WEEKEND PREVIEW

So, what about A.I.?

I sat there watching the screening, kind of shocked by what I was seeing.  Stephen Spielberg, by my account, has made movies that are worth watching, even when they aren’t his strongest efforts.   Perhaps the least inspired of his work was The Lost World: Jurassic Park 2.  But it still had its moments.  A.I. has its moments.  But it is, overall, the most surprising mess of his amazing career.

I am going to avoid spoilers, for those of you – the vast majority – who haven’t seen the film yet.  But let’s start at the beginning.  William Hurt is the well-intentioned genius who is ready to bring emotion to Mechas.  (“Mechas” are mechanical people and “Orgas” are humans.  This distinction fades quickly, both in significance and in the moral discussions the film would like to think it had.)  And so, this entire sequence inside this tech haven is shot in a visual style that is so overtly Kubrickian and not Spielbergian that it is distracting.  Worse, the intellectual level of the conversation is almost insultingly simplistic in view of the portentous tone that is brought to the sequence.  If Spielberg was paying homage to Kubrick, he should have gotten the most basic thing… Kubrick almost never told the audience what hypothesis he was about to bring to life. 

In my little fantasy life, a Kubrick opening to A.I. would have started with David (Haley Joel Osment’s character) in the household he was trying to join.  And his awkwardness and his efforts would have been a disconnect for the audience.  We would be experiencing the same discomfort as his “adoptive” parents.  David’s ultimate reality, that he is not human, could have been a real jolt… a painful reality.  

Now, in my other fantasy life, in which Steven Spielberg makes the A.I. that he was perfectly capable of hitting out of the park, we get the opening scene with William Hurt, but it’s much shorter.  And Hurt spends some time with the “adoptive family” before David arrives.  And when he does arrive, he is programmed to be everything you would expect an 11-year-old boy to be… with some funny kinks.  Those kinks and David’s earnestness in wanting to do right make him so loveable that the relationship builds, with the audience feeling the same way about David that his new parents do.

But what we get is a series of sequences that never really make any sense.  David is not designed with real integration in mind… neither the glory of it or the danger of it.  Instead, we get a boy who is designed to bond with only one of two parents.  We get a boy who doesn’t seem to have been programmed to understand the most basic pre-teen attitudes and activities.  We get a boy who learns lessons, but who doesn’t ever use them.  We get a boy who not only doesn’t need to eat, but for whom the act of eating is dangerous.  Why?  If they can make Mechas who can service Orgas sexually in a way that seems absolutely real, why not a boy who plays video games?

In the second act, we settle into the part of the film that Spielberg should really fly with… the fairy tale.  David goes on his journey, guided by his own Mecha Jiminy Cricket, Gigolo Joe.  But what does this Jiminy Cricket (Jude Law) serve to do in this story?  Not a lot.  For the most part, Joe doesn’t change the story much.  And, more importantly, he is not in any way a conscience.  He adds little to David’s effort to become real, except to get him from one location to another.  But most unfortunately he never challenges David’s humanity or effort to become more human in any way.

Anyway… I don’t want to get into a point-by-point deconstruction before you have all had a chance to see the film.  For me, it was simple.  Neither fish nor fowl.  This could have been a great Spielberg movie.  This could have been a great Kubrick movie.  It is neither.  And it is worse than a mixture of the two.  Each artist’s style is, in conjunction, destructive to the other.  The intellectual debate that would have been Kubrick’s A.I. would have been disturbing and rich and relevant to our lives without A.I. Mechas in our lives.  Spielberg’s A.I. would have reminded us that the need for love is universal and that any sentient being will inevitably do all they can to achieve that connection.  The pudding that’s left is neither intellectually challenging or heart tugging.  It’s artificial and unintelligible. 

So, why are some critics praising it to the heavens?  I really don’t know.  Sometimes, there is a movie that I don’t connect with and I think that I may need to go back to reevaluate my feelings.  Not here.  By the middle of A.I., I was so uninterested that I can’t imagine going back to take another look for any reason… there is nothing there to reexamine. 

BOX OFFICE EXTRA:  It's here.

HAPPY TRAILERS TO YOU:  I saw a trailer for Rush Hour 2 that was a vast improvement from the original.  In many cases, all they really did was add some more on a few scenes they had already used in the earlier trailers.  But everything seemed to be working better and damned if the film doesn’t look like as big a hit as the original.

READER OF THE DAY:  The Handy Z writes:  “My all time favorite film is "The Apartment." I didn't see it until my senior year in college, but it took the place of "Annie Hall" in my heart as the movie that I feel warmest about. Who could not be moved by the passion of the script, the sharpness of the direction, the evil that is Fred MacMurray, the elvish wonder of Shirley MacLaine? Everyone else talks about how "Some Like It Hot" is the greatest Wilder film, if not the greatest comedy of all time, but for me, it'll always be "The Apartment." I cannot remember a movie more honest, more willing to be brutal and kind and never backing down an inch.

And the performance in the movie that best sums that up is Jack Lemmon's. He was a goof. A spaz. A stuttering, fast-talking (but never slick), eager to please, desperate to succeed, confused, smary, ultimately decent individual. There is no perfect hero in the movie, there are just people trying to do their best in a system that isn't inclined to help them along, and Mr. Lemmon captured that with a perfection that is so sincere it's damn near beautiful.

Mr. Lemmon was supposed to receive an honorary degree at my graduation this year, and was unable to attend due to the health problems that would eventually take his life. I (and most of my class as well) will always regret the missed opportunity to see the man who so perfectly captured the person I wish I could be. Luckily, there are still the movies.”

E ME:  Send in you’re AI comments…