Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick: Together Again For the First Time
Written: Jul 02 '01 (Updated Jul 02 '01)
Product Rating:
Pros: Intelligent? Yes.
Cons: Artificial? Unfortunately so.
The Bottom Line: This film is gorgeous in every frame, with haunting performances and enough intelligent questions to fuel film-school theses for many years to come. And yet, it's flawed, chilly and disjointed.
Grouch's Full Review: A.I. Artificial Intelligence
Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence might just be the best value for your dollar at this summer’s cineplex. For the price of one admission, you get three movies, each of them odd and perplexing and downright beautiful. A.I. is divided, none too seamlessly, into three distinct parts:
1. Grieving parents Henry and Monica Swinton adopt a robot boy named David in an effort to fill the void left by their comatose, cryogenically-frozen son. The mother eventually warms to her robo-son but must give him up after a series of unfortunate events.
2. David, who only wants to become “real,” falls in with a band of robo-refugees running from “organic” humans who torture them in public displays. His new friend, a computerized male prostitute named Gigolo Joe, aids him in his quest to find the Blue Fairy who will make him real.
3. David meets his destiny. (No spoilers here)
Loosely based on a 1969 short story by Brian Aldiss called “Supertoys Last All Summer Long,” A.I. transports us into a world in the near future when polar ice caps have melted and most of the globe, including New York City, is underwater. It’s a world of sterile material comfort, where the dividing line between real and manufactured blurs and dissolves. It’s a world where humans have made robots “too smart, too quick and too many.” It’s a society—hauntingly real and possible—where the person sitting to your left at the dinner table could very well be a robot. A very real, flesh-coated machine that laughs and cries and asks questions. The only way to tell the difference between your real son and his replicant replacement is whether or not he eats spinach.
If you’re cinematically hip, you’ll recognize this as the kind of place that might be a collaboration between HAL and Alex and his droogs. And you wouldn’t be too far off the mark since Stanley Kubrick was originally at the helm of the project. After his death in 1999, Spielberg slid into the director’s chair. It’s probably the oddest pairing since Pat Boone teamed up with Dweezil Zappa.
For the first time since 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Spielberg works from his own script (with a screen story credit going to Ian Watson). Still, the ghost of Kubrick haunts nearly every frame. He’s there, just around the corner in the decadent Rouge City with its milk bars and neon pornography; and in the cold geometry of the Swintons’ home; and the droog-like violence of the Flesh Fair where orgas (humans) take unnatural delight in tearing apart mechas (robots) limb by limb. It’s a chilly world, punctuated only by the warm, condensed breath of Mr. Spielberg.
Most viewers will probably come away from A.I. saying, “I liked it, but…” That “but” is probably the disjointed frame of mind the movie has put them in. Perhaps the oddest thing about A.I. is how it makes you feel. On the one hand, you’ve got the warm cuddles of a typical Spielbergian flick; but what lies underneath is the cold prickle of Kubrick’s dark worldview.
It’s been several hours since I walked out of the multiplex, and I still can’t decide if I think A.I. is a nice-try failure or a masterpiece whose full effect will hit me months down the line. I do know it’s probably the most probing and intelligent film that I’ll see all summer. It is laughably out of place, sharing a marquee with Pootie Tang and Dr. Dolittle 2.
The questions A.I. raises still tumble through my brain. Can we learn to love machines as much as (or more than) our fellow humans? (For some Internet addicts, this is already happening) Can we teach machines to reciprocate our love? Did God create Adam solely to reciprocate love? If so, aren’t we all just robots?
Deep stuff like that.
Curious about A.I.’s genesis, I hunted down Aldiss’ original story. It’s a very short, but blade-sharp, piece of fiction which only bears surface resemblance to the final product on the screen. It’s easy to see what first attracted Kubrick to the notion of exploring man’s relationship to the things he creates. Here, for instance, is an exchange between David and his animatronic teddy bear (brought to vivid, unforgettable life in the film):
David was staring out of the window. “Teddy, you know what I was thinking? How do you tell what are real things from what aren't real things?”
The bear shuffled its alternatives. “Real things are good.”
“I wonder if time is good. I don't think Mummy likes time very much. The other day, lots of days ago, she said that time went by her. Is time real, Teddy?”
“Clocks tell the time. Clocks are real. Mummy has clocks so she must like them. She has a clock on her wrist next to her dial.”
David started to draw a jumbo jet on the back of his letter. “You and I are real, Teddy, aren't we?”
The bear's eyes regarded the boy unflinchingly. “You and I are real, David.” It specialized in comfort.
Despite its Kubrickian arms-length tone, there is a lot of comfort in the nearly three hours A.I. unspools across the screen. For one thing, there is the unmistakable way Spielberg has of resurrecting the wonder and hope of childhood in the viewer. Sentimental and manipulative? Sure. But there’s no denying the power of certain scenes in E.T., Empire of the Sun, Hook and now A.I.. We see the world almost entirely through the eyes of David, the naive, blank-slate child. He has been programmed to love, but there is nothing artificial about his heartbreak when he is abandoned by his mother in a forest—a scene guaranteed to wring the chests and lump the throats of many a parent.
By now, it should be obvious that A.I. closely parallels Pinocchio (the Blue Fairy was a dead giveaway). In one scene, Monica reads the story aloud to David and his mouth hangs slack with wonder and hope. Spielberg is tapping into something deep inside all of us here, I think. Even if we aren’t puppets or robots, who among us hasn’t always dreamed of becoming “more real,” capable of feeling even more love? That’s the message A.I. is trying to deliver to us this summer, in the midst of all the slick, contrived teen romances, groin-kicks-are-funny comedies and gleaming-bland CGI action flicks. It’s occasionally flawed in its delivery and execution (it’s intelligent and artificial and sometimes contradicts itself), but I give A.I. points for giving us something deeper than dumbed-down entertainment.
It also gives us some of the summer’s best performances—chief among them Haley Joel Osment as David, the boy with the barking laugh and eyes that melt through all your emotional defenses. Osment proves his Oscar nomination for The Sixth Sense was no fluke as he embraces this challenging role with the right balance of robotic artificiality and little-boy longing. Frances O’Connor as Monica Swinton—the mother whose grief for her real half-dead boy “is going undigested”—is riveting and proves her previous performance in Mansfield Park was no fluke, either. She takes us through sullen grief, distrust of her “new” son which melts into love, and then heartbreak when they must part. And finally, as Gigolo Joe, David’s guide through the mecha world, Jude Law is physically astounding. His every move looks mechanized, yet he’s supple, sleek and thoroughly sexy. When he walks along a rainy street, he’s Gene Kelly in Singin’ in the Rain; when he’s servicing a female client, he’s Richard Gere in American Gigolo; when he’s walking through a turnstile (and adding an extra twirl to his step), he’s John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. Unfortunately, the Gigolo Joe character is only fun to look at—he doesn’t really contribute much to the story except to serve as a contrivance to get David from place to place. But Law is so deeply ingrained in the role, it’s hard not to think his every moment on the screen is beautiful.
He is, in fact, surrounded by beauty. The cinematography (Janusz Kaminski), production design (Rick Carter), makeup (Stan Winston) and score (John Williams) are all sublime. There are some stunning moments that will be imprinted on my programmable brain forever: a forgotten robot lying on the bottom of a swimming pool, the half-drowned landscape of Manhattan and, in the closing moments, the tenderest mother-son scene you’re likely to see on film this year.
Recommended:
Yes
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older
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