A.I. is a curious film to say the least. Part Stanley Kubrick, part Steven Spielberg it ultimately winds up belonging to the actors and special effects.
Kubrick labored to bring the story to the screen for 25 years but was never able to come up with a screenplay that worked for him. Several times the movie seemed on the verge of production only to have Kubrick wind up pulling the rug out from under it at the last minute. He even tried to pawn it off on Spielberg in 1994, though Spielberg respectfully declined to take it on at the time. Finally after Kubrick died in 1999 Spielberg agreed to make the picture out of respect for his late friend and wound up rewriting the script himself.
That script has at its heart a seemingly complex philosophical question: Are we responsible for the broken heart of a robot that we've programmed to mimic love? Like I said it seems like a complex question but at its core is an invalid conceit: that a robot can have a broken heart to begin with. If I were to believe that I'd also have to believe that I'm violating the civil rights of a lightbulb if I forget to turn if off when I go out. The fact that Spielberg's heavy, deep and real seeming question can be pretty effectively brushed aside by invoking the difference between man and his tools is at the heart of what's wrong with A.I. Spielberg is using the material to ask the wrong questions.
If instead of attempting to reinvent the emotional wheel Spielberg had used the robot David as a device to shed some light on the plight of parentless children adrift in a complicated and increasingly dangerous and exploitative world then he might have had a significantly moving and even important film on his hands. Instead he tries in vain to convince us that love is no more special than seeing or hearing and that a machine can be made to experience it just as a machine can be built and programmed to 'see'.
But does he really believe that himself? Does he really believe love can be reproduced using binary code and a couple of circuit boards? I have to think he doesn't based on the preponderence of his work. Nonetheless he tries his damnedest over the course of the movie to convince us with his efforts yielding naught but the feeling of a director trying to convince himself instead.
While it would be tempting to buy into the simplistic notion of love Spielberg seems to posit here the unfortunate fact is that its just not that simple. Love is one of the great mysteries of existence. It's also an incredibly fragile and often ephemeral thing. Two people who are swimming in the molasses of love one day might just as easily be coldly trying to destroy each other in court the next day. Former lovers move on, parents and children drift apart, we forget yet we retain the ability to love again. The fact that David never moves on demonstrates fairly convincingly that he isn't experiencing love, but rather that his hard drive has crashed and the screen is frozen.
And so with naive and unsatisfactory signals coming from the narrative and director the movie has little choice but to hand itself over to the actors and special effects artists and for the most part they comport themselves beautifully. Haley Joe Osment does a terrific job playing a life-like machine. Frances O'Conner and Sam Robarbs likewise are first rate as the emotionally conflicted parents and William Hurt embues the corporate slimeball with appropriate amounts of phony earnestness and cold-hearted calculation. The special effects are equally excellent and the cinematography compelling to the extent that you wish there were something going on on the screen that would take advantage of it.
But alas, Spielberg's heart never seems to be in this movie. Its one of the few cases I can think of where he just doesn't seem to be on top of what he's doing, maybe because he realized only too late that he'd turned down a dead end street with his interpretation. Or maybe he felt somehow forced to make this 'homage' to Kubrick. Or maybe his mind was on the several other projects he had on the board at the time he made this. Whatever the true reason for his disconnect the fact is that he could have had a Blade Runner type success on his hands but instead asked the wrong questions in a search for easy answers and failed.
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