A. I. Inteligencia artificial

AI - ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE / (2001) ***1/2 (out of four)

By Blake French:

"AI - Artificial Intelligence" is the hardest kind of movie to review-but it's also the most enjoyable kind of movie to watch. It's been over three weeks since my screening of Steven Spielberg's emotionally harrowing epic about a robot boy. Before writing my review, I wanted to let its themes, content, and characters sink into my head and make a solid impact. The film was based on an idea by Stanley Kubrick, but when he died in 1999, Speilberg took charge of the project. I could spend pages discussing the techniques of Kubrick's intentions and Spielberg's decisions, but I will not. Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg are two of the greatest directors American cinema has to offer; it's pure pleasure watching their ideas clash and flow. I am not going to examine each individual theme here, either. That would ruin the movie for you.

"AI - Artificial Intelligence" presents many themes on screen, but it's important to take what you get out of it. Whenever I read a review of Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange" or "2001: A Space Odyssey" I feel influenced by the reviewer's interpretation of the movie's themes. Every time I watch either of those movies I get something new out of it. I hate it when other critics state the movie's themes on paper as if it's a fact. There is far too much room for interpretation to reveal this movie's message, or the message of any Kubrick film for that matter. Ask 100 people, and you might get 100 different answers. "AI - Artificial Intelligence" is that kind of movie-one of the year's best.

Critics and audiences alike have torn apart this movie's ending-a clear miscalculation by Spielberg. If Kubrick were in charge, the movie would have called it quits about twenty minutes earlier in an unsettling sequence that takes place in the ocean. But Speilberg, who always seems entranced by science fiction, injects an additional segment into the mix that does not work quite as well, but isn't so completely awful that it deserves such harsh criticism. It still leaves us with an open, startled emotional disorientation. I left the theater with tears in my eyes. The movie before the conclusion is so complex, moving, and involving in so many different ways the last twenty minutes didn't even come close to spoiling the movie for me.

"AI" transpires sometime in the near future after the polar ice caps have melted and flooded coastal cities and reduced natural resources. Mechanical androids have become popular since they require no commodities. Reproduction has also become highly illegal. Machines provide sexual services and if anyone wants a child, they will purchase a robot. However, the difference between a robot child and a living child is that robots cannot love. That's the task professor Hobby (William Hurt) of Cybertronics Manufacturing has solved. He has made a robot child that can love.

We can separate "AI" into two separate segments. I do not want to reveal too much about each plot because the pleasure of watching this movie evolves from the revealing of the connecting plots. I will, however, briefly say the first details a robot child's interaction within a family, and the second deals with the robot's estrangement from its family and the quest to regain the mother's love.

I can imagine the material in Kubrick's hands. The movie's opening scene has a female robot begin to undress in a public office. Speilberg cuts the action before she reveals any explicit nudity. Kubrick would have had various shots of full frontal nudity. Spielberg, never comfortable with sexual material, leaves out much of the motivation behind Kubrick's ideas. One of the biggest problems in "AI" is the lack of edge with the sexual content. Jude Law plays a robot gigolo who lives in a sex fantasy called Rouge City where people from everywhere come to seek sexual satisfaction. The central character, a robot boy played by Haley Joel Osment, motivates every action in the story except for the scenes in Rouge City. Why contain such a perverse character and setting when his entire existence simply displays a mood that has already been well established. Obvious, the filmmakers toned the aspects of "AI" down to warrant a gutless PG-13 rating-but why? The movie isn't appropriate for children anyway, and it's far too complex. Undoubtedly if Kubrick were in charge "AI" would have to be re-cut to avoid an NC-17 rating. Spielberg should have either taken advantage of the perverse material or completely eliminated it.

Here I am, doing exactly what I said that I wouldn't do, and at nearly 900 words, I still have not clearly expressed my own opinions on the film. I have many notes in front of my that display my reaction as I watched the film, but I am not going to use them-they reveal too much about the movie. "AI" is a very personal film, a deeply moving, scientific, careful, and harrowing motion picture that displays startling talent on screen and behind the scenes. The special effects are extraordinary. The performances are alarming-the immensely talented Haley Joel Osment may once again be up for an Academy Award nomination. Go see the movie, then talk about it with others. It's the kind of film that you can spend hours thinking about, then go see it again.

