Movie of the Moment: A.I. Artificial Intelligence - Primal Screen

Film Comment, July-August, 2001 by Paul Arthur

A.I. Artificial Intelligence is a hybrid of disparate cinematic sensibilities: Steven Spielberg's warm romantic optimism spliced together with Stanley Kubrick's cold modernist pessimism. Does it work? Or is it an unwieldy genetic mutation? Paul Arthur goes into analysis.

It was certainly not a match made in heaven, nor in any other unearthly realm save perhaps the corporate boardrooms and high-tech workshops of Tinseltown. Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg, together at last. The Prince of Bleak and the Emperor of Ice Cream. Two absolute potentates of cinema ruling kingdoms notoriously disparate in commercial clout, thematic climate (cloudy/sunny), production tempo (slow/fast), and the social stamp of their admiring subjects (elite/hoi polloi). Nonetheless, the eagerly anticipated and -- given its eerie creative synergy -- aptly titled A.I. Artificial Intelligence marks the culmination of a 20-year friendship conducted mostly by phone and fax. The film was spurred by Kubrick's reported hunch that his endlessly delayed project was finally more suited to Spielberg's sensibility, and by the latter's desire to honor the work of a dead master. Part wish-fulfillment dream and part moving-picture Rorschach test, A.I. has generated enough partisan critical heat to solve the energy crisis in California, if not in Hollywood.

Given the sheer quantity of advance publicity, bolstered by the most extensive and intricate Internet campaign to date (for a summary of A.I.'s "alternative fiction," check out www.cloudmakers.org), its basic premise may already be as familiar as a classic fairy tale. Set in a techno-future America inundated by melting polar icecaps, where childbirth is licensed by the state to avoid overcrowding, A.I. follows the "spiritual" journey of a prototype robot designed by Cybertronics, which specializes in high-end cyborg helpmates. The company places him in the affluent, cloistered home of a prominent employee as compensation for the loss of a biological son, cryogenically frozen while awaiting a cure for his fatal disease. David, played by perpetually slack-jawed Haley Joel Osment, is a perfect human simulacrum, programmed with all the positive attributes of a normal kid: lacking the customary mix of defiance and manipulation, he is hardwired with "a love that will never end." The exclusive object of this love is Monica Swinton (Frances O'Connor), who is at best ambivalent toward the new arrival and otherwise behaves with startling hostility, the least sympathetic mom in the annals of Spielbergian family drama. As Brian Aldiss, whose tiny 1969 source story underwent numerous script transformations, has confirmed, it's about a boy who "whatever he does, cannot please his mother."

When David's flesh-and-blood "brother" is brought back to life, he doesn't stand a chance in the ensuing sibling rivalry. Ill-equipped to handle the devious, malicious tactics of real pre-teen monsters, he is summarily abandoned by Mom in an archetypal forest with only his faithful robotic teddy bear for company. Another of Spielberg's "lost boys" in search of parental nurturing, David must navigate a cruelly futuristic environment, bristling with pockets of lower-class technophobia, to find Pinocchio's Blue Fairy, who he believes will magically turn him into a real boy capable of sustaining his mother's love. Befriended in their adventures by Gigolo Joe (Jude Law), a sex machine on the lam for a murder he didn't commit, they ricochet from a vicious "Flesh Fair," where discarded "mechas" are annihilated for the viewing pleasure of rural yahoo "orgas" (organics), to the CGI splendor of a zippy Oz called Rouge City. Their quest ends in a partially submerged Manhattan where David meets his scientist maker, attempts a form of robo-suicide, and comes face-to-face with the mythical fairy in an underwater Coney Island.

A.I. is divided into three well-marked chapters, each with its own dramatic arc and distinctive visual facade. Unlike Spielberg's earlier calculated thrill rides -- or for that matter, the relentlessly entropic pull of Kubrick's narratives -- the storytelling here is awkward, sputtering, full of gaping plotholes and unresolved gambits, most notably the fate of Gigolo Joe. Still, it bears the writer-director's sentimental imprint, his faith in the salvific force of childhood imagination. In the epilogue, which constitutes the third section, David is revived after 2,000 years by a breed of glistening extraterrestrials, super-machines intent on studying him as the sole surviving witness to the long-extinct human species. At last, his singular wish is granted ... sort of. The machines clone undeserving Mom from a lock of her hair preserved by Teddy, and David gets to spend one perfect day basking in the radiance of maternal plenitude. If not quite a real boy, he achieves an idealized emotional harmony we humans unconsciously crave but can never fully realize in our adult lives.

Thus the fairy-tale circle is closed, the passage from stability to danger to self-recognition and redemption retooled for a possible future of sentient machines. As is common in Spielberg films, the risks entailed in producing this closure are considerable, and the contradictions arising from it speak powerfully, if inadvertently, not only to metaphysical themes that pervade his entire career but to anxieties at large in current cinema and, by extension, contemporary society. Regardless of how Spielberg is assessed as an artist, his blockbuster creations have acquired a monumental cultural significance that can't be denied. If we looked to Kubrick for private, barely admissible truths about our atavistic natures, we look to Spielberg for a symbolic reflection of our public face. The two filmmakers converge on questions of what defines us as fallibly human, even as they reach vastly different conclusions. For Spielberg, the core of human identity lies in emotional receptivity, and few directors have done a better job of portraying youthful expressions of fear, joy, shame, trust, loneliness, and awe. On the other hand, intelligence, the rational mind, is suspect precisely because it is "programmed" rather than "felt" -- recall Elliot's rebuttal in E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial to the assertion that the alien thinks what he thinks: "No, he feels what I feel." With several notable exceptions, the demonstration of intelligence is reserved for passive, ineffective adult characters or figures manifesting cynical attributes of greed or personal ambition. When children in Hook or E.T. are told to "Grow up," the demand is understood as pernicious since to be an adult is to lose the capacity to feel; conversely, young Jim in Empire of the Sun, whose feral smarts are a defense against grief, is admonished: "Try not to think so much."