Director: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Haley Joel Osment,Jude Law,Frances O’Connor,William Hurt
A.I.: Artificial Intelligence
might just prove to be the most ironically-titled film of the year, given that
it’s being released at the heart of a season in which cinematic fare rarely
shows any intelligence, artificial or otherwise. The summer to this point has
mostly been a case of loud (Tomb Raider), louder (Swordfish), and
loudest (Pearl Harbor), so one can imagine how disconcerting it was to
come across a movie that’s actually driven by a healthy dose of good,
old-fashioned artistic ambition. A.I., after all, is the brainchild of
not one, but two titanic filmmakers, combining the big-hearted yin of Spielberg
with the perpetually-dour yang of Kubrick. It’s an intriguing combination,
given that Spielberg is the button-pushing optimist who likes tearful old men
saluting American flags in cemeteries, whereas Kubrick, before his untimely
death, was the morose cynic who enjoyed putting Tom Cruise in a cape and
sticking him in gothic orgies.
A.I. is weird and
fascinating, beautiful and visionary, yet I hesitate to call it a good film, for
the Spielberg/Kubrick collision tends to prove as unruly and fractious as it
does inspired. The movie, of course, stars boy wonder Haley Joel Osment as
David, who can’t see dead people but is nonetheless special because he’s the
first ever robotic child programmed to love. David is obviously a great
technological wonder, although it remains anyone’s guess why these scientists
of the future have the brains to build a totally lifelike android, yet remain
incapable of programming halfway-decent laughter. David loves his adoptive
mother (Frances O’Connor) with all his little tin heart, but she ends up
ditching him in the forest anyway when her real son conveniently recovers from a
murkily-defined illness, and it’s at this point that the movie morphs into a
kind of post-apocalyptic Pinocchio as David embarks on a quest to become
a real boy.
All this is well and good, but
have we so quickly forgot the lessons of modern technology that The
Terminator taught us? At one point, Spielberg stages a Flesh Fair, in which
a bloodthirsty human mob cheers wildly as poor persecuted robots are dragged
into a circus ring and reduced to puddles of battery acid. The imagery is
certainly haunting but, thematically, is it really all that different from the
scene in Office Space in which the three guys lay waste to the copy
machine? We humans come off looking rather heinous, but since when did we lose
the right to fear replacement by machines anyway? The middle third of A.I.
at least cackles to life when Jude Law dances onto the screen as the
intensely-charismatic Gigolo Joe, who’s quite literally a sex machine and
takes David under his wing as they descend into a nightmarish urban metropolis
that will probably bear a striking resemblance to New Haven in about fifty
years. Another bonus proves to be David’s intrepid sidekick Teddy, a talking
teddy bear who proves to be the most endearing inanimate object since Wilson the
volleyball stole all his scenes in Cast Away.
Spielberg, being Spielberg, does
manage to tug at the ol’ heartstrings every now and again, but in the end A.I.
just proves too damn long and too damn tiresome. It’s the most ambitious movie
in sight right now, and Spielberg’s meticulous dedication to the Kubrick
sensibility is astounding, but when it comes to the dog days of summer,
sometimes I just prefer a scantily-clad Angelina Jolie blasting the crap out of
a giant robotic beast.
