A.I. Artificial Intelligence

Ok I bit the bullet and saw A.I.  Boy was that a mistake.  Alright, just a couple of quick thoughts here because I don’t know if I have the energy to write a whole long piece about this one.

(There are some minor spoilers that might be common knowledge but thought I should give fair warning anyway)

This couple has a son that’s in a coma so they decide to buy a robot boy to replace him.  The robot, named David, is a prototype boy model though so he’s more loving and human like than the previous models.  The couple’s real son gets better and he eventually comes back home.  They don’t want the robot anymore because they think that he’s dangerous so the mother drops it off in the woods.  The robot then goes on a journey to try and become a real boy.

I want to get one thing out of the way before getting on with my rant.  Haley Joel Osment was actually fine in this movie.  I was pleasantly surprised by his performance.  He’s pretty good at acting like a robot.  But he does way too much whisper talking man.  Holy shit I hated it when he did that.  Other than the quiet grinning babble neither he nor Jude Law were the issues that I had with this piece.  Alright, with that done we can move on.

So we all know that this was Stanley Kubrick’s idea.  Not the story itself but to make the story into a film.  For years (going all the way back to the mid 80’s) he thought about doing it but decided that Spielberg should direct it instead and that he would produce.  Spielberg initially declined but eventually came around to the idea because Kubrick did not want to make this movie anymore.  Kubrick had already made up a ton of storyboards and he even approved a script before removing himself from the project.  After Kubrick died Spielberg took the film over completely and made (and I’m quoting here) “hundreds of changes to the script” according to the producer Jan Harlan.  So this is the last in the trilogy of Spielberg penned scripts (Close Encounters and Poltergeist are the other two).

There are some things that are typical Spielberg and others that are clearly not Spielberg’s style and that makes this movie a mess.  I know I said that about Poltergeist too but this one is even worse.  It actually starts out fine but gets bad gradually as the movie progresses until by the end it’s a totally different picture (and I mean that in a bad way). 

At first it’s kind of interesting watching how this couple deals with having a new robot child.  They’re not sure how to act around the thing because even though they know that it’s not a real person it looks exactly like a little boy and behaves in a child-like manner.  But then their real son comes home and it turns into The Good Son.  Why is their real son such an asshole?  I don’t quite understand why they had to make him evil.  I know it’s all about sibling rivalry for their mother’s affection but I think it could have been done differently.  They could’ve just had that one scene where David almost drowns the son and had that be the trigger to get rid of David.  Or they could’ve had David do other accidental stuff like that that didn’t involve a dick hole son.

When David gets dropped off in the woods then the movie starts on a downward spiral that it never recovers from.  There are three distinctly non Spielbergian things that appear in this film and they are the flesh fair, Rouge City and Gigolo Joe.  The flesh fair with the heavy metal music and showing regular humans in a negative way by having them destroy robots is not in line with his style.  Spielberg’s villains are supernatural phenomena and Nazis, not everyday citizens.  That was Kubrick who did that in every single one of his films except 2001: A Space Odyssey (or at least as good as I can tell with 2001, man I love that movie but I don’t understand a good chunk of it).  Spielberg doesn’t destroy robots either.  In fact he doesn’t have a lot of robots in his movies at all.  Apparently the music was picked by Kubrick himself but that along with everything else that he was supposed to have picked or supervised has to be taken with a huge grain of salt.  If Kubrick really went on to direct this thing then who knows what changes he would have made along the way.  This was a notoriously meticulous slow worker we’re talking about here.  In the span of 1971 to 1999 (that’s 28 years) he made only five movies.  There was a twelve year gap between his last two movies.  It would have taken Kubrick many more years to complete A.I.

