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A.I.: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Send This Review to a Friend
So many scenes are a knockout in Spielberg's genuinely intelligent "A.I.: Artificial Intelligence," but none more effectively startling than the sight of a woman looking as flesh-and-blood as a woman can look (played by an actress, of course) suddenly, in a stroke of technical illusion, having her face lifted upward to reveal a tangle of computer parts. She is an especially lifelike robot, and the scene dramatically sets the tone for the film's remarkable mix of the human world with the robot world that inspires so much dazzling imagery in this must-see film that attempts to peer profoundly into the moral and ethical problems that humanity may face in our ever-expanding technological future. Despite the excursion into science fiction, what may be Spielberg's most maturely ambitious work remains anchored to emotion.
But stretching the emotion into a convoluted fairy tale is labored and extended in the film's latter portion, thereby undercutting the film's less sentimental achievements, but even with this criticism, related to what is probably typical of Spielberg's outlook, "A.I." is smashingly strong and creative, a major work of the year as well as an important achievement in the director's total output.
We are already into the future when the woman robot referred to above is being demonstrated to the staff of a robot manufacturing company by William Hurt as Professor Hobby. It is a time when global warming has resulted in the rise of oceans. Manhattan and much of the East coast is largely under water. Hobby insists there is a great challenge ahead--to create a robot that can express love. Someone asks whether humans will be capable of loving a robot in return. Twenty months later a robot boy named David, played wonderfully from start to finish by the remarkable Haley Joel Osment, has been created, and the company decides to experiment with him by placing him with a company employee (Sam Robards) and his wife (Frances O'Connor), whose own son has fallen ill and is being preserved cryogenically in hope a cure will be found so that he can be revived and restored to health.
Complications begin when the sick boy is indeed revived and in a mean-spirited sibling rivalry, he taunts David for not being a real boy. A harrowing incident leads to David being taken for a ride by his "mother" and abandoned, and that shakes him up emotionally and sets him on a quest to find the Blue Fairy who will turn him into a real boy so that he can be loved. Shades of "Pinocchio."
Stanley Kubrick had long thought of making such a film, which Spielberg has now written based on a screen story by Ian Watson and a short story by Brian Aldiss. Spielberg says Kubrick at one point wanted him to direct it and that they had many communications about the idea, although Spielberg always felt it really should be Kubrick who directs. After Kubrick died, his heirs asked Spielberg to do the film and he agreed. So what have we? Obviously a mix of sensibilities.
This must remain conjecture, but it is doubtful that Kubrick would have been so sentimental and so verbal in the latter part of the film, when the fairy tale portion goes on and on. This is not entirely bad. By the time we reach the emotional climax, David, thanks in no mall measure to Osment, can wring tears from an audience. But David's journey, interrupted when he is left at the bottom of the ocean covering Manhattan, resumes when he is discovered well-preserved after 2000 years by strange, thin beings from a future civilization. It's a long quest.
Apart from getting caught up with David, "A.I." is a marvel of ideas and effects. David is given a lovable super toy, a teddy bear, as an amusing, protective and wise companion. David also meets Gigolo Joe, a robot played by handsome Jude Law, who is hired by women to deliver his specialty--sexual pleasure. Joe's servicing is both humorous and raunchy as he assures A womAn that once she has had him, sex will never be as good.
There are frightening and garish scenes as humans hunt robots to stem their proliferation, and in a cruel circus-like show, human audience members cheer as they watch the destruction of robots as entertainment. It is a fate that threatens David when he is caught. There are also weirdly chilling scenes of deformed robots rummaging in junkyards for parts to replace portions of their shattered faces or their lost limbs. One can enjoy "A.I." for the look of it alone, and in that sense the film probably does justice to whatever imagery Kubrick may have been conjuring.
What makes "A.I." so compelling most of the way, apart from its cinematic pleasures and brilliant use of contemporary technology, is its inherent warning that humankind must think about the implications of the advances that science is making and what the dangers will be. Although told through the very "human" story of a robot boy looking for love in return for what he is programmed to give, lurking are contemporary concerns about such possibilities as creating new human beings through cloning, pre-determining sex and other so-called progress.
Nobody should confuse "A.I." with being a family film, although older children should certainly be able to grasp it and be moved. But beneath the fairy tale lies a tough, acerbic viewpoint expressed with immense talent and an eye for entertainment by Spielberg. A Warner Bros. release.
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