|
a.i.:
artificial intelligence |
director
Steven
Spielberg
screenwriter
Steven Spielberg
screen
story
Ian Watson
based on
a story by
Brian Aldiss
producers
Steven Spielberg
Kathleen Kennedy
Bonnie Curtis
cinematographer
Janusz Kaminski
music
John Williams
editor
Michael Kahn
cast
Haley Joel Osment (David)
Jude Law (Gigolo Joe)
Frances O'Connor (Monica)
Sam Robards (Henry)
William Hurt (Professor Hobby)
Jake Thomas (Martin)
Brendan Gleeson (Lord Johnson-Johnson)
Jack Angel (voice of Teddy)
Robin Williams (voice of Dr. Know)
Chris Rock (voice of Comedian Mecha)
Ben Kingsley (Narrator)
Meryl Streep (voice of Blue Fairy)
mpaa rating: PG-13
running
time: 145m
u.s.
release: 6/29/01
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
other steven
spielberg films
reviewed on this website:
- amistad
- catch
me if you can
- close
encounters of the third kind
- e.t.
(special edition, 2002)
- jurassic park
- the lost world: jurassic park
- minority report
- munich
- saving private ryan
- schindler's list
- the terminal
- war of the worlds
other kubrick
stuff
on this website:
- eyes
wide shut (theatrical review)
- eyes wide shut (DVD review)
- kubrick: the films, 1955-1999
|
[Warning: This
review contains many spoilers and should be read only
after seeing the film, unless you don't intend to see it.]
There's one moment early in
A.I., Steven Spielberg's lavish, long-awaited fantasy,
that promises a far more complex experience than we end up getting.
David (Haley Joel Osment), a "mecha" (robot) designed
to act as a child, is having dinner with his adoptive "parents"
(Frances O'Connor and Sam Robards). Actually, David is only pretending
to have dinner, since he can't eat. Anyway, Monica, the mother,
has a long strand of food dangling from her mouth -- the sort
of thing a kid would laugh at -- so David lets out a raucous
simulation of a laugh, scaring the hell out of both "parents."
Then they laugh uneasily at him. Then he laughs some more. Then
they all laugh some more. Then, finally, they just stare at each
other.
This brief, wordless sequence,
with its barely repressed hysteria popping out like a switchblade,
sends a ripple of equally uneasy laughter through the audience;
it says, very economically, pretty much everything A.I.
has to say. The rest of the movie, even before the disastrous
triple non-ending, features some of the most elaborate bumbling
I've ever seen from a great filmmaker. And Spielberg is
great, or, rather, he once was. No longer content to be an ingenious
entertainer, he now wants to improve us; his movies have become
the equivalents of the latest Oprah Book Club selection -- each
story is picked according to its potential for uplift.
What Spielberg doesn't, or
can't, recognize is that this story has no such potential.
A.I. began life as a 1969 short story by Brian Aldiss.
For years, the late Stanley Kubrick wanted to turn the story
into a movie; he consulted Spielberg on the visual effects he
wanted to use for it, and even suggested Spielberg direct it
and he himself produce it. After Kubrick's death, his estate
offered the project to Spielberg, who takes sole screenplay credit,
working from a "screen story" by Ian Watson. To put
it mildly, what Spielberg has done with the material is not what
Kubrick might have done with it, though the fact remains that
Kubrick spent years trying to find a cinematic way into the story
and couldn't. What made Spielberg think he could? He can't,
either.
William Hurt appears at the
beginning, as a robot-engineering guru named Professor Hobby
(very subtle). We're in the future; the ice caps have melted,
submerging the coastal cities and drowning millions, and mechas
have been created to take care of some of the tasks humans used
to do. Apparently, they're only available to the elite who can
afford them; the movie doesn't get much into the middle-class
or working-class response to the mechas, or their resentment
at being replaced by them -- though this is alluded to in a dark-carnival
scene of violence, set at the "Flesh Fair," where malfunctioning
robots are shot out of cannons or drenched with acid for the
amusement of hooting mobs of lowbrows.
