A.I.
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I did not cry when watching this movie, for I am an android and do not have tear ducts. If I were a real boy, I would have cried a lot, though. It's a sad movie. Very, very sad. Not in the prevailing sense of being a bit laughable and rubbish, but in the nice, old fashioned sense that people don't use much these days. This isn't the first time Spielberg has done this; ET is a seminal tear-jerker, and Schindler's List hardly leaves the audience hooting with laughter[1]. However, with A.I., he has produced a piece of work which marries all of his extraordinary talents into one epic piece of cinema. The the childish awe and wonder of ET and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, for which he is probably best known, is tempered by the mature reflection he finally showed to be capable of in Schindler's List. The grandeur and terror of his monster movies creeps in during a few of the film's pacier moments, and he even manages to incorporate some of the swashbuckling flavour of the Indiana Jones trilogy via the devil-may-care style of Jude Law's love mecha Gigolo Joe. Jude Law, incidentally, is fantastic. The precision of his movements and the ever-present feeling that everything he does he does because a subroutine has kicked in somewhere in his head is balanced perfectly with the occasional flash of independent thought. This is flawless performance. But even he is acted off the screen by Haley Joel Osment as perfect child David. Proving that The Sixth Sense was no one-off, he holds the film together with an electrifying portrayal of a doll striving to become a person. His early scenes are slightly creepy, his perma-smile and omnipresence around his prospective "mother" being exactly how you would expect a robot child to behave. As soon as he is imprinted with the need to love her, though, the change is striking. His rigidity gone, he transforms from a cherubic automaton to a bemused little boy, and Osment builds from there. His development as a person is absolutely believable, his every action plausible, his every emotion understandable. Even if he were to never make another film, his place as one of the great screen actors is assured. But from great actors to great directors[2], and much has been made of the collaboration of Kubrick and Spielberg on A.I. Though it seems impossible that two such different directors could have the same movie in mind, this does have the feel of something created by the two of them. Like Kubrick's best movies, it takes its time with the story. There is no rush. Things unfold in a lugubrious manner across broad shots, yet Spielberg makes sure to keep the audience's attention focussed. For such slow-paced storytelling, there is barely a wasted minute, though it seems a shame Spielberg the screenwriter feels the need to tell the audience - often using the otherwise well-placed "Happy Ever After" narrator - that which he has already shown them, but the instances this becomes apparent are few and far between. Visually, the film is dazzling, gorgeous, possibly one of the most beautiful movies I have ever seen. The delicate warmth of David's home, the BladeRunner-esque, neon-soaked Rouge City and the final absurd cityscapes are all masterfully realised and frightening in their authenticity. The use of reflection acts as both a metaphor for the robot-human relationship and a device for some wonderful images; David as a tear on Joe's airbrushed cheek via the windscreen of a liberated hovercopter stands out as a particularly striking, yet easily missed, detail. Even the more horrific aspects of this futurescape - the Flesh Fair, and preceding mecha hunt - are couched in Spielberg's trademark visual honey. Yet for all the lushness and softness, there is something steely buried in the heart of the story. Kubrick's cold analysis of humanity forms much of the subtext, wrapped in the soft velvet of Spielberg's fairy-tale enchantment. The Flesh Fair is the most obvious surfacing of the pessimistic view of humanity. Mechas are destroyed in horrible, inventive ways in front of a baying human crowd. It is a horrible sight, terrifying and repulsive. Yet crank Robot Wars up a notch and that's us in the audience, screaming for the destruction of that which is artificial, simply because we can. A.I. is full of questions. If a robot can emulate our emotions so closely as to be indistinguishable from us, does it become one of us? Or is it still, when you get down to it, just so much scrap metal? And, perhaps most disturbingly of all, once it has reached that level, what is it about humanity that makes us so special? Are we, too, just any old iron? >[1]If it does have this effect
on you, please consult a counsellor.
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