The
late Stanley Kubrick's name graces the intro to A.I: Artificial
Intelligence alongside that of
director Steven Spielberg's (Saving
Private Ryan, The Lost World: Jurassic
Park), due to his having cultivated the film for over a
decade before it was passed to the man that was best felt who do
service with the material. It's only fitting that Kubrick be
associated with this film since A.I., like Kubrick's finest
works, is one of those films that will received middling reviews upon
release only to be considered a classic film by future generations.
A.I. is loosely based upon a short
story by Brian Aldiss back in the late 60s called "Supertoys Last All
Summer Long", and draws influence from Disney's version of
Pinocchio for this tale of an android who wishes to become a real
human boy. The movie starts off set in the middle of the 21st
century, where huge advances have taken place in the field of
artificial intelligence, so much so that it has become increasingly
difficult to distinguish between the man-made people (dubbed "Mecha"
for mechanical people) from their real-life counterparts.
However, one key component is missing: the ability to love.
One of the great designers of artificial beings
has undertaken to develop a Mecha that loves in the form of a young
boy named David (Osment, Pay It Forward),
who is adopted by a young couple grieving over the plight of their
real son (Thomas, The Cell)
who is comatose. David forms a loving relationship with the
family, but once the real son awakens, competition between the two
complicates the situation and the family finds it best to send David
out into the world to fend for himself, not being able to bear sending
him back to the plant for destruction. David then resolves he
will do whatever he can to become a real boy and get the love he so
desires to have from the family that sent him away.
Much darker in its soul than
most people will be accustomed to from Steven Spielberg, A.I.
is bound to be considered a disappointment from many people with
different expectations. It's not a thrill-a-minute ride like
Raiders of the Lost Ark or
Jaws, it's not here to instill a sense of
wonder like Close Encounters
or E.T., and it's not here to tell us
important historical lessons like
Schindler's List or Saving
Private Ryan. If anything, A.I. would seem the
anti-Spielbergian film, where kids are cruel, society is cold, and a
happy ending seems eternally out of reach. Spielberg directs
with adept knowledge of what people expect, making us think he is
going to pull his cinematic magic and set things the way we think they
should be. He toys with our expectations, dangling the ever
elusive carrot before our hungry eyes and cruelly jerking it away once
it is within our reach.
This will no doubt frustrate
many a viewer, who will come away disappointed that a director who has
spent an entire career instilling thrills, wonder and hope, even among
the most serious of films, would make a film as icy cold and dystopic
as the world depicted in A.I. Perhaps this is
Spielberg's ultimate tribute to Kubrick, a man who has built a career
on great masterworks of unsettling and perplexing films that would
rather instill doubt to make us think than in making things easy.
We are never quite sure where A.I. is going, or even if it's going
anywhere at all. The film isn't about entertainment, it goes
more to the core on what it is to be human.
Although I am positive a good portion of
today's moviegoers will be disappointed with the film, I have a very
ambitious prediction to make. Of all of Spielberg's films, many
of which are already considered to be classics of their respective
genres, A.I. may be the only one that might ever be dubbed with the
moniker of "Masterpiece". Like Vertigo
for Hitchcock, like Citizen Kane
for Welles and like 2001: A Space Odyssey
for the aforementioned Kubrick, many filmgoers and critics of their
times did not come away liking these films, thinking them too dark and
perhaps too ambitious to truly entertain. Yet, as time
progressed, these films challenged people to think and rethink, to
watch over and again to try to understand why they feel so unsettled,
so bleak, so defeated by these films. Of all of Spielberg's
films, this is the one that is the most perplexing, the one which is
the most unsettling, the one where the true meaning of it all is the
most complicated.
Scaling back the hyperbolic talk a bit, I will
admit that A.I. has a long road ahead of it if it ever is to
be considered one of Spielberg's greatest works. I only mention
it because it fits the mold of the films mentioned in the last
paragraph. They were all works by great directors that were
given mediocre reviews for being too slow and ponderous, too dark and
disparaging to enjoy. Yet over the years, as fresh eyes viewed
them and old eyes took a retrospective look at these films and tried
to understand why they found them so hard to like and why it affected
them so. In so doing, they found meaning and deeper
understanding of the human condition, even if they felt dispirited by
these creations, and in time grew to love them.
For now, A.I. has been greeted with no
accolades, middling reviews, and a lack of financial success such that
it will is considered a failure. Perhaps, like 99.99% of
all movies, it has a greater chance of being forgotten than in being
considered a masterpiece by almost anyone. All I can say
is that if we were to lay odds now on what will be considered
Spielberg's finest hour 30 years in the future, I'd gladly put a
dollar down on this one. I suspect the odds are sufficiently
against it that big dividends will be coming my way around my
retirement age.
Slow, confusing, ugly, sad, brutal, unsettling,
unsatisfying...
Brilliant.