So, is artificial intelligence
good or bad? Kubrick would have concluded that any robotic intelligence
designed and controlled by fallible humans is bound to break
down eventually (see HAL 9000). Spielberg, on the other hand,
doesn't seem to know or care. But back to Professor Hobby, who
speaks about the need to build a mecha capable of love. Such
a creation, he reasons, will be perfect for couples who cannot
have (or have lost) a real child. Someone brings up the question
of what happens when a loving mecha is thrown in with people
who cannot love it in return; Professor Hobby is stuck for an
answer, and so is the movie, which in any case doesn't linger
very long on the question. When David is brought home to his
human "parents" -- whose genetic son is cryogenically
frozen until doctors can find a cure for whatever's wrong with
him -- we're meant to find David a bit creepy (an overused word
in reviews of A.I., but it fits). We identify with the
bafflement and, eventually, the horror felt by the parents as
they watch this simulacrum interact with their real son, Martin
(Jake Thomas), who has been cured and brought home. Martin is
sportive and sadistic towards David; sometimes he seems to think
it's cool to have a mecha for an adopted brother, other times
he seems to find the very idea of David -- and of being replaced
by him, even if only temporarily -- offensive.
In any event, most of this
is forgotten once Monica, frightened by one mishap too many,
takes David to a remote, woodsy area and abandons him. This,
I think, is where the movie first seriously goes astray: Spielberg
abandons a cool, contemplative premise in favor of masochistic
longing -- he leaves his own movie out in an emotional nowhere
to fend for itself, and it's not a pretty sight. In a cruelly
overextended scene, David weeps and begs his cherished mother
to take him back. If done differently, the moment could resonate
across many fields of experience in the audience, but Spielberg
oversells it, just as he goes on to oversell everything else
in the movie.
A viewer might assume that
the stage is being set for a fable in the tradition of A Clockwork
Orange, which thirty years ago was already parodying this
sort of woe-is-me trauma (in the scenes wherein Malcolm McDowell,
post-Ludivico, returns home and is rejected, beaten and nearly
killed). Spielberg has something different in mind, though: a
series of disjointed adventures that smack dangerously of the
frantic exertions in his Hook. David meets up with a sex
robot named Gigolo Joe (Jude Law), who has been framed for the
murder of one of his female clients. Joe's backstory seems pointless
except to explain why he's on the lam and to provide yet another
instance of human mistreatment of mechas. We're meant to feel,
helplessly, that this just isn't fair. To paraphrase John
Lennon, mechas are the niggers of the world, used up and then
torn apart. This sounds like Kubrick in rare form, but Spielberg's
tone is way off. The tenor of the movie is oddly resentful: these
worthless, compassionless humans don't deserve the service of
the very beings they've built. Humans are seen as crude, incompetent
gods sending their creations into squalor. Kubrick might have
chuckled icily at the hubris of man playing God; Spielberg stamps
his foot and says it just isn't right.
Together, David and Joe narrowly
escape the Flesh Fair (a disturbing sequence until Spielberg
apparently decides he's gone far enough and makes the screaming
crowd have a sudden change of heart towards David) and wander
around Rouge City, a sort of Ralph Bakshi carnal wonderland complete
with open female mouths swallowing the highways that lead into
the city. Spielberg blows a chance to show how Joe might thrive
in a place like this; Jude Law, bounding into the movie with
a phallic energy that recalls McDowell's in Clockwork,
is mostly thrown away for his troubles (Spielberg treats him
like a mecha). Joe doesn't really belong to this story as Spielberg
is telling it, anyway; he's being imposed onto the material --
he can be yanked out at any time without harming the narrative.
After some dawdling, the two wind up in a sort of informational
kiosk, speaking with a digital guru named Dr. Know, with the
voice of Robin Williams. Like an earlier vocal cameo by Chris
Rock as a minstrelly-looking mecha who gets shot through a propeller
at the Flesh Fair, Williams' Einstein shtick takes you out of
the movie -- you start wondering if Billy Crystal or Whoopi Goldberg
will turn up as well.
Brian Aldiss' original story
"Supertoys Last All Summer Long," recently reissued
in a collection of the same name along with two follow-up stories
Aldiss wrote 30 years later, is much more haunting; anything
chilling in A.I. -- other than film-specific inventions
like the Flesh Fair -- derives pretty much from Aldiss. The two
sequel stories, particularly the middle one "Supertoys When
Winter Comes," take the premise of David and his fuzzy-bear
robot friend Teddy into even darker territory: for instance,
in the middle tale, David flips out and dissects Teddy to prove
that he and Teddy are real, and goes on a rampage that results
in the death of his mother figure. If A.I. had given us
a David who desperately, futilely seeks the love of his mommy
-- who can't return his love because she's dead -- some
of the metaphysical gassing in the final half hour might have
had more of a point.
