Artificial Intelligence - The Movie

[Gauracandra 1]

I'll be seeing this tomorrow and will write up some sort of review. In the meantime, this comes from Time magazine.

 

'A.I.' — Spielberg's Strange Love

It's a prophecy and a fairy tale within a bold sci-fi film BY RICHARD CORLISS

 

 

Sunday, Jun. 17, 2001

A noted scientist of the remote future lays down a piquant challenge to his colleagues at Cybertronics Manufacturing. "I propose that we build a robot who can love...a robot that dreams." Hurrah and alas, his dream is realized. Two years later, Cybertronics has assembled the perfect child, "always loving, never ill, never changing," and has found a potentially ideal couple to adopt him--or try him out. But we know the danger of answered prayers. Real life is messy; love can break your heart. Even the heart of a "toy boy" like David, who will be abandoned by the one he loves most and have to face a brutal world before he can find a saving human touch.

 

A love story, a prophecy and a fairy tale (Pinocchio, to be exact) in the guise of a science-fiction film, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence represents the collaboration and collision of two master filmmakers: Stanley Kubrick, who spent parts of more than 15 years on the project; and Steven Spielberg, whom Kubrick finally asked to direct it, and who did, from his own screenplay, after Kubrick's death in 1999. The film, whose genesis and shooting have long been cocooned in secrecy, opens next week.

 

For his first sci-fi project since 2001, Kubrick had planned, as Spielberg says, "to take a step beyond the sentient relationship that HAL 9000 has with Bowman and Poole, and tell a kind of future fairy tale about artificial intelligence." When he suggested that Spielberg direct it, "I thought he was out of his mind. He was giving up one of the best stories he had ever told. But he said, 'This story is closer to your sensibilities than my own.' " Once Spielberg began work on the film, at the behest of the director's widow Christiane and her brother, Kubrick's producer Jan Harlan, "I felt that Stanley really hadn't died, that he was with me when I was writing the screenplay and shooting the movie."

 

A.I. will beguile some viewers, perplex others. Its vision is too capacious, its narrative route too extended, the shift in tone (from suburban domestic to rural nightmare to urban archaeology) too ornery to make the film a flat-out wowser of the E.T. stripe. A.I. boasts a beautiful central performance — Haley Joel Osment, 13, plays David with a kind of buoyant gravity — and a canny turn by Jude Law as a robo-stud, while other actors are wan. The film is bold, rigorous and sentimental by turns, and often all at once, as should be expected from a two-man movie where both have strong wills to match their great gifts, and one is dead. "This will be a repeat of 2001," says Harlan. "Some people will hate it. Never mind."

 

Even when A.I. meanders or stumbles, it is fascinating as a wedding of two disparate auteurs. Kubrick took five, seven, a dozen years to make a movie; he optioned Brian Aldiss's short story "Supertoys Last All Summer Long," on which A.I. is based, in 1983. Spielberg has shot multiple films in one year, and in his spare time he helps run the DreamWorks film studio. Spielberg has the warmest of directorial styles; Kubrick's is among the coolest. One aims to seduce the audience; the other wanted to bend moviegoers to see it his way, or to hell with them. The resulting fugue is like a piece composed for brass but played on woodwinds, a Death Valley map on which Spielberg has placed seeds, hoping they will somehow blossom...

 

...the way a boy robot might hope that a woman's love could make him human. David is the cybergenic triumph of Professor Hobby (William Hurt). Who wouldn't want this perfect child, years past colic and teething, years before the gonadal eruptions of puberty? The chosen "parent" is Henry (Sam Robards), a Cybertronics employee whose wife Monica (Frances O'Connor) has sunk into remorse because their son Martin (Jake Thomas) is in a coma. So here's a pick-me-up for a grieving mother: a machine that looks and acts like a kid--the best kid ever.

