ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: A.I.
Released: June 29, 2001
Deep into the future robots have become part of society as we learn in "A.I. Artificial Intelligence", the new epic from director Steven Spielberg. After finishing "Saving Private Ryan" in 1998, Spielberg then began planning his next project. He had been friends with Stanley Kubrick for many years and both had talked about the movie that Kubrick was working on but couldn't quite execute properly. After Kubrick passed away in 1999 it was decided by Kubrick's family that Spielberg should take over the project. We are then given a motion picture so grand, so breathtakingly beautiful to look at yet compromised by Spielberg's integrity to Kubrick's vision and Spielberg's inate inability to make anything other than a Spielberg movie. Dispensing detailed plot details for a 154 minute movie is beyond the scope of this site but it's clear something was wrong with the basic foundation of the story. Kubrick had a desire to make a point, but what point was that exactly? Perhaps that is why he had been working on this project for a dozen years or so, unable to find an ending that satisfied his need for a profound statement. Spielberg understood the story needed some fixing and even went as far as taking it upon himself to write the final draft of the screenplay himself. Unfortunately, the Kubrick essence is diluted by Spielberg's own trademark style, giving the overall movie an uneven pace. Ultimately, the movie asks us to accept the idea that humans in the future would want a robot that feels emotions and responds with genuine love. Haley Joel Osment plays the 10 year old robot boy who is a "learning" robot and able to question things going on around him - but cannot ever truly experience them like his human counterparts. The movie asks a lot of its audience. By the ending, we must be convinced that this robot is truly able to love and feel emotions like we do. I found myself simply not able to commit to this concept and felt disengaged and cold. I see where Spielberg was trying to go but it just didn't mesh together to form a whole. Like I said, the look of the movie is astonishingly good. The effects are almost all superb. Haley Joel Osment turns in an exceptional performance that deserves praise. He really is a great actor. Also, Jude Law plays a robot with the gift of charm. His scenes give a lift to the otherwise weighty material. William Hurt stars as the doctor that created the robot boy. Notable narration and voices from Ben Kingsley, Chris Rock, Meryl Streep and Robin Williams are fine but are also distracting from the story itself. I wonder what the Kubrick version would have been like? We will never know...
154 Minutes
Dreamworks SKG/Warner Bros.