Very Artificial and Rather Unintelligent (A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2 DVDs))

Member Name: sandrabarber

Product:	A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2 DVDs)
Date:	04/01/03 (88 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: good effects, good central performance

Disadvantages: too long, boring, disjointed

It is the future. Earth has suffered environmental crisis, cities are flooded and the planet is critically overpopulated. No one can have children unless licensed to do so. To appease the childless, robot children are created. They do as they are told and say the right things, but they are incapable of feeling.

For scientist Professor Hobby this is not enough. He wants to make a child who can feel and who is capable of real 'human' love. After twenty years of striving, his work is complete, and the child, David, is given to a couple whose own son has long been in a coma from which he does not look likely to recover.

The woman does not want David at first, but her husband persuades her to keep him for a while. He is cute, affectionate, loyal and obedient, and she soon grows to love him. David becomes a fully fledged family member.

Things start to go wrong, however, when their real son comes out of his coma and comes home. Sibling rivalry ensues, and the family is thrown into conflict. Forced to choose between their real son and David, the couple choose their natural child and abandon David and his 'real toy' teddy bear out in the woods.

Until this point, the movie is an interesting and thought provoking depiction of a 'possible' future and to some extent (though it is never fully exploited) an examination of the human condition, the nature of love and family dynamics.

Henceforth, however, things take a massive turn and the viewer finds themselves thrust into another kind of movie altogether, where we encounter a robot flesh fair, where outdated and malfunctioning robots are used for sport, a horrendously decadent and dangerous Las Vegas type city, and a new Ice Age.

David travels with two companions, his techno teddy (an all-singing, all-dancing creature who knows the answer to everything), and a robot gigolo called Joe.

What it all adds up to is a black and adult fairytale inters
persed with huge dollops of schmaltz that has David searching for his mother's love for over 2000 years.

I didn't know what to expect from AI when I put it in my video machine, but it was certainly not this. I can honestly say that it is the most bizarre and mixed-up movie I have ever seen.

What I liked:

I loved the first section of the movie. It raised interesting and important questions about the human race and where we are going with science and technology.

I also loved the special effects, especially the submerged Manhattan to which David travels to find the man who made him. And the human-like robots are incredibly surreal.

And praise must go to the central performance of Haley Joel Osment of Sixth Sense fame. He shows a maturity way beyond his years and an astonishing mastery of his craft.

David's reunion with his mother towards the end of the film is a genuinely moving experience that is brilliantly portrayed by both actors involved. It is also wonderfully lit and photographed, which adds to its sheer emotional power which, for once, is not diminished by saccharine-sweet sentimentality.

What I hated:

Directed by Spielberg, the film was originally begun by the late Stanley Kubrick. They are two very different film-makers and for me their styles have not combined well at all. What we have is Kubrick's icy distance coupled with the excesses I thought Spielberg had got over, i.e. utter sugariness, the complete sentimentalisation of children and a nauseating belief in the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Two more diametrically opposed philosophies and outputs I cannot imagine, and what results is an utter mish-mash of styles that is disconcerting rather than innovative.

Teddy. Though I am quite prepared to believe that we will in the future have teddy bears that are human-like on the inside, I do not want one playing a crucial role in a supposedly adult movie. r>
Length. This film is way too long at two hours twenty minutes. It seems like a lifetime.


Overall:

I did not like this film. I do not know what it was trying to say, and I do not like the way it said (or didn't say) it.

Though AI is undoubtedly a visual feast, its story is a disjointed, long-winded and often boring bag of nothingness.

Style-wise, it is a complete mish-mash of genres, and it comes at you from a variety of half-formed and uncomplimentary perspectives.

Scenes and themes that could have been explored in depth were merely skimmed over, whereas scenes that had little to say but merely looked good lingered on and on.

For me A.I. did not work as either science fiction, fantasy or fairy-tale, and it amounted to a very empty and unsatisfying viewing experience indeed.

Or maybe I'm just too old for teddy bears.