So, Steven Spielberg comes out with A.I., his would-be collaboration with the late Stanley Kubrick and his first movie in three years, and all anyone wants to know is, "Is it good?" Well, "good" isn't the word, but neither is "bad."
First things first, I'm not a big Spielberg fan. For me, his name is synonymous with the kind of big-budget, fast-cut, epilepsy-inducing flick that I don't much like.
That said, I found this movie stunning.To be sure, A.I. is big budget and plenty slick, but it has something that Spielberg's movies don't usually have--an edge.
And I don't mean "edge" in the empty, Hollywood buzzword sense. I mean "edge" as in "don't touch the stove when it's hot" or "don't pick up that rusty piece of metal" or "don't pet that strange dog" edge.
Viewers walk into the theater innocently enough, figureing they'll get standard Spielberg fare, and the next thing they knowthey've got third-degree burns or tetanus or rabies.
Sure, there's violence and death in Saving Private Ryan and Schindler's List, but there's redemption and there are learned lessons, too. There's nothing easy in A.I.. This movie isn't reassuring; it doesn't ask the usual feel-good questions to which we all know the answers.
Set in the distant future, A.I. tells the story of David (Haley Joel Osment), a prototype robot. While robots are everywhere in this America, serving as everything from "Supertoys" to nannys, David is the first robot fashioned after a boy. He's also the first robot programmed to love.
David enters the lives of the Swintons -- a middle-class, New Jersey family -- as a gift to Monica Swinton (Frances O'Connor) from her husband Henry (Sam Robards), who has decided that his wife needed a child to replace the void left by the absence of her own hospitalized son, Martin (Jake Thomas).
David spends about the first half-hour of the movie either creeping out or endearing himself to his "mother," and everything's going fine, until Martin comes home.
Martin, the "real" boy, finds himself having to compete with David for his mother's affection and sets up the naive David to make the robot look like a liability to his parents.
You see where we're going here, or at least you think you do. The movie looks as though it will be about this odd little boy trying to overcome the bigotry and ignorance of others in order to lead a normal life.
But, after he nearly drowns Martin, David is taken into the woods by his mother and left to fend for himself. She told her husband she would take him back to the factory, but she doesn't have the heart for it, and has decided to let him fend for himself instead.
An understandably confused David soon is captured, along with several other refugee robots, and taken to the Flesh Fair, a grotesque scene where a stadium full of neo-Luddites cheer as these robots are chopped to bits, burned with acid or otherwise tortured and killed. David is spared because even the "circuit-thirsty" crowd, can't stand to watch a boy, real or not, killed.
So David escapes with Gigolo Joe (Jude Law), a literal love machine, and they set off to look for...well, no sense in giving the whole movie away. In store is a journey to a gaudy, futuristic city, as well as a submerged Manhattan.
As for the performances, Osment somehow seems to know exactly what programmed emotion will look like, and plays David beautifully. Jude Law's gigolo is also a lot of fun.
The ending is sort of extended, and a bit surprising, but it, too, offers no tidy solutions--only tough choices.
