STARS: *** �
DIRECTOR: Steven Spielberg [& Stanley Kubrick]
PRINCIPLE CAST:
Haley Joel Osment
Frances O'Connor
Jude Law
TAGLINE: His love is real, but he is not.
I believe it is now officially safe to say that Haley Joel Osment is a superstar. We first caught a glimpse of his great abilities as little Forrest Jr. in Forrest Gump. He made a great leap in film evolution with his Oscar-nominated performance in The Sixth Sense. And though it garnered mixed reviews and lackluster box-office, he proved himself in Pay it Forward. Now, in this sci-fi quasi-Pinocchio for the new millennium, Osment radiates as one of the greatest young film stars of all time. Barely a teenager, he has incredible emotional range and fabulous screen presence that pushes him as one of the most gifted and talented actors out there today, regardless of age. Steven Spielberg, who took over this project after the late, great Stanley Kubrick passed on, obviously knows this and takes a major advantage of it. Young Osment has several scenes in this movie in which he is the only character present, leaving him to play off his surroundings and expressing his characters emotions without dialogue (or blinking).
A.I. may seem like Bicentennial Boy through previews, but it is far much more. Divided into three acts, this is the story of what happens when man tries to play God and cannot deal with the outcome. Haley Joel Osment is David, an experimental Mecha (short for mechanical) designed to genuinely love and feel love in return. He is brought home by Henry, an employee of his manufacturing company, as a gift for his wife Monica to substitute their comatose son Martin. This first act is very emotional, powerful, and at times scary. Monica finds herself learning to love David and when she programs David, he feels the same, if not deeper. She dresses him for bed, dresses him, and even gives him Teddy, Martin�s supertoy teddy bear. All goes awry when Martin wakes up and returns home, feeling a bit jealous of David. This sets off a chain of events that leads Henry to the conclusion that the best thing for the family is to bring David back to the factory. However, when Monica goes on her drive there, aware that David will be destroyed because he cannot be deprogrammed, she does not have the heart to destroy her son and in a very emotional scene, she abandon�s him with Teddy, leaving him alone in the woods, so to speak.
This is the start of the second act in which David meets up with Jude Law�s Gigolo Joe, a Love Mecha, and the robots find themselves on the run from humans. They are soon caught and brought to a Flesh Fair, a whacked-out carnival in which robots are publicly destroyed. Though the abandonment scene in the first act had me in tears, this scene had me emotionally disturbed. I mean, I may have been set off by certain parts of movies like Se7en and Hannibal, but I was actually shocked with the coldness that Steven Spielberg drew out from this. It was the first time I can recall seeing the theory of �humans being utterly inhumane� expressed so well on film.
It is also during this act that David, having been told the story of Pinocchio, goes in search of the Blue Fairy to turn him into a real boy so his mother can love him and he can return home to her. He makes a journey to �the end of the world� which is actually an underwater and not-so-coincidental Manhattan, from which several robots have gone and never returned. There he meets his maker and discovers he is not as special and original as he thought. He goes a bit mad, then tragic. He soon finds himself submerged underwater staring at a ceramic Coney Island blue fairy. This brings us two thousand years later into act three, which I will not go into great detail about, though I can say it has the most Kubrick-ian elements.
This is a phenomenal movie that tests human emotions and mentality in a sci-fi fable world. The only problem I have with this movie is the way Spielberg feels the need to spell out everything to the audience, either through useless narrative or unnecessary dialogue, which Stanley Kubrick would never do. This is the type of movie that people either get or don�t, regardless of how it is told to them. I tried so much to love this movie even more � I was almost on the verge of giving it the nonexistent *** � - but the story-telling of it all seemed to push the film more as a contemporary fairy tale adaptation that the cold Grimm brothers style of an original. But overall, this is a great work, with its visual splendor, beautiful score, and, of course, performances. Frances O�Connor milks every bit of emotion as David�s �mommy� Monica. William Hurt, though a little underused, is fabulous as robot creator Dr. Hobby. And Jude Law manages to turn in a slightly comic turn as Joe. But as I�ve stated, this is Haley Joel Osment�s movie and knows it and embraces it. Major snaps to this young man, I only hope the Academy looks past his age, recognizes his talent and rewards him � having the best performance I have seen this year � with a Best Actor nomination.
