A.I. Artificial Intelligence
AI is set in a not too distant future, when global warming has resulted in the drowning of substantial parts of Earth and technology is advancing rapidly. Robots, artificial people called mechas (as in ‘mechanical’), do all those boring chores humans would like to avoid. There is a robot for every need — even the sexual. None other than Jude Law takes on this, the best role in the film, the sex mecha Gigolo Joe, and he does it well. Unfortunately, AI has few other redeeming features. The camera angles are forced, the lighting unnaturally natural and the premise of the traditional lonely housewife, whose only goal in life is to be a good mother, carried into the future is insulting to any intelligent person with the slightest knowledge of feminism.
Haley Joel Osment plays David, the first robot boy ever to be programmed to love his adoptive mother (Frances O’Connor), the wife of a Cybertronics employee, whose own terminally ill child has been cryogenically frozen until a cure can be found. Predictably, complications arise and Spielberg’s familiar family bliss is torn to pieces. David is left to fend for himself with Teddy, the supertoy teddy bear, as his only companion. Up until now most of the action and the acting has been laboured but then the film takes a more interesting turn. We are guided to the seedy Rouge City, where Gigolo Joe uses all his programmed charm to relax nervous human females who come to him for pleasure but are unsure of what it will be like to sleep with a mecha. According to my partner, the scenes in Flesh City look like a combination of sets from Blade Runner and Beyond Thunderdome and, although familiar, they are the most entertaining in the entire film.
Toward the end, John Williams’ overbearing strings and the painfully slow pace of the film made me escape to a dream world of my own. When I woke up just in time to see the sentimental ending, I immediately wished I had been spared. There were several opportunities to cut the 2½ hour long yawn short but AI missed them all in its endeavours to echo 2001: A Space Odyssey. As we re-entered the world outside the theatre, we heard scattered comments about Kubrick’s influence on the project and it occurred to me that this fact is probably the main problem with AI; Spielberg has tried to make a good Kubrick film as well as a good Spielberg film. AI is neither and has therefore become a double failure.
Sol
