Get your own Free Home PageI've heard a lot of complaints about this half Spielberg / half Kubrick project. But let's hold complaints to the end now.
A.I. takes place at an undetermined time in the future when the polar ice caps have melted nearly completely and submerged most of the world under giant oceans. This fact is merely incidental to the story and serves only to justify the continued daily use of robots. Basically, due to overcrowding, strict birth control measures are implemented and not everyone is allowed to procreate. Hence the creation of "David," (Haley Joel Osment) an artificially intelligent child mecha (movie slang for robots) who's sole purpose in existing is to love his adoptive "parents" unconditionally.
Perhaps the first criticism that most people have about this movie (other than a complex and unsatisfying ending) is that because this film is a Spielberg/Kubrick hybrid it shares strong elements of both directors and yet will never fit into either directors canon of works easily. However, there is a strong yet subtle connection between the two directors style of film making and the plot of A.I.
Kubrick's films over the years became considerably streamlined in dialogue and deeper in psychology. When looking at his last film Eyes Wide Shut one sees extremely minimal emotions between Kidman's and Cruise's characters. If Kubrick had handled A.I. on his own we probably wouldn't have seen the flustered emotional outbursts of David in situations of danger and abandonment.
Spielberg, on the other hand, has been the blockbuster king, with Dinosaurs and special effects out the wazoo. This film more fits into Spielberg's work right alongside Schindler's List. As the film explores the issues of personal property and intelligent software one immediately begins to think of forced labor camps and Nazi sentiment regarding the Jewish people as expendable pieces of property that could be disposed of if need be.
As said before that A.I. is a film that is at once both a Spielberg film and a Kubrick film, and yet in its totality something less than either man's body of work. That can be a fair assumption, but I like to think of it as the perfect link between the two directors as embodied in the character of David. The Kubrick side of David is the machine who does as he is told, and programmed to react appropriately, whereas the Spielberg side of David is the loving emotional and even spiritual being. So, we as an audience are torn between seeing these feelings of grief of a child being left out in the woods by a parent who still feels for him, and yet in the back of our minds knowing that this is program, a human generated emotional algorithm designed to tug at our heartstrings.
There are a number of ethical questions that we have to wrestle with in this film. The first of which is how are we as humans supposed to treat the mecha that we live with? It'll be interesting to compare the idea of the soul in A.I. to the idea of the soul in Tim Burton's new Planet of the Apes. But more specifically, if these mechas are intelligent creatures, should they deserve the same respect as humans, or are they merely a trumped up version of the Sony Aibo (tm)? We see this debate played out between Monica and Henry, David's adopted parents, but literally every scene of this movie is laden with an ethical question.
Without giving anything away, there has also been quite a round of criticism about the ending in that there was too much explanation of what just happened. I'm going to agree with that, but with hesitation. This is after all is said and done a Spielberg movie, and he does tend to get into explanations.
A.I. is well worth going to see, although, if you're thinking that you're getting into E.T. here, you're seeing the wrong movie. If your children get frightened easily you might want to think twice before seeing A.I.
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