A.I. Intelligence artificielle

AI is inspired by British science fiction writer, Brian Aldiss short story 'Supertoys Last All Summer Long.' It was a project initiated by Stanley Kubrick and then taken over by Steven Spielberg who directs as well as write the screenplay. It is a mixture of Spielberg's wide eyed childlike wonder from his ET era with Kubrick's cold gaze of adulthood. It is a modern version of Pinocchio.

The film is set in a future where the ice caps have melted and eradicated the coastline. Robots of increasing sophistication have become part of the fabric of society. Professor Hobby (William Hurt) has created an android with programme to love and be more human like.

Monica and Henry Swinton (Frances O'Connor and Sam Robards) have a terminally ill son and take in David (Haley Joel Osment) almost as a substitute son to love. David as he is programmed is fixated on his mother and projects his love.

When their son Martin (Jake Thomas) miraculously recovers and returns home, the new family of four becomes fractious. Martin is mean to David who cannot interact with other kids. It is not in his programming. An incident means that like a dangerous pet, he could be dangerous in the house. However Monica is not willing to send him back to the corporation where he would be presumably terminated.

Monica cares enough for David to abandon him in the woods with a Teddy Bear who is also an AI robot for companionship and wisdom (his Jiminy Cricket.) From there David befriends other robots such as Gigolo Joe (Jude Law), a sex-bot on the run after being framed for murder. They evade resentful humans and journey to find the Blue Fairy whom David believes can turn him into a real boy so his mother can love him.

David is a boy who becomes accepted quickly by becoming part of a family only to find that he is not afforded their protection when he is gauded and provoked by Martin. Once in he wilds with Gigolo Joe he is living in fear in a society where robots have no rights.

Spielberg creates two sound stages for the middle of his film. Flesh Fair a gaudy, sleazy place where robots are destroyed in front of cheering humans but David pleads for his life and swings the crowd his way. Then there is Rouge City, A Vegas type place where the holographic Dr Know points them to the top of Rockefeller Center in the flood hit of Manhattan where he meets his creator, Professor Hobby.

The final act set in the submerged Coney Island which is then frozen over in an oncoming ice age until David is rescued by advanced beings.

I have to confess. I liked the ending. It bought an emotional crescendo to a flawed film. It moved me as it allows David to find he is the recipient of love and can finally grow and become human even if it is all a projection from the beings that rescued him. Without this ending, I would had found this to be a dull, uninvolving and grim experience. Humans treating robots like pets who are soon discarded once they are no longer fulfil a useful function.

I understand that this ending was part of the Kubrick draft and not added by Spielberg. Kubrick finally showed his sentimental side.

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.

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.

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.

I loved this film. It isn't one of the greatest films ever made, but it's a personal favorite of mine. I cried at the two sad points, I laughed at the mannerisms of Gigalo Joe and Teddy, the super-toy, my heart pumped faster at the action, suspense, and horror, but overall, I really enjoyed the film on a whole. I didn't find an ounce of it boring at all. It's practically the same as observing an extraordinary life and extraordinary tale of a boy who just wants his mommy. But the boy is not a boy, and rather a robot. But the way he acts can pass for a human any day.

The look of the film was dazzling and amazing. From the facilities in the underwater Manhatten, to the curvy, sensual architecture of Rouge City. I really felt as if I were really going along for a great ride and once I stepped out of the theater, I wanted more.

The film is from Steven Spielberg based on Brian Aldiss' short story, "Super-toys Last All Summer Long" which was doctored up by Stanley Kubrick. The film is a tribute to the legendary filmaker, but it is not his film, but rather Spielberg's. Sure it sometimes tries to mimic his styles, but that's practically the same as a filmmaker paying homage to a great. It's more or less the same as somebody making his adaptation of a novel or maybe graphic novel, since Kubrick supplied some of his artwork through designs. The story is Kubrick's, but the film is Spielberg's.

Although it may seem ridiculous to some at some points, it's a future, not THE future, but a rendition of it and somethings may happen in THIS future that may seem unrealistic. The film has a great score, but it just doesn't stand out like some of John Williams's other scores. The end could be considered a homage to Spielberg's "Close Encounters Of the Third Kind" or it could be something different, something more along the lines of the film's title, Artificial Intelligence, but only a far more advanced form of it.

The acting in this film is great along with the emotions, visions, humor, and fright. I found this film to be extraordinarily superb, but whether you think it's as good, is up to you.