William Butler Yeats wrote a poem once about a human child stolen away by faeries into a Sylvan Wye. It was for an 1889 collection of poetry called Crossways, and it’s called “The Stolen Child,” here’s the chorus:

Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can
understand.

Steven Spielberg, who once admitted in an interview that the only book he ever read in its entirety was The Color Purple (and look what he did to that), uses Mr. Yeats’s poem – just the chorus of it quoted above – in A. I. as a clue and then an invitation to an artificial boy looking for a means to become a “real” boy. This is not entirely inappropriate, it seemed, as Yeats’s poem is a menacing invitation to a child to seek an unattainable paradise at the expense of his life – but I’m not giving anything away when I say that Spielberg is entirely incapable of honoring the darkness of Yeats’s nostalgic modernist vision – and I’m also not giving anything away to say that Spielberg is entirely incapable of honoring the darkness of Kubrick’s misanthropic vision. In fact, ever since Spielberg began to believe that billions of dollars of box office made him some kind of kind-eyed teacher/messiah, responsible for the salvation of mankind, there’s been very little of his work that has been anything vaguely surprising. . . nor honorable.

We may have no better purely imagistic director working in the United States today and each of his films (maybe not 1941), has a moment or two of pure visual majesty. His listless “adult-themed” films are marvels of a cinematic bait-and-switch – he slips a dead rabbit into our pockets while we’re distracted by an expertly crafted illusion. A. I., predictably, has a moment or two of pure visual majesty. Sadly, one of them, involving a moon-shaped craft used to harvest “lost boy” robots in a dark forest, is recycled (much like the cast-off robots scrounging for spare parts) from his own E. T.. Sadly again, the other visually majestic moment is an apocalyptic underwater city scene that appears to have been cribbed from, of all things, Waterworld.

A.I. was to be Stanley Kubrick’s last project but, unable to fashion a screenplay with which he was happy even after more than a decade of work, Kubrick’s last project became the puzzling Eyes Wide Shut. The promotional machine’s in overdrive now to reassure that Kubrick had intended to pass on the A. I. project to Spielberg anyway – sort of a last wish of a dying genius – a deathbed passing of the torch and all the destiny such a symbolic act would imply. I worry whenever equivocations of value are made before the product’s even been released – “listen, I have it on good authority that Kubrick wanted Spielberg to direct A. I..” The implication of such a statement, of course, is that if it sucks, blame Kubrick. I also worry when a hyper-literate man like Stanley Kubrick (who, rumor has it, has finished – and understood – more books than just A Clockwork Orange) is unable to finish a screenplay in ten years that an admittedly non-literate man like Spielberg pounds out in less than two.

My sad suspicion is that Spielberg fashions himself as thoughtful a filmmaker as Kubrick. In his introductory speech for the man upon Kubrick receiving a lifetime achievement Oscar a few years back, Spielberg praised the director for his “vision of hope,” begging the question, of course, of what it is, exactly, Spielberg was watching when he thought he was watching Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange, Full Metal Jacket, The Killing, Killer’s Kiss, Paths of Glory, and so on. Further illustrating the intellectual and philosophical gulf between the two filmmakers, Kubrick himself once suggested that Spielberg’s Schindler’s List was something less than an honorable film about the Holocaust: (Schindler’s List) was about success, wasn't it? The Holocaust is about six million people who get killed. Schindler's List was about six hundred people who don't.

It appears as though Spielberg’s poor reading comprehension carries over into a poor general comprehension, and it appears as though Spielberg’s hubrical flaw has conspired to not only devalue what is heavily touted as Kubrick’s legacy, but to dishonor the brilliant speculative fiction of Brian Aldiss.[1] That Spielberg cannot even in a tribute to his late great and sober friend subsume his nauseating instinct to desperately fashion an E.T./Elliot “be good” tear-jerking finale is testament to the director’s strange Oedipal cocktail of bloated self-satisfaction and a puerile and indefatigable desire to please.

the plot + commentary, segments 1-3

The first segment of A.I., concerns a couple who “adopts” a mechanical boy, David (Haley Joel Osment: The Sixth Sense) that has been programmed to simulate “love.” Though the house design with Janusz Kaminski's lighting, all saturated whites and expanses of soft blue gray, is meant to evoke a Kubrick-ian sterility, the intrusion of John Williams’s unbearably saccharine score and Spielberg’s predictable misunderstanding of the importance of Kubrick’s pessimistic take on man’s ambition and technologies fatally undermines any kind of moodiness.

Osment is suitably creepy as a life-like automaton (just as he was in The Sixth Sense and Pay It Forward), but he is so successful in his performance that it becomes impossible to think of David as the “real boy” it so wishes to be, and thus for us to develop any kind of sympathy for it. If A.I. intends to be a treatise on the morality of creating human-seeming automatons that can simulate thought and emotion (or actually develop thought and emotion like the replicants of Blade Runner), then the focus of the film needs to be on the morality of the creators and not on the hunk of metal upon which we have projected our desires and fantasies.