As it is, David is just a sweet
little "boy" who's hardwired to love his mother (once
she has "imprinted" him with a few random words); when
he encounters the tale of Pinocchio and the Blue Fairy who could
turn the puppet into a real boy, he adds that to his pull-down
menu of obsessions, and the movie becomes about how he yearns
to become "real" so that his mother will love him.
Spielberg seems as obsessed with Pinocchio as his little
hero is. To be fair, Kubrick was the one who insisted on keeping
the Blue Fairy stuff in the movie, much to the bemusement of
Aldiss, who notes in his foreword to his collection that "I
tried to persuade Stanley that he should create a great modern
myth to rival Dr. Strangelove and 2001, and to
avoid fairy tale." Kubrick didn't take this perfectly sound
advice, and neither did Spielberg.
David winds up in Professor
Hobby's headquarters, where he confronts irrefutable proof that
he really is a robot, though you'd think he would've figured
that out by now. In Aldiss' stories, David is in denial about
his mecha nature throughout; in the movie, things happen to him
that obviously separate him from humans, such as malfunctioning
when he tries to eat spinach. (Is this Spielberg's joke on kids
who won't eat their spinach? Or a free-floating Popeye reference?)
But when David encounters another David, he flies into a rage
and bashes the other David's head clean off -- Kubrick popping
up again, maybe: even a perfect little mecha can be made bestial
and violent by human passions. Spielberg, though, films this
atrocity -- we've seen that David can feel pain, so we assume
this other David can, too -- entirely neutrally, as if it were
a necessary step on the hero's mythic path. Are we not supposed
to care about the second David's destruction because he's
just a robot? If so, why were we prompted to care about the robots
at the Flesh Fair? Or, for that matter, about the David we've
been watching?
At this point, we're hovering
around the two-hour mark, but Spielberg isn't anywhere near finished
with us yet. Joe goes out of the picture rather abruptly and
absurdly, leaving behind a gnomic announcement: "I am. I
was." (Between this and Tom Hanks' "Earn this,"
Spielberg seems to have cornered the market on quasi-profound
catchphrases. Djimon Hounsou's "Give us free" also
would not be out of place here.) David goes underwater -- we're
in Manhattan now, where the Statue of Liberty is submerged up
to its torch -- and ends up at Coney Island, where he parks himself
in front of an old plaster Blue Fairy and waits. And waits.
"Two thousand years passed,"
narrator Ben Kingsley informs us -- what? -- and now we're
into a post-humanity Ice Age, where super-advanced mechas who
look like shimmering Giacometti sculptures are trying to recreate
the human race by digging around in the ice for human DNA. David
awakes, reasserts his desire to be loved by his mother, and is
given his mother, revived for only one day so that he
can finally hear her say that she loves him. (Is this Spielberg
delivering a message to the parents in the audience -- "Tell
your kids you love them before it's too late"?) This may
be the first solipsistic epic since 2001, but it has none
of that film's wonder or mystery -- Spielberg collapses into
spasms of exposition, suffocating the uncanny with verbiage,
and one's boredom and exasperation may turn into anger. It's
as if Spielberg were trying to ape the Kubrick of Eyes
Wide Shut, who allowed Sydney Pollack to drone on and
on about what the past half hour's events didn't mean
(in retrospect, the Pollack speech is pretty funny, though --
it tweaks our desire to see the mystery cleared up).
This is probably Spielberg's
worst film since Hook, perhaps even worse than that other
misguided fairy-tale revamp, since this one had the potential
to be so much more. Haley Joel Osment tries very hard to be everything
that this difficult role requires, but, unavoidably, his performance
becomes more conventional and dull when David is on his own,
with no one except other mechas to play off of; everything else
in the movie dulls out, too. Spielberg appears to have latched
onto the Pinocchio material, and all the rowdy adventures
it made possible, as an escape hatch from the deeply uncomfortable
scenes of David and his uncomprehending human family. Brian Aldiss
knew what Spielberg, and Kubrick before him, didn't: that the
story of Pinocchio is a too-easy parallel with this material,
and that it throws out everything that might have made this film
complex, specific, original. The movie goes outward when
its nature -- its wiring as programmed by Aldiss -- demands that
it turn inward. (Eventually it does turn inward, but in
an extremely literalized, disappearing-up-its-own-ass way.) If
Spielberg had stayed home with the mecha and his family, and
explored the implications of an inhuman boy showing more humanity
than his human parents and sibling, he might've had a classic.
What he has delivered is the scattered wreckage of a good idea
-- a mechanical thing clogged with emotional spinach.
|