Subject: Review: A.I. (2001)

From: "JONATHAN RICHARDS" <[email-masked]>
Date: 7 Jul 2001 03:48:01 GMT

IN THE DARK/Jonathan Richards

A.I. (ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE)
Written and Directed by Steven Spielberg
With Haley Joel Osment, Jude Law
UA North, De Vargas     PG-13     145 min

     The first warning signal flashes on the screen with the opening 
credit: "an Amblin/Stanley Kubrick production."  Amblin, of course, 
means Steven Spielberg, and the promise of this collaboration is about 
as reassuring as a duet between Perry Como and Yoko Ono. 
     Spielberg is about sentiment, Kubrick was about detachment.  When 
you combine those two approaches, what do you get?  A robot with 
emotions.  A machine ingeniously constructed and programmed to simulate 
the responses associated with human feelings.  You get David (Haley Joel 
Osment), a mechanical device with the look of an eleven-year-old boy and 
a capacity to love and yearn for love in return.
     This project, based on a Brian Aldiss short story called "Supertoys 
Last All Summer Long", lay on Kubrick's drawing board for years, and he 
had conferred at length with Spielberg about it.  After Kubrick's sudden 
death in 1999, his friend picked up the baton.  His desire to create an 
homage to Kubrick is understandable, but the movie that came out of it 
is often labored, schizophrenic, self-indulgent, derivative, hackneyed, 
and long. 
     The story begins against rolling ocean and a Ben Kingsley 
voice-over informing us that this is the time after global warming has 
melted the polar caps and submerged much of the world.  Livable land is 
now at a premium, most of the world's poorer population has been 
drowned, there is strict governmental control over reproduction, and 
robots have taken over the menial work.  The scene shifts to the lab of 
Dr. Hobby (William Hurt), who explains the history of robots to his 
colleagues in a painfully expository lecture.  When he broaches his plan 
to build a mecha (mechanical device) that can love, he's interrupted for 
a Meaningful Question: "If we create a mecha that can love, can we get 
humans to love it in return?"
     This is the central issue of A.I., and it's a straw man.  Humans 
can love anything, animate or inanimate.  We love our cars, we love 
stuffed animals, we love all sorts of things that have neither a heart, 
nor a brain, nor courage.  Stripped down, A.I.'s premise amounts to 
this: love is the most essential of emotions, it is mechanically 
reproducible, and the computerized version is purer and more dependable 
than the human kind.
     After a number of years (leapt, thankfully, at a single bound) 
Hobby creates his prototype loving mecha, and it is brought home 
unannounced by Henry Swinton (Sam Robards) to his wife Monica (Frances 
O'Connor) as a replacement for their son Martin (Jake Thomas), who lies 
frozen in a very Kubrick-like cryogenics chamber with an incurable 
disease for which a cure will probably never (hah!) be found. 
     Spielberg's screenplay dresses story in logic with the grace of an 
ugly stepsister's foot being crammed into a glass slipper.  For reasons 
passing understanding David is accepted in the Swinton home, programmed 
to love Monica (but not Henry), and provided with a best friend, the 
comatose Martin's Supertoy Teddy bear (voiced by Jack Angel) who 
presumably comes from the shelves of some futuristic Toys R Us but is 
smarter than the cutting-edge David, and wiser indeed than anybody else 
in the movie.
     In a cool Kubrickian land of banked emotions, Teddy is pure essence 
of Spielberg, with his rolling gait and his gruff voice and his cuddly 
fur.  And when malevolent circumstances conspire to get David thrown out 
of paradise (if the chilly Swinton household can be so described), Teddy 
goes with him, a steadfast Jiminy Cricket to his lost Pinocchio, 
comforting and guiding him in his quest to find the Blue Fairy and be 
turned into a real live boy so he can go back home to Mommy and bask in 
her love. 
     The most interesting character in the movie is Jude Law as Gigolo 
Joe, a robotic sex toy who befriends David and accompanies him on his 
search for the Blue Fairy.  "She will make you a real boy," he promises 
leeringly, "for I will make her a real woman!"  But the performance the 
movie depends on is Osment's; and while there's no denying this kid's 
acting talent, we've seen his trademark scrunched-up face and manic 
intensity before and it's beginning to suffer from exposure and 
advancing age.
     A.I.'s 2 hour saga winds through three acts: home, the quest, 
and a resolution two millennia in the future.  Along the way it dazzles 
us with special effects and technical accomplishments, but they perform 
their wonders in the service of a story that is so full of shallow 
trickery, and so cluttered with elements hijacked wantonly from other 
movies ranging from The Wizard of Oz to Planet of the Apes with side 
trips through most of the Kubrick and Spielberg canons, that it abuses 
our patience and betrays the promise of true intelligence that made it 
the most anticipated movie of the summer.
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