A.I. Artificial Intelligence

Year: 2001
Running time: 146 minutes
Certificate: 12
Language: English
Screenplay: Steven Spielberg
Director: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Haley Joel Osment, Jude Law, William Hurt, Frances O'Connor, Brendan Gleeson

Dave.

The point of no return.

You might think that Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick have directing styles so different that for them to collaborate successfully on a project would be impossible. Well, in a sense, you'd be right. Great friends for a long time, the two of them spent many years discussing A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Kubrick's brainchild, the story of a machine capable of love is an extended adaptation of the Brian Aldiss short story Supertoys Last All Summer Long. The director considered the material very close to his heart but unsuited to his detached and clinical directorial style. For years he tried, unsuccessfully, to convince his friend Spielberg to direct it for him. Spielberg's style is much warmer and usually more sentimental (in fact, over-sentimentality is what he is most often criticised for). Spielberg believed strongly that Kubrick was the only one able to do justice to his own vision. And so it went on, until Kubrick died. As a tribute to his friend, Spielberg decided to take the project on. As it was particularly personal, Spielberg elected to also write the script himself, something he had not done since Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

You can plainly see, especially in the earlier scenes, elements that would have been most suited to Kubrick's touch. You could be fooled into believing it really is a Kubrick film for a while, his style is homaged so perfectly by Spielberg. The moment when Spielberg's sensibilities kick in is as blindingly obvious as a clarion call. The scene in which the mother Monica (Frances O'Connor) 'imprints' the robot child David (Haley Joel Osment) to cause him to love her like a son is bathed in warm yellow 'Spielbergian' light and from then on, Kubrick was right; the material suits Spielberg much better.

Left behind.

As with anything touched by Stanley Kubrick there is a wealth of complex issues running through every part of this film. A bereaved father designs a robot child to genuinely love and opens a whole can of murky moral and ethical worms, which is summed up nicely in the opening scene, when a colleague asks what responsibility that places on the 'parent' to love them back. Many films have explored the idea of the rights for advanced thinking technology and robots - Ghost in the Shell, I, Robot and The Animatrix among others. This succeeds in having a much deeper emotional impact than those others though, especially for parents, because the robot in question is an innocent child. The wider issue is explored in a scene set at a 'Flesh Fair' where robots are destroyed for the amusement of human spectators. How sophisticated does the technology have to be before they could be considered life-forms and all the rights and freedoms that implies? Depending on your sensibility, the Flesh Fair concept will either disturb you greatly or cause you to shrug your shoulders and wonder what all the fuss is about.

Going back to the question of responsibility to a machine that is in essence a child who loves you, it doesn't take long for David's 'parents' to fail in their responsibilities to him when their own critically ill son Martin (Jake Thomas) begins to recover and comes home. Driven by an understandable need to protect her own son, Monica abandons David in the woods in a scene that is devastatingly heartbreaking. Understanding her reasons does not absolve Monica of her act - the abandonment of what is essentially her son is unforgivable, and in the scene you can see that she knows she has proved herself unworthy of David's love. Prior to this Martin treats David with little respect, simply like a toy, albeit one he has a particular dislike for. His behaviour is entirely understandable and more forgivable than Monica's - he has come home to find he's been replaced by a robot; at his age he's not going to have the emotional maturity to deal with this properly and his actions bear this out.

Rouge City.

Before being abandoned, David had been entranced by the story of Pinocchio, and using the logic of an inexperienced child, assumes that becoming human like in the story will make his mother love him, and the story in many ways then becomes a retread of Pinocchio, following David's quest to become human. He meets the likable Gigolo Joe (Jude Law in one of his most impressive roles to date), a pleasure robot on the run after getting into 'bad trouble' when one of his clients is murdered by a jealous human lover, and the two of them head to Rouge City, which is an incredible wonder of special effects wizardry.

The film has a very powerful tragic streak running right the way through it, because if a human child is abandoned by its parents, it will at least have a chance to grow up and the opportunity to mature and perhaps recover from the ordeal. David is forever doomed to stay a child, forced by his programming to love helplessly a mother who has abandoned him, never able to grow to understand the reasons why he was rejected. It starkly illustrates a child's need for the unconditional love of its parents, its willingness to forgive any number of sins committed against it by the parents just for the chance of being loved, and seeing David eternally denied this essential need is distressing in the extreme. The film is undeniably beautifully designed, shot and written - the effects are, even 10 years on, absolutely flawless - but this underlying helplessness of the main character that can never change makes watching the film extremely bittersweet. While being a futuristic sci-fi with clear fantastical elements, the film is not a fairytale and is set in a real world where magic does not exist, so David's belief in the Blue Fairy and her magic, coupled with his inability to develop and mature leaves him destined to be forever heartbroken and abandoned.

With Gigolo Joe.

The ending is widely considered to be unnecessary and typical of Spielberg's over-sentimental nature, as it contrives to give David's story a happy ending within the confines of the 'real' world in which it is set. Critics of the film say it should have ended with David under the sea, forever doomed to beseech the Blue Fairy in vain. Beware of these people, for they may be without hearts. I, you may have guessed by now, utterly adore the ending for the very reason it's criticised - the film became a kind of version of Pinocchio and as such needs a relatively happy ending or it would be too unbearable to watch. It wasn't an ending that was tacked on, as many who are critical seem to think - it was foreshadowed in a scene where Joe explains to David why robots are so hated by humankind: "They made us too smart, too quick, and too many. We are suffering for the mistakes they made because when the end comes, all that will be left is us." 2000 years in the future, the highly advanced robots exploring a world without people proves the truth of Joe's words. (And yes, they are robots, not aliens as many mistook them for. Just because it's a Spielberg film, it doesn't mean there will always be aliens.)

Seeing David finally get his heart's desire - the right of a mother's love which should never be denied any child - is absolutely essential, and is the ending David deserves. Here is an ideal time to point out the astonishing work of Haley Joel Osment in the lead role. He is wonderful in every scene, but the close up of his face when his mother at long last tells him she loves him is breathtaking. Almost without doing anything, he portrays the internal workings of a boy who finally has what he always wanted after a life filled with heartbreak and desperation. Few actors with decades more experience would be able to pull off something like that.

Difficult and distressing to watch, but undeniably brilliant, Kubrick and Spielberg combine disparate styles to create a truly under-rated masterpiece.

Score: 9/10

Rachel.

Rachel might one day write something about this, but don't hold your breath, for unlike me, she has a real life. She has, however, scored it.

Score: 8/10

I'm not the only one out there with this opinion of A.I. Artificial Intelligence, as seen in this re-appraisal from Robbie at The Telegraph. As usual, The Guardian's Peter is pretty much as far from my opinion as it's possible to get.