A tired opening voice-over (though not as tired as the closing voice-over) sets the play in the near future when the polar ice caps have melted because of “green house gases” resulting in the loss of all coastal cities and a massive shift of human population. We are informed of birth restrictions for couples wishing to reproduce leading to the rise in popularity of robots that consume “no more precious resources than those used in their manufacture.” Three things:

1. the birth restriction element doesn’t apply to David’s foster parents (as it does in the Aldiss short story) as they have a son who has been cryogenically frozen because of a currently incurable cancer – so why mention it?

2. David’s foster parents are clearly not the ideal test family despite an exhaustive search by David's manufacturers for the ideal test family, as the prospect of their natural son’s return is always a possibility, and eventually a reality.

3. and, finally, why is so much of the film spent in a lush New Jersey forest when we have been told that over-population and the lack of vital resources have resulted in the strict management of reproductive rights and the rise of robot practicality?

My biggest question for the first segment actually involves a sequence where a spat of sibling jealousy results in David eating spinach and shorting out some circuits in its thorax. The question is not why talking underwater (and, later, soaking in the ocean) does not also short out some circuits in its thorax, but why David has a hole in its throat that leads to its delicate thorax in the first place.

Cookie Monster is a messy eater for a reason, gentle reader.

Frances O’Conner as Monica, David’s adoptive mother, is so bland and one-note that she inadvertently becomes the only element of the film that accurately reflects Kubrick’s emotional detachment. To say that she is awful is to distract attention from the awfulness of a screenplay that forces this decidedly untalented woman to say things like “silly man. . . of course I’m not sure.” If you’re neither a burlesque of a drag queen nor an animated cereal rabbit, you can’t say “silly man” without sounding like some kind of synthetic theatrical construct yourself – try it. There is no irony in the fact that the warm mother figure is played with a complete lack of humanity, for O’Connor isn’t playing an emotionless cipher, she’s an emotionless cipher playing a warm mother figure.

The second segment of A.I. involves David fleeing into the woods to avoid destruction (it becomes a danger to its “brother” in a contrived and unlikely moment – one of many), accompanied only by a talking teddy bear [3] and meeting up with Gigolo Joe (Jude Law: Gattaca), a male hooker-bot with a juke box in its head and a song in its heart. Law is easily the best element of the film. In an interview, Law said that the original conception of Gigolo Joe was far darker and twisted – he laments that after a warm tongue-bath from Spielberg’s sugar pen, the character functions more as a “scoutmaster” for David. More’s the pity, for every moment with Law on the screen is a moment that A.I. begins to touch upon the promise of its premise. Dark, disturbing: a hedonistic capitalist wonderland dystopia where favors of the flesh are catered to by a perversity of metal. Cronenberg, eat your heart out.

The second segment of A.I. is also the one richest in references to Kubrick. By “references” I don’t mean visual homage nor thematic enrichment – alas no, by “references” I mean cheap throwaway sight and dialogue gags that come off not as sly, but as smarmy/winky name-dropping. Revolving around the cruel destruction of outdated robots at a “flesh fair” (clearly meant to evoke Pinnochio [2]), and later at a Las Vegas-like sex cauldron, keep an eye peeled for the “Strangelove” café, for a drugged milk bar, and, more obliquely, note that the Jawa-esque droid harvesters (led by Brendan Gleeson: The General), call out “any old iron!” as they gather up the panicked automatons (Any Old Iron is also the title of a novel by Anthony Burgess, the author of A Clockwork Orange).

That being said, a closing scene resembles (and is scored identically to) the Well of Souls sequence in Raiders of the Lost Ark, and the finale of the film is a bald rip-off of the inside-the-monolith sequence from 2001 before degenerating into a nauseating and bald rip-off of Contact (not coincidentally the last critically championed, and equally vacuous, “thoughtful” mainstream science fiction film). Is there a hint of the Lodz Ghetto raid from Schindler's List in the rousting of the rogue robots? a touch of Amistad and The Color Purple in the voice-appearance of Chris Rock as some kind of lawn-jockey robot man-servant? possibly. It's a shame that after a while, A.I. is most interesting when it's a "Find Waldo" game for Spielberg buffs.

The final segment of A.I. concludes David’s mystical search for the “Blue Fairy,” that element of the Pinnochio story that bestows humanity upon a duplicitous piece of wood, fulfilling a lonely old man’s dream of fecundity. There is, indeed, a Gepetto in this piece, a mad scientist named Dr. Hobby (William Hurt: Dark City), but his appearances at the beginning and end of the film are so arbitrary and expository that when he disappears with no explanation after promising to “be right back,” it isn’t so much jarring as “ah, who cares?” Making the most vital figure of the fairy tale you most wish to emulate completely insignificant and not missed is a bad miscalculation.