 

Monica, initially spooked by this shiny-faced, irrevocably pleasant simulacrum of a boy, comes to appreciate David's virtues; he has no flaws, except that he is not "orga" (organic) but "mecha" (mechanical)--and not Martin. From a closet she retrieves an old supertoy, a stuffed bear named Teddy, who becomes David's most faithful companion. Soon David is calling her Mommy. Bereft of her only natural child, she cradles this artificial one. Bathed in Nativity light, mother and child melt into a Pieta.

 

A medical advance restores Martin, who is instantly resentful of the new kid in the house. Martin tries to get the cute intruder to break a toy, but David can't. He's being tested and tempted. The real boy tells robo-boy: Try being a kid; it means smashing things.

 

A few unfortunate accidents persuade Monica to abandon David in a forest. Quick as a face slap, David and the audience are in a strange new world containing refugee robots with half-faces and a jaunty "love mecha" named Gigolo Joe (Law). In Kubrick's script, says Law, "Joe was much more aggressive, more twisted." Here he is, in Spielberg's word, David's "scoutmaster." (This was the section Kubrick could not solve and which Spielberg, in developing it, has softened. The Kubrick version would have been rated R; this film is PG-13.)

 

 

[Guest guest]

After reading this review, I think I'll save my seven bucks:

 

 

Steven Spielberg's new movie is — let me try to put this delicately — really, really, really bad. It's bad in almost every way. A.I. is bad in ways you never would have believed Steven Spielberg could be bad. It's painfully slow and boring; at least five times during the course of it I found myself making little wheel motions with my hands in hopes that I might speed things up on screen. It's cheesy and (for the most part) visually unimaginative, resembling mid-budget science-fiction movies of the 1970s like Logan's Run or Damnation Alley. (It even borrows colored motorcycles from Tron.) I am not kidding when I say that you get a better sense of a depopulated future from Woody Allen's sci-fi spoof Sleeper than you do from the ponderously self-serious A.I.

 

If you want to read all about how Spielberg decided to make A.I. in homage to the late Stanley Kubrick, who worked on it for 15 years, find another article to read. It is of no moment to any non-cineaste moviegoer what parts of the film are "classic Spielberg" and what parts are "classic Kubrick." What matters is what's on screen, and what's on screen makes precious little sense, and who cares whether that's because the visions of Spielberg and Kubrick are in conflict?

 

Some critics are essaying the notion that A.I.'s problem is that it's just too overstuffed with ideas — that it bubbles over with interesting explorations of the nature of humanity, free will, global warming, sex, robotics, a new ice age. A.I. is indeed a film of ideas. The problem is that they're dumb and obvious ideas, and they are surrounded by a meandering and distended plotline.

 

It's the future, you see — or actually, you don't see. A narrator tells you the polar ice caps have melted and that people have grown to rely on robots because there isn't enough food. But Spielberg doesn't actually show us this. What we see is a house somewhere in the country where a couple is chosen to take in the first robot built to look like a boy — and designed to feel love.

 

The wife is whiny and petulant, the husband nondescript. And yet we are forced to spend about 45 minutes trapped with them in a house that doesn't even have any cool futuristic gadgets. When David the Boy Robot's feelings are activated and he begins mooning for his new "mommy," you can only wonder why he bothers. If this character were your natural mother, believe me, you'd have a hard time loving her.

 

Suffice it to say that the love between robot boy and human mother is not going to end happily, and for the rest of the picture David goes on a journey to find the Blue Fairy who turned Pinocchio from wood into a real boy.

 

 

 

The only actual pleasure to be had in the course of the movie's 2 hours and 25 minutes comes from a querulous talking teddy bear who is forever warning David to be careful, and from Jude Law, the British actor who plays a vain blabbermouth sex robot called Gigolo Joe. Haley Joel Osment, the great child actor who plays David, does his best to seem inhuman when he is robotic and all-too-human when his feelings are engaged, but he still has no character to play.

 

A.I. concludes with a freakish sequence that turns this updated effort at a fairy tale into a clinical depiction of the Oedipus complex. That's kind of interesting, but I'm really not sure it's what Spielberg has in mind. Then again, I don't think Spielberg really does have much on his mind most of the time.

