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A.I.
5/10
aka
A.I. Artifical Intelligence : USA 2001
director
: Steven Spielberg
script : Spielberg, based on a screen story by Ian Watson, from short
story ‘Super-toys Last All Summer Long’ by Brian Aldiss
producers include : Spielberg
cinematography : Janusz Kaminski
editing : Michael Kahn
music : John Williams
lead actors : Haley Joel Osment, Jude Law, Frances O’Connor, William Hurt
145 minutes
AI
isn’t much good. It’s shamelessly sentimental, manipulative, pretentious,
portentous and ponderous. But we’re talking Spielberg here, and surely
these things go with the territory. There’s also the shadowy presence
of Stanley Kubrick to contend with, causing Spielberg even more constipation
than usual, as he makes a very simple story seem dreadfully leaden: robot
boy David (Osment), abandoned by his human “parents” (O’Connor, Sam Robards),
sets off on a quest to become real. Aided by his faithful robot-bear Teddy
(voiced by Jack Angel) and love-android Gigolo Joe (Law), he tracks down
his ‘maker’ Professor Hobby (Hurt). But this turns out to be only the
beginning of his very long journey…
If
you can overlook Spielberg’s limitations as writer-director, and his countless
basic mistakes (endless muzak; banal dialogue; hazy visuals; plot holes,
etc), A.I. is surprisingly watchable. It doesn’t feel like an unusually
long movie, though it surely wouldn’t have killed Spielberg to aim for
a two-hour maximum. Some of the visuals are undeniably impressive, and
there’s a freewheeling loopiness about the final half-hour that’s engaging
enough, if you don’t think too long or hard about what’s happening.
But
A.I. makes the fatal error of wanting to be taken seriously. It
has themes and explores morals and philosophy – or
at least it thinks it does. As soon as you try to analyse anything about
the picture, it immediately falls apart. The ending, like the opening,
is dominated by a largely redundant voiceover – as in Chocolat,
the film tries to paper over all its problems by explicitly presenting
itself as a fairy tale.
It
doesn’t work. In fact, only one thing in the whole film does, but it’s
enough – amazingly - to make the whole thing just about worthwhile. One
could say that Teddy steals the film. But that wouldn’t be fair. Teddy
saves the film. He arguably is the film. He’s the one injection
of pep and life into a film that’s otherwise a trudge through treacle,
and he brings out the best in Spielberg the director, suggesting that
the basic problem is a simple mismatch between film-maker and (Kubrickian)
subject-matter. There isn’t much magic in this film, but this mechanical
bear is, remarkably, responsible for just about all of it. Time and again
Teddy points up the rest of A.I.’s deficiencies, but, it must be
said, he also goes a very long way to compensating for them.
20th
September, 2001
(seen Sep-19-01, UGC Middlesbrough)
For the full
length review click here
For an interview with AI star Jack Angel click
here
by Neil
Young
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