(spoilers) You know how if a 12-year-old boy were to make up a story for you, the story would combine an incredibly disjointed number of elements, and the story would paint itself into several corners and somehow squeek out of them, and you would patiently listen to the story, and when it finally ended you would ruffle the kid's hair and privately thank God that the story was over while politely cooing to his parents about how creative and imaginative the child was? Further, you know how you would never take that story and spend millions of dollars on translating it verbatim to film with no adult editorial input? You know what I mean?
I really, really wanted to like "A.I.", and perhaps setting my expectations so high only contributed to the crushing disappointment I felt watching this film. I found the concept of robots becoming more integrated with society because they do not eat or require much in the way of living quarters (in the wake of over-population due to melting ice-caps) to be though provoking. However, my first danger signal came as David, an artificial boy who is introduced into the home of a couple who's biological son is in a coma (or dead, or whatever), is initially rejected by the wife who is horrified at this ersatz replacement of her own son.....and suddenly, for no real reason, not only accepts David but begins to love him. Indeed, this transformation is important to the story but it comes out of left field with no development whatsoever. David comes into the household as a cold, semi-vulcan like automaton, but the mother activates David's "love circuit" causing his cold stare to soften. He immediately starts calling this woman "Mommy"... and the woman just melts and accepts him. Uh, who's the robot here?
Suddenly, ta-dah, the couple's biological son is restored to health and comes home, creating a sibling rivalry situation. The returned son has a mean streak in him and starts tormenting David. Through a series of misinterpreted fear responses in David, his "parents" deem him dangerous. Knowing that returning David to the company that made him will result in his destruction, the mother instead drives him into the woods and dumps him there at the mercy of a world in which robots are hated, feared, and destroyed for entertainment by the mass majority of people. Nice. Kinda like someone who would rather let thier pet die slowly instead of having them put to sleep at the vet.
Anyhoo David, familiar with the "Pinochio" story, decides that his "mommy" would love him more and wouldn't have abandoned him if he were "a real boy". In order to achieve this, he must seek out The Blue Fairy. He does indeed find her at the long-submerged Coney Island amusement park, where his repeated requests to the Blue Fairy's statue go unheard. And so he sits at the bottom of the ocean for two thousand years until aliens dig though the ice and find him. And the aliens clone his "mommy" for him so he can spend one day of happiness with her. Yay.
This would be a very emotionally involving tale if it were not for the lack of character building and progressively treacly story telling. Between the "mommy's" willingness to abondon her "child" to the cruel world and David's cold treatment at the hands of the very people who created him to feel emotions, the central message of this film seems to be that people suck. There is no real redemption for David, and no indication that the human characters in the movie are capable of the feelings that David has. This might be interpreted as a clever irony - that the robot has feelings and the people do not - except that there is no other atorytelling skill evident in the film to suggest that such an irony would have occurred to the filmmakers in the first place.
Haley Joel Osmet turns in yet another convincing and impressive performance as the boy who feels nothing until his emotional circuits are activated. The other amusing, if not stand-out performance comes from Jude Law as Gigolo Joe - a comical sex-worker robot who befriends David. As a whole, the story is very cold-and-stark Kubrick while the film is wonder-and-ohh-ahh Speilberg, kinda like a banana split sundae with whipped cream and rainbow sprinkles served in your grandmother's skull....a grim story with a gooey-sweet coating. Yuck.
I really, really wanted to like "A.I.", and perhaps setting my expectations so high only contributed to the crushing disappointment I felt watching this film. I found the concept of robots becoming more integrated with society because they do not eat or require much in the way of living quarters (in the wake of over-population due to melting ice-caps) to be though provoking. However, my first danger signal came as David, an artificial boy who is introduced into the home of a couple who's biological son is in a coma (or dead, or whatever), is initially rejected by the wife who is horrified at this ersatz replacement of her own son.....and suddenly, for no real reason, not only accepts David but begins to love him. Indeed, this transformation is important to the story but it comes out of left field with no development whatsoever. David comes into the household as a cold, semi-vulcan like automaton, but the mother activates David's "love circuit" causing his cold stare to soften. He immediately starts calling this woman "Mommy"... and the woman just melts and accepts him. Uh, who's the robot here?
Suddenly, ta-dah, the couple's biological son is restored to health and comes home, creating a sibling rivalry situation. The returned son has a mean streak in him and starts tormenting David. Through a series of misinterpreted fear responses in David, his "parents" deem him dangerous. Knowing that returning David to the company that made him will result in his destruction, the mother instead drives him into the woods and dumps him there at the mercy of a world in which robots are hated, feared, and destroyed for entertainment by the mass majority of people. Nice. Kinda like someone who would rather let thier pet die slowly instead of having them put to sleep at the vet.
Anyhoo David, familiar with the "Pinochio" story, decides that his "mommy" would love him more and wouldn't have abandoned him if he were "a real boy". In order to achieve this, he must seek out The Blue Fairy. He does indeed find her at the long-submerged Coney Island amusement park, where his repeated requests to the Blue Fairy's statue go unheard. And so he sits at the bottom of the ocean for two thousand years until aliens dig though the ice and find him. And the aliens clone his "mommy" for him so he can spend one day of happiness with her. Yay.
This would be a very emotionally involving tale if it were not for the lack of character building and progressively treacly story telling. Between the "mommy's" willingness to abondon her "child" to the cruel world and David's cold treatment at the hands of the very people who created him to feel emotions, the central message of this film seems to be that people suck. There is no real redemption for David, and no indication that the human characters in the movie are capable of the feelings that David has. This might be interpreted as a clever irony - that the robot has feelings and the people do not - except that there is no other atorytelling skill evident in the film to suggest that such an irony would have occurred to the filmmakers in the first place.
Haley Joel Osmet turns in yet another convincing and impressive performance as the boy who feels nothing until his emotional circuits are activated. The other amusing, if not stand-out performance comes from Jude Law as Gigolo Joe - a comical sex-worker robot who befriends David. As a whole, the story is very cold-and-stark Kubrick while the film is wonder-and-ohh-ahh Speilberg, kinda like a banana split sundae with whipped cream and rainbow sprinkles served in your grandmother's skull....a grim story with a gooey-sweet coating. Yuck.