 

 

[atma 0]

Just came back from the movie, took 4 kids with me. They hate me! They said it is the most boring movie they ever saw. For me was great, I slept the second half, a really good nap. I agree with Random that 'Teddy' is kind of funny. Save your $$$.

 

[This message has been edited by atma (edited 06-29-2001).]

[Guest guest]

Originally posted by atma:

Just came back from the movie, took 4 kids with me. They hate me! They said it is the most boring movie they ever saw. For me was great, I slept the second half, a really good nap. I agree with Random that 'Teddy' is kind of funny. Save your $$$.

 

Thanx for the thumbs down! I'll wait for it to come out on cable. I've been hearing really bad things about it. A friend just returned from the theatre and here's what she sez:

 

<font color="blue">

Other than showcasing how much special effects have progressed this film was merely a hodgepodge of tired ideas stolen from other films. Bits of Waterworld, Pinocchio, Bladerunner, 1941, ET, Close encounters of the Third Kind, 2001 a Space Odyssey, a few startle scenes ala Sixth Sense, Milennium Man, a brief Chris Rock and then a Robin William's attempt at humor, a WWF wrestling crowd type robot destroying event all mixed together to tells us what?

 

That greenhouse gasses will destroy the earth?

 

That robots have rights also?

 

That unconventional families are important?

 

That there will always be rednecks who brutally hate?

 

That we should question what is human or equal or better than human?

 

Who knows?

 

I don't know why Hollywood feels compelled to tell us that we should care whether a machine is destroyed , when Hollywood seems to glibly support abortion.

 

This film mixes bits and pieces of other films the way a bad cook uses herbs and seasonings from many cooking styles....the end result is an unpleasant assault to the senses. </font>

 

Is it true that the lead character is a sex toy???????

[atma 0]

Not the lead character. But there is this Gigolo robot who gives pleasure to women and goes with the little boy for a while (not for sex).

[Guest guest]

Acha. I think I'll skip it on cable also.

[Maitreya 0]

I just saw it.Agree with most all of what has been written above.

 

Okay don't laugh but I thought I picked up on some semi-subliminal anti-christ anti-Catholic anti resurrection of Christ stuff from Spielberg.

 

Hey!! I asked you not to laugh!! I'm serious.Please don't ask me to explain what I mean.I can't explain films anyway let alone the semi-subliminal parts.It had to due with the blue fairy murti and references to two thousand years.I think I was able to catch it due to having slipped into the hynogogatic state;you know the period between waking and sleep.

 

McCritic

 

 

[Gauracandra 1]

Maitreya,

 

I also saw that anti-Catholic message in the movie as well. Especially the blatant part where Gigolo Joe says many of his clients come from Our Mother of Mary of the Sacred Heart (or whatever that place was called). Anyways, here are some of my ramblings about the movie.

 

 

Ramblings about the movie A.I.

 

Just got back from the theater and figured I’d give you my first impressions. There may (or may not) be spoilers in this posting, so read on with that in mind.

 

My initial impression is that the movie is somewhere between passable sci-fi and TOTAL, UNDENIABLE PRETENTIOUS CRAP!!!!!

 

The beginning is slow and ponderous. But I can forgive that since it is trying to setup the rest of the movie. The middle section is quite good except for two parts (a voice cameo by comedian Chris Rock, and an Einstein Hologram voiced by Robin Williams, both of which are distracting), but then the ending is terrible. I mean really, Really, NO I MEAN REALLY BAD.

 

The story was written by Stephen Spielberg based off of a short story (which I read a few years ago, its quite good) by Brian Aldiss called “Super Toys Last All Summer Long”, as well as reportedly thousands of pages of notes, sketches, faxes, emails etc….. between the late Stanley Kubrick (2001: A Space Odyssey, Eyes Wide Shut) and Stephen Spielberg (E.T., Schindler’s List). Now with two of the worlds best film makers you’d expect some world class movie making. But what you get instead is a jumbled, at times almost incoherent movie.