Steven Spielberg's AI fails to live up to its billing, which really bothers me, because artificial intelligence is such a rich and variegated subject, traversing the fields of biophysics, psychology, philosophy, and even religion, that the payoffs for careful consideration of this subject are potentially great, perhaps even inspiring. Spielberg, it seems, didn't even bother to make a trip to the library, preferring instead to invest awkward and incomprehensible phrases like `human beings are the key to the meaning of existence' with eschatological gravitas.

Throughout this film, Spielberg drives home one theme over and over and over: humans are more programmatic, both in their thinking, and their behavior, than `mechas.' We watch David's parents first adopt and then abandon the robot boy because of their prejudice about what is `real' and what is not, a deliberate irony seeing as how David is in many ways more human than their biological son. We see a perfectly ridiculous `Flesh Fair' thrown into the movie to embellish this point: the `artificiality' these humans seek to destroy might just as well be their own.

At worst, the movie has a psychotic message. At the heart of the film, Professor Hobby, who designed David, delivers an impassioned speech, telling him that his singular quest to become a `real' boy at the magical hand of the Blue Fairy is a human flaw which is also humanity's `greatest single' gift: The ability to `chase down dreams. ` Problem is, if a human dreamed of becoming a non-organic being, and could not find surcease from his labors to do so, he would become, if not already, psychotic. Why Mr. `Hobby' couldn't have made the boy to accept himself as he is, which is the essence of human spirituality, seems never to have occurred to him. And so one leaves the movie with a sick feeling in the pit of one's stomach, due largely to the fact that this psychotic idea is presented as an axiom, with religious fervor.

AI succeeds in being artificial, but not in showing intelligence.

This was a horrible, horrible movie. A big, incoherent, pointless exercise in the typical Spielbergian club-you-over-the-head-until-you-get-it style that has absolutely no redeeming value whatsoever. Even the special effects are a waste, adding nothing to the plot and serving only as a place to dump millions of dollars where a few would have done just fine. Does it have a point of view? Who knows? The story is as disjointed as a road map of Afghanistan. Does it have humor, charm, pathos, insight--the few things, at least, you think you can count on from Steven Spielberg? No, no, no, no. Does it have a keen insight, a cold, dispassionate worldview, straightforward emotions, economy of action, like most of Kubrick's films? Uh, no, again.

This film is simply miserable. A hateful, ill-conceived, pointless, overblown, fragmented, shrill, poorly-executed disaster of a film that should serve as a cautionary tale to thousands of wanna-be filmmakers when they wonder if success is something that can be maintained after thirty years in the business. A disaster and a colossal disappointment, from beginning to end.

Stanley Kubrick made a career out of directing brilliant but unpleasant movies. The ultimate example is "A Clockwork Orange," which I saw for the first time just a few months ago. I found it astonishing, thought-provoking, and visually brilliant. But my experience watching the film was not in any way a pleasant one. The film chronicles the hideous crimes of a charmless psychopath, and ultimately how he is captured and subjected to an almost unimaginable series of tortures. I suppose some moviegoers might find those kinds of scenes entertaining, but I do not. Nevertheless, I consider it a great film, and a tremendously important one.

"A.I." is harder for me to justify. While not technically a Kubrick film, it is a Kubrick project that was finally directed by Steven Spielberg, following Kubrick's death. The result is a film that manages to combine the worst qualities of these two great filmmakers: it has Kubrick's obtuseness as well as Spielberg's sentimentality. The ending is deliberately designed to frustrate, to remove itself from any possible human reference point that we can easily relate to. At the same time, it's the sort of film that wants to be loved. There is even a teddy bear character that evokes mystery and awe more than cuteness. This awkward fusion of purposes left me feeling distinctly uncomfortable.