But I think the important thing to keep in mind is that Kubrick didn’t want to make this film.  He figured out somewhere along the way that either he wasn’t into the idea of A.I. anymore, the technology for the effects wasn’t there or that he liked the story but it didn’t suit him.  I personally think that it was a combination.  He obviously wasn’t thrilled with the idea that much anymore because he handed off directing duty to someone else.  Whether he knew he didn’t have much longer to live or not is anyone’s guess but I’m going to assume that he didn’t know because who really does?  You can only gauge it so much.  You never know what your body’s going to do and how it’s going to react to things.  And as for the technology, I’m sure he realized that it wasn’t quite where he wanted it to be.  As it was done in the final version of the movie, sometimes the effects and CGI look fine like the lady robot in the opening scene and sometimes it looks really bad like the part where they’re flying out of Rouge City in a helicopter.  But then again I still think the effects in 2001 look amazing so who knows what magic Kubrick would have worked on this project. 

Also, Kubrick might not have been so keen on making another sci-fi picture.  It’s interesting to note that Kubrick did at least one movie from almost every major genre of film.  Dr. Strangelove is his comedy, The Killing is his crime movie, Spartacus is his period piece, The Shining is his horror film, Paths of Glory is his war picture, Lolita is his drama/sexy thriller, A Clockwork Orange is his art picture and 2001: A Space Odyssey is his science fiction piece.  There are a couple of repeats in there like Eyes Wide Shut is also a sexy thriller, Full Metal Jacket is another war picture and Barry Lyndon is also a period piece.  The only things missing are an action movie (I could see an argument for Full Metal Jacket for that that category though) and a musical (which could fit the beginning of 2001).

The “hundreds of changes” that Spielberg made to the Kubrick approved script I’m sure changed the movie pretty drastically.  The overall Pinocchio story does seem like something that Spielberg would be interested in but the way that Kubrick wanted to tell it is probably not the way that Spielberg wanted to.  But since Kubrick had just died Spielberg wanted to honor his friend and fellow director by leaving in as many of Kubrick’s ideas as he could stand which amounted to an awkward meshing of efforts.  Could you imagine ever seeing the sexy chick shaped buildings of Rouge City or the open mouthed bridge support columns popping up in any Spielberg film, especially one that he wrote?  I can’t.

That leaves us with Gigolo Joe to contend with who I’m guess was probably a darker character originally.  The reason I say that is because there are still things there that imply that he’s a shady figure but in the end it never amounts to anything.  For instance he’s a goddamn gigolo.  He’s a robot that’s out on his own and his only job is to have sex with human women.  He’s also told to remove some robot part of himself because some people are looking for him.  This is before he discovers a corpse too so why are the cops after him?  Did he do something wrong?  We never find out.  This all sounds more like Kubrick to me.  He’s very into sex and finding different ways of portraying it on film and Spielberg is not.

(The following is definitely a spoiler so read at your own risk)

But the strangest and most unforgiving thing that this movie throws at you is the stupid fucking alien ending.  Now this is Spielberg all the way.  I think this is his contribution to the film because I can’t imagine that this was in the Kubrick approved script.  For everything that happens before the alien part Spielberg probably changed some things around here and there to make the movie more family friendly and less sexually perverted but he still sort of kept Kubrick in mind.  But finding the blue fairy under the water to the credits is where Spielberg takes this thing and inserts something that has nothing to do with anything.  But he loves aliens so much that he can’t resist.  He has to put them in everything.  For the last twenty minutes of the movie I had no idea what I was watching but I could tell that it was Spielberg because there was more of that flat uninteresting dialogue.

There are some other things in this movie like Robin Williams as the voice of Dr. Know that I would have bet money on that that was Spielberg’s casting decision but according to IMDB it was Kubrick’s decision and apparently he even supervised the recording.  Like I said though, who knows what the hell would have changed if he had actually made the picture himself or even stayed alive long enough to finish producing Spielberg’s version of it.

Well it looks like this did get kinda lengthy but guys, this was bad.  This movie gets so fucking weird by the end that I thought it was a joke.  This has easily got to be Spielberg’s worst picture.  Easily.  I mean I haven’t seen Always but I would welcome it after this.