A Scientist at the Movies Reviews by Greg Paris

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Title: A. I.: Artificial Intelligence

Date Viewed: 7/14/01

Details:

Haley Joel Osment (David)

Frances O'Connor (Swinton)

Sam Robards (Swinton)

Jake Thomas (Swinton)

Jude Law (Gigolo Joe)

William Hurt (Professor Hobby)

Film score: John Williams

Director: Steven Spielberg (and, some would say, Stanley Kubrick)

Score: 0

The Review: Disturbing, depressing, oddly paced -- this is a very strange film.

Derived in part from the short story by Brian Aldiss ("Supertoys Last All Summer Long"), this is a peculiar collaboration between Spielberg and Kubrick, or an homage by one to the other, depending on how analytic you choose to be. Some have likened A.I. to Pinocchio, although that was not the first thing to occur to me. At the outset of this film, self-powered android robots have been companions and servants for some time, but the next step is about to be taken, towards the creation of an android whose learning process will include human emotions.

This film is partitioned into three nearly-independent parts -- call them creation, quest, and epilog: a triptych -- each with its own narrative that reaches a logical conclusion, only to start running again in(to) the next segment. The tension generated by just-achieved closure immediately moving onto a radically different next chapter, causes a queasy unsettling feeling. Furthermore, to my naive eye, there is an imbalance between these segments, with the quest and epilog each forming a minor component, and each much too short (relative to the initial chapter) and only marginally connected to the segment with David's creation and initial human experience. The epilog, with its curious and potentially fascinating view of cognitive evolutionary history, is annoyingly short, considering the material it is presenting. But in this sense, it reminds me of parts of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey -- it's a fragment, a scene, a stand-in for more full development, that works but is not fully satisfying.

Haley Joel Osment is chilling as the android David, and I'm not sure this is a compliment. His role requires an almost leaden mask for much of the earlier segments of the film, and while Osment carries it off well, it's a bit spooky. (I gather there was a debate about whether David's character could be effected by a human actor, or whether they needed to animate the entire role.) Jude Law as the android Gigolo Joe is a bit more of a character, but still over-the-top. It tends to be a bit annoying when the humans have almost as little affect as do the androids, and as little personality. There is a good chance you will cringe at the banalities here, as you did in the early portions of 2001 -- the dialog is just as irrelevant.

Spielberg's (and Kubrick's) vision of the future is in many ways dystopian, and almost unremittingly dark. There is a thin veneer of advanced civilization, but the heart of darkness lies close to the surface, and not too far out in the countryside -- and easy for David and Gigolo Joe to stumble into. The vision of the anti-technologists, the persecution and torture of escaped or defective androids, has a gladiatorial flavor to it, but there are no gladiatorial heroes; these scenes are perhaps the most disturbing in the entire film. Perhaps gratuitous violence; violence to androids -- violence to thinking entities that happen not to have been created via the normal human fertilization process -- but violence nonetheless. This was an important aspect of Kubrick's Clockwork Orange, effective in its shock at that time, but here is just seems strident.

My neutral-point rating is not because the film is "ehh", but because there are too many conflicting thoughts, moods, feelings. Perhaps in that sense, this was a successful filmmaking effort, but it is not an overly pleasant one.

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