I feel unjustified for giving the film as low a rating as 6/10. I just so intensely disliked the film that I have great difficulty rating it any higher, despite its clever and thoughtful handling of the concept of artificial intelligence. No doubt Kubrick has covered this territory before, in "2001" with the character of Hal. But he seems to expand on it in this film, which features two android characters, a child robot played by Haley Joel Osment, and a robot gigolo (don't ask) played by Jude Law. The behavior of these characters is so subtle and complex that I was often left wondering what they were thinking and feeling, what the experience of being a robot was like, if such an experience is possible. I personally believe that there is something special about human subjective experience that cannot be duplicated by computer technology. But this movie presents the opposite view very compellingly, and without taking the standard route of making the androids seem human.

In this regard, Osment is spectacular: his performance in my opinion surpasses his Oscar-nominated one in "The Sixth Sense." There were moments when I looked at his eyes, his facial expressions, and I sensed an adult level of understanding and depth. Perhaps no child actor is better than Osment at acting creepy without being cute, as in one early scene when he startles his family with oddly forced laughter that doesn't seem to come with the appropriate emotions. He is playing a character who's supposed to pass for a child while not really being a child, and we slowly realize that he is in fact an alien intelligence with his own perspective and goals. Unlike a real child, he is not in the process of forming an identity. He already has one, and his only task is to fulfill his set desires and instincts, including his unbreakable attachment to his "mother" (Frances O'Connor) whom he is preprogrammed to love.

This setup is not very conducive to melodrama, yet that's much of what we get throughout the film, which tries to cast itself as a modern reinterpretation of "Pinocchio." Since Osment's character is not a real boy, we can never relate to him as one. His emotions are as artificial as his intelligence, and no enchantment or anything else will turn him into a real boy, because he simply isn't one. Yet the movie tries to manipulate our emotions so that we do see him as more human than he actually is. This approach leads the film to lose its focus in the second half and put forth one of the more perplexing and unsatisfying endings I've seen in a long time. I don't mind whether a film ends happily or sadly, but it should not try to force a weak solution to a hopeless situation, just to gain a few moments of cheap sentiment.

A.I. is a difficult film. Some of it is brilliant, while some is dire.

The acting - Haley Joel Osment as David the mecha (robot) boy is superb. He plays the role with such intelligence and maturity - it's a real achievement and bodes well for his future (if he can avoid hitting the self destruct button like so many other child stars.) Jude Law puts in another solid performance as 'Gigolo Joe' the mecha prostitute. In a similar vein to his previous roles in Gattaca and eXistenZ, he's quirky and somehow detached from reality - it works brilliantly. He's rapidly turning into one of my favourite actors. "Hey Joe - Waddya know?"

The rest of the cast is very good but doesn't shine, perhaps because their characters were treated lightly and not fully explored. Overall though - good performances by all.

The sets , costumes and special effects are of a very high standard. Until the last 30 minutes or so, the use of computer graphics is tastefully done and never feel like an excuse to wow the audience with some clever CGI. The scenes at the Flesh Fair (a kind of rock concert where mecha are destroyed for the entertainment of spectators) are powerful, visceral and in your face. The flying and underwater scenes were also very well handled, although not mind blowing.

Now the downside, and it's a big downside.

The plot is incredibly disjointed. I didn't expect it to be so obvious that this movie had been directed by two different people and thought Spielberg to be more subtle. There was apparently little attempt by Spielberg to blend his parts of the movie with Kubrick's to create a coherent whole. Instead what we get is a wonderfully dark first 60-90 minutes and then something reminiscent of 'Close Encounters of the E.T. kind' tacked on to make us feel good. As a result, the feel of the film quickly evaporated into a mush. There were a couple of chances to end the movie earlier (notably at the end of the underwater section) and it was a mistake to take the movie beyond these points. The poignancy is lost with repeated attempts to extend and explain the story in unnecessary ways, the scene with David's mother towards the end being especially contrived and saccharin.

The sum up, this felt like two movies in one - an intelligent, dark and fascinating film mixed one that's formulaic, sentimental and cheesy. Because of this it fails to reach the promised heights and at times feels messy. It's ultimately unsatisfying and left me very disappointed, but not because it's bad, but rather because I expected so much more. As many others have said, I can't help wondering what heights it would have reached if Kubrick hadn't passed away.

An interesting film, but rent it first as it's not for everyone.