 

I’ve followed this film’s development for a few years now. Here is a brief synopsis of what was the vision for the film. Essentially Kubrick wanted people to fall in love with a fairy tale about the future of mankind. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick tried to show man’s evolution from animal, to man, to sentient machine, to a “star child”. Now many decried that as being pretentious pablum as well, but it went well with the psychedelic 60s. In this, Kubrick wanted to tell a fairy tale about a robot boy and his search for love, spanning several thousand years, with man’s eventual extinction, but reemergence as a higher life form beyond A.I.

 

Here is my problem with the ending. There is a saying that less is more - and this fits perfectly with this movie. Most people, because they don’t know the background of this movie, have no idea what is going on. Basically you see these really tall, skinny alien looking creatures at the end rediscover the A.I. child. These are supposed to be the evolved humans. But we don’t know that by watching the movie. They look like cheesy aliens. And then worst of all they speak and we get subtitles at the bottom of the screen. Then they latter talk with a British accent. Its B-movie style badness. Its somewhat the same problem with the ending to Contact. The ending of Contact was alright, but by trying to show the unimaginable, they end up making it seem hokey. The aliens, the setup, it all seems cheesy. Besides these evolved A.I. don’t have a particularly creative design. Many sci-fi movies have used this look before.

 

Another problem with the movie is that it keeps hammering away to let us know that this is a remake of Pinocchio. I mean there are probably like 20-30 times in this movie where they say “But Pinocchio can be made a real boy” “I want the Blue Fairy to make me into a real boy like she did Pinocchio” etc….. Its sooooooooooooooooooo obvious, that you figure the director thought we were all imbeciles. The way movie magic works best, just like real magic, is to plant an idea in the mind of the audience, and then let their imagination do all the work for you. Don’t keep telling us over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over…. Ok my fingers are getting tired so I’ll stop with the overs…… again about what this movie is supposed to be about.

 

The best part was the middle section. It had an odd atmosphere and was visually interesting. The two stand outs are Teddy and Gigolo Joe (played by Jude Law). They were both lots of fun. Haley Joel Osment (the kid from the Sixth Sense) was ok, but his character wasn’t real lovable, despite the fact that this movie was trying to get us to fall in love with him.

 

I can nitpick this movie to bits with plot holes and inconsistencies but why bother. There is a point where if this movie had ended I could have given it a passing score. It would have been a melancholy ending but much better than what we got instead. Overall I’d give the beginning a C-, the Middle a B, and the ending an F- so it probably ends up being a D+ or so.

 

Gauracandra

 

 

 

 

[This message has been edited by Gauracandra (edited 06-30-2001).]

[Gauracandra 1]

Just to give a positive alternative I'd suggest anyone interested to go rent Blade Runner starring Rutger Hauer and Harrison Ford. I caught the ending of it yesterday on the Sci-fi channel. Now that is a great movie. Beautiful to look at, visionary, interesting story, and you actually care about the characters. It gets an A+ in my book.

 

Gauracandra

[atma 0]

In India you get a lot of pirates movies. Any new movie coming out here, within a week you get it in India in CD, DVD and cassette, They call it 'camera print'. Somebody here sneak a Camcorder in the cinema and they send the print to Asia. I saw lots of movies that way, renting from the local 'Blockbuster" in India. If I really liked I bothered a few months later to go and see it in the big screen. The same people that provide the cable, has this free channels where they show the latest English and Hindi movies. Cable there is really cheap, around $2 a month. Anyhow, I'm rumbling about this because I remembered the director S. Kubrick and his movie "Eyes Wide Shut", one night in the local cable they showed it. I knew about the controversy about the B.Gita sloka in the middle of an orgy and when I saw it I found it really interesting. In the middle of all that maya, with all the masked characters, you heard that beautiful Sanskrit Sloka saying that the Lord will descend whenever and wherever there is a decline in religious practice and a predominant rise of irreligion. My impression was that they were trying to give hope in the middle of so much inmorality.

I never saw the rest of the movie because after that they cut it off and never bothered to see it again.