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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