it finally reached and ending that would most likely not alienate the average test audience. The film also gets bogged down in some fairly bogus-sounding technology. For example, David can be fully submerged, breathing in water and all, and not take any damage, but if he eats a mouthfull of spinach he starts to malfunction. And would something as advanced as a robot with human skin, emotions, etcetera, have something as primitive inside of him as printed circuit cards? And the explanation of why a human revived from a D.N.A. sample can only survive for one day makes no sense at all.I can only imagine that if Kubrick himself had actually directed, we would have ended up with a very different movie. For the most part, Spielberg does an admirable job, but it just starts to feel aimless after a certain point, like a mecha pleasure model that has worn out it's welcome. Probably worth seeing once for all that it does well, but far from the instant classic and the deep exploration of a society supported by robot slavery that I had hoped for.
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=4734&reviewer=258
originally posted: 07/02/01 10:28:37
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USA
29-Jun-2001 (PG-13)
UK
N/A
Australia
13-Sep-2001 (M)
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