A.I.
***
Cinema
Releases - September 21, 2001
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 12. 145
minutes. Directed by Steven Spielberg. Written by Spielberg; from a screen
story by Ian Watson; based on the short story "Supertoys Last All Summer
Long" by Brian Aldiss. Starring Haley Joel Osment, Jude Law, William Hurt,
Frances O'Connor, Sam Robards, Brendan Gleeson.
We know that "A.I." was a project
Stanley Kubrick had been working on for years. We know that after his death
it was passed on to Steven Spielberg, because Kubrick had always said Spielberg
would be the perfect director for the piece. And we've heard all the pre-release
speculation about whether the detached aura of Kubrick's work and the
sentimentality of Spielberg would make for a good combination.
And now the movie is here, and it falters towards
the finale, but before that it is a wonderful visionary achievement. There
are chapters here that call for great visual ingenuity, such as when the
main character, a robot child named David (Haley Joel Osment), must learn
to find his way around a human household and learn the rhythms of human family
life. We are shown stunning futuristic cities where cyborgs live among real
people, serving their purposes. We come across a so-called 'flesh fair' that
the organisers call a 'celebration of life', where mobs murder humanoids
with great glee and declare that they are 'ending artificiality'. And there
is an awesome final journey to a flooded Manhattan, whose images include
an eerily prophetic shot of the World Trade Centre towers in
ruins.
The film takes place decades from now, when a
brilliant scientist played by William Hurt has created robots with the ability
to actually think and feel. A couple played by Sam Robards and Frances O'Connor
buy one, the aforementioned David -- their real son is in a coma and they're
waiting for a medical breakthrough before he can come home. The first third
of "A.I." shows David forming a bond with his new mother, before a series
of misunderstandings forces her to give him up.
David is supposed to be returned to the factory
for destruction, but O'Connor can't bring herself to let him be killed, and
so she turns him loose and drives off. David feels too much love for his
mother to be anywhere that she isn't, and so he goes on a quest to return
to her, believing that if he can find the Blue Fairy from "Pinocchio" he
can become a real boy.
The search for Blue Fairy takes David to those
amazing-looking cities, as well as the 'flesh fair', which has some creepy
reminders of "Schindler's List". David also runs into a conceited piece of
artificial intelligence named Gigolo Joe (Jude Law), a robot built to pleasure
lonely women who ends up using his street smarts to help our
protagonist.
These "Pinocchio"-type stories, in which we're
asked to sympathise with machines, have never much involved my emotions.
I simply don't buy it when "DARYL" and "Bicentennial Man" inexplicably 'become
human'. "A.I." is different; the way David feels drawn to his mother is engaging,
poignant and pitiful, because the whole point of the plot is that David has
been created to feel emotion. "Their brains are mere fibres!" declares the
'flesh fair' merchant, but of course so are human brains -- all physical
things are made of atoms, and if something is able to have a consciousness,
then for all intents and purposes it is alive.
The movie looks astonishing, and in this respect
it really does fuse the strengths of Kubrick and Spielberg, who have even
at their weakest moments been directors whose movies boast great technical
credits. But I can see why Spielberg was drawn to this project on top of
the great visual challenge; it touches on some of his pet subjects, such
as forms of life different to our own ("Close Encounters of the Third Kind"),
the Holocaust ("Schindler's List") and the fragile thing that is family life
(Spielberg has always said that the screenplay of "E.T." draws heavily on
his parents' divorce).
As they get older, some directors lose their ability
to ruthlessly edit their work, and their movies get unfocused. "A.I." is
an enthralling piece of filmmaking, and the least flabby Spielberg picture
in several years -- until the ending. There is a perfect moment to close
this picture, when David takes control of a sort of submarine-type craft
and is about to submerge in the New York waters to find what he's been looking
for. But instead "A.I." drags on for a fifteen-minute stretch that goes from
unnecessary to weird and ends up simply mawkish. Pity.
COPYRIGHT©
2001 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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