Typically for Spielberg, there is a wholly manufactured and atonal finale that works as a really bad short film independent of the rest of the film in tone, execution, and theme. It is shameless and dim-witted and left me feeling furious and deeply embarrassed for Spielberg. It’s a shocker, and it’s a belly-laugher.

conclusions

Though it doesn’t feel anything like a Kubrick film at any point, it does reveal the parts of the Kubrick script to which Spielberg remained faithful – parts that draw from Brian Aldiss’s work (though, as we’ve discussed, under Spielberg’s hand have lost their meaning), as well as from Kubrick’s philosophy. A society of machines establishing a tenuous caste in the absence of man recalls Aldiss’s wonderful 1958 short story “Who Can Replace a Man?,” the reclamation theme of the finale recalls 1957’s “The Failed Men,” and the process of a mechanical self-deception takes shape in 1955’s “Outside.” All resonance and questions about the nature of identity and the dangers of self-absorption endemic to Aldiss (and Kubrick), however, are frittered away by Spielberg’s uncontrollable urge to proselytize and his lamentable instinct towards schmaltz.[4]

A.I. wants desperately to be more than it is and it is so well made technically that it will fool some people into believing that it’s more substantive than it is. Like Contact, the movie that it most resembles at its end, however, A.I. isn’t thought-provoking for what it succeeds in presenting, but thought-provoking for what it fails to examine. A Faulknerian man-child idiot isn’t thought-provoking because of his brilliance, he’s thought-provoking because he says something about our failures as a culture through his guileless naiveté, and his essential incompleteness. A.I. plays on every single one of Spielberg’s weaknesses and subverts each of his strengths – it has awkward dialogue where image used to suffice, and the first segment’s parody of Spielberg’s sacrosanct cult of childhood leaves the director rudderless and without confidence, leaving us no access to its moral and emotional core while resulting in the desperate reclamation of terra cognita in the deplorable final movements.[5]

A.I. is ultimately a film made by a fearful little boy named “Steven” who once made movies because he loved to, and now makes movies because he’s desperate to be taken seriously as a man – even if he doesn’t quite understand the responsibility and maturity that comes with manhood – even as he forgets that “man” is the death of “child” and “child” is what we liked about Spielberg the best.

==============

[1] After finishing a draft of this review, I popped on over to Ebert’s thoughts on it only to discover that he mentions the Aldiss story upon which this film is based – and, in his only comment regarding the story, misrepresents the story. Ebert says: “At the center of the movie is an idea from Brian Aldiss' 1969 short story, ‘Supertoys Last All Summer Long,’ about an advanced cybernetic pet that is abandoned in the woods.” – begging the question of what is was that Ebert was reading when he thought he was reading ‘Supertoys Last All Summer Long.” Unlike the Spielberg film, the Aldiss story makes no mention of abandonment nor of lush forests in an “overpopulated world” that requires strict reproductive control to preserve precious resources.

Mr. Ebert, a critic whom I had long admired and whose reviews I now only occasionally visit, needs to rethink having other people do his research – in his review of Time and Tide, he states that Tsui Hark was: “born in Vietnam in 1951 when it was under French rule” – which is erroneous and simple to check. Ebert has left research to his flunkies and to hearsay if he engages in research at all - when here is the marvel of the Internet, bristling with ready information. If Ebert can’t be bothered to turn on his computer or read an eight-page short story, maybe he should hire better flunkies.

[2] I was excited to see all the reviews before this film was released mentioning the Pinnochio story in regards to this film not because I particularly like the story (nor dislike it, that’s not the point), but because if everyone was picking up on this subtext, then maybe, I thought, Spielberg had succeeded in at last creating something of subtlety and archetypal grace. Foolish me, the Pinnochio story is played up to such a shameless and repetitive degree in the film that it isn’t subtext – it’s the main plot point.

[3] Teddy is voiced by Jack Angel in a clear homage to the implacable reason of HAL 9000. The homage is made more obvious by Teddy’s repeated calls of “David! David?” – recalling “Dave? What are you doing, Dave?” from 2001. Ho hum.

[4] The extent to which the public seems to be realizing that A.I. is just another cynical attempt to wring tears from reticent ducts, however, is reflected in the sudden, panicked shift in advertising campaigns just prior to the film’s release from “his love is real, he is not” to a more Blade Runner “the human’s are out to get us!”

[5] Imagine if the aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind explained themselves to the dumbstruck earthlings for minutes on end with a Dean Martin smoking-jacket accent rather than with explosive lights and a nifty tune and you're close to understanding how ridiculous the end of A.I. is. Why this most visual of directors has turned, in his first screenplay since CEOT3K, to exceedingly long and drawn out globs of plot clarifying monologues is beyond me. It's a cinematic "said bookism" - an adverb where a comfortable "nothing" should suffice.



Recommended:
No