Jul 23, 2001 07:51 PM
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Steven Spielberg’s A.I. is uneven because of his collaboration with the late director Stanley Kubrick – but a mediocre work from either of these masters is still superior to fare offered by most other filmmakers...isnt it?
Apparently Mr. Kubrick had been developing the project for years, and requested Mr. Spielberg to take it over. Based on a short story by Brian Aldiss. The film opens with a speech by Dr. Hobby (William Hurt) to his colleagues. The speech is a proclamation that even more human-like robots should be developed and marketed by his company. The film then switches to the house of one of the company’s employees, Henry Swinton (Sam Robards) and his wife Monica (Frances O’Connor), whose son Martin is in cryogenic suspension because of some disease which cant be cured. Dr. Hobby and the company place a prototype of a robot designed to mimic a human child. They name it as David (played by Haley Joel Osment). The real story begins when Monica commences the activation of David.
Can a mechaistic versus the organic assume the full role of homosapien? The grist of the film is the social hierarchy as you would expect from Stanley Kubrick. The mechaistic are the quite literally disposable underclass, the target of the hatred of the organics, and a marginalized and easily persecuted subculture. In some of the most gripping scenes, the robots are rounded up and finally held in a cage. After some very powerful scenes in the upset lives of the Swinton family, David is discarded, and falls in with another mechaistic on the run, Gigolo Joe (Jude Law), a love-slave robot framed for murder. In this central section of the film, David and Joe become both fugitives and adventurers, as David pursues his quest of finding the Blue Fairy, the character with whom he has become obsessed since hearing that she turned Pinocchio into a real boy; David reasons, of course, that after he becomes human, his mother would love him more than ever, and accept him back into her life.
Haley Joel Osment pulls off his robot act extremely well. His David is supposed to be seamless in his movements – and that’s probably not hard to act out. But Osment excels with the emotional infancy that David must suffer through. He’s a boy of eleven or so and suddenly must bond closely with a woman whom he called Monica just seconds before his activation.
The special effects are wonderful, as one would expect from a science fiction film with Steven Spielberg at the helm. Animatronic effects are done well.
