A.C. Artificial Cinema
Spielberg's sci-fi drama takes banality into the future.

A.I. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
With Haley Joel Osment, Jude Law, William Hurt
Screenplay by Steven Spielberg
Based on a screenplay by Ian Watson
Which was based on a short story by Brian Aldiss
Directed by Steven Spielberg

LET’S GET ALL the requisite accolades over with so we can move on to the important stuff: The special effect in Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence are as impressive as you’d expect from Stan (Terminator 2) Winston and the team at Industrial Light and (Star Wars) Magic. Try all you like to dismiss their work, but it’s startling beyond words to watch an actor’s face turn into a piece of robotic machinery without a cut or a blink.

With that out of the way, I’m free to assert that the difference between a turkey and A.I. is that a turkey knows it can’t fly, and A.I. apparently thinks it can. Schizophrenic to a pulp, and with a protracted ending that employs a deus ex machina to end all deus ex machinas, it’s so nakedly the work of its director that you won’t know whether to cheer or guffaw. Twenty minutes from the end, when David (Haley Joel Osment) - the lonely little robot boy searching for love - stands before the statue of the Blue Fairy and begs, "Make me a real boy," I mumbled to myself: "Will you make him a real boy already so I can go home."

As with all benign egotists, Spielberg nods at his own work, from the aliens in Close Encounters to the auto-lovable E.T. (David first appears as a glowing apparition with a long neck and a big round head.) Then, Spielberg unleashes all the weepy clichés of love to stage a grand-mal entertainment that drowns in the mawkish tunnel vision of its creator.

This wouldn’t be so infuriating if his movie weren’t also unwittingly about something. The story takes place on a future Earth where the greenhouse effect and our environmental non-policies finally caused the polar ice caps to melt. New York is largely under water, and life exists on higher ground, where the rich live in metallic splendor, where reproduction requires a permit, and where human-looking robots exist because they don’t consume valuable natural resources.

Soon we meet a husband and wife who lost their son and who get, as his replacement, the mecha (for "mechanical") David, designed by its madly passionate creator (William Hurt) to love as well as function. Eventually David’s adopted mother abandons him, and on the run in the dangerous outer world, he meets Gigolo Joe (Jude Law), a buoyantly narcissistic mecha literally designed to be a love machine (sort of like a vibrator with a smile). Together they search for the Blue Fairy, a character from Pinocchio that David hopes will make him a real boy.

A.I. changes tones several times, but the only rewarding tone is the one in the middle, where we get to witness Flesh Fair, an arena full of people who cheer at robots being slaughtered as blood sport in a rant against technology. Yet in his hurry to get on with his bittersweet lovefest, Spielberg seems to miss that this scenario is very intriguingly about class struggle: As rich people live like futuristic Rockefellers, the disenfranchised underclasses rebel futilely against the technology that allows the rich their privilege and isolation.

If you’re generous with Spielberg’s ultimate plot, you might say humankind eventually gets punished for its sins. But that’s about as much of an accident as any other interesting idea in A.I. Its science-fiction future world is haphazard and muddled, and it has a cowardly strain of narration (spoken by Ben Kingsley) that obliterates any hope of a subtext and permits Spielberg to tell us all the things we need to discover for ourselves.

So we’re left with a few CGI-techno-worlds to please our senses, a charmingly effervescent performance by Law as the heel-clicking gigolo, and with the continuing promise that Osment, the dark elf from The Sixth Sense, is not just a bundle of instinct, but rather the alert and penetrating young actor that he seems to be.

A long time ago, Stanley Kubrick showed some interest in making a movie of A.I. But there’s not much point in pondering what kind of movie his would have been. Just think of it the other way around: Could you imagine Spielberg directing Clockwork Orange, Full Metal Jacket or Eyes Wide Shut? In fact, Spielberg says Kubrick himself suggested that A.I. was not his kind of movie, and that he should produce and Spielberg should direct. So maybe it’s a good thing after all that Kubrick didn’t have anything to do with A.I. It probably would have killed him.