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AI: Artificial Intelligence [2001] This odd collaboration between Spielberg, the late Stanley Kubrick and a clutch of name science fiction writers [Brian W. Aldiss, Ian Watson, Bob Shaw] opens in a world where global warming has washed away coastal cities but the wealthy continue to live in suburban perfection, limited only by strict laws about giving birth. Professor Hobby [William Hurt] creates an android child, David [Haley Joel Osment], with the inbuilt capacity to feel love for a parent, an emotion that can be hardwired forever into his consciousness by the recitation of seven code-words. To test the prototype, David is given into the care of Monica [Frances O'Connor], wife of one of Hobby's employees, who is grieving because her real son is in cryo-stasis thanks to a nebulous disease. The first section of the film has David bond with Monica, who imprints herself on him, and a slightly creepy version of family love based on mutual reassurance developing, with David eerily certain that the fifty years Monica might have left to live is only a short time. When her real son returns, there's friction between the boy, who maliciously gets mother to read them Pinocchio, and the mecha, that leads to an emotional fairytale sequence as Monica takes David into the woods to abandon him, rather than return him to the factory to be dismantled. The spine of the rest of the film is taken from Pinocchio, as David – accompanied by 'supertoy' Teddy and runaway sex robot Gigolo Joe [Jude Law] – experiences injustices in the human world, from a carnival arena where obsolete or dismantled robots are tortured for the baying crowds through the neon fleshpots of Rouge City to a sunken New York City for a bittersweet reunion with Hobby. All the while, David fiercely believes in the storybook's Blue Fairy, who can grant his wish to make him a real boy. The finale makes a leap which will lose a lot of the audience, picking up the story two millennia later as intelligent spindles, the evolutionary end product of machine life, subtly grant David's wish by treating him as more like a boy than a robot, then arrange for an ending many will find puzzling or cloying and which feels vaguely like a Spielbergian twist on the last act of 2001. There are moments of raw emotion that suggest both great creators –
the unnerving scenes between Osment and O'Connor which are always suspenseful
and creepy, even when remembered as an idyll – and little fillips
of dark humour [Joe cricking his neck to provide mood music], not to
mention some wondrous images [a flying machine in the likeness of the
moon] and the now-mandatory cutting edge special effects [you won't
believe what you'll believe]. It does lapse disturbingly into bathos,
manipulation and clod-hopping plot contrivances [why built a robot to
love only one parent?], but it is big, ambitious filmmaking, struggling
with ideas and issues and real feelings in a summer and a genre overrun
with chewing gum pictures. First Published In: Venue, issue number / date not known Visit Kim's Official Website at www.johnnyalucard.com
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