A.I. is a project that the late Stanley Kubrick worked on for decades without bringing it into production. Although it has been touted as a collaboration between two great directors, it is more accurately a passing of a torch. This is Kubrick's vision, turned into Spielberg's film. Almost all of what we see is Spielberg's work, for better and for worse.

A.I. is based on the short story "Supertoys Last All Summer Long" by noted science fiction writer Brian Aldiss and is, believe it or not, a cold hard future fairy-tale predicated on the familiar story of Pinnochio. The science fictional setting is an indeterminate future, probably the early 22nd century, in which the polar ice caps have melted and human society has survived through the exploitation of advanced "mecha" servants. The film never delves any deeper into this flimsy pretext, but neither do any of the characters belabor it, so it fades acceptably into the background.

The film opens with a lecture from robotics expert Professor Hobby (William Hurt) that is half goading lament and half sales pitch. Using a "mecha" secretary as evidence, Hobby effectively demonstrates that humanity has indeed created artificial intelligence but has failed to invest its creations with genuine emotions. Hobby, who works for a firm called Cybertronics, proposes to rise to this challenge by creating a mecha that will develop the same rich emotional tapestry a human being can. His plan is to design a mecha that is capable of love. From love, he asserts, all other emotions will eventually develop.

Twenty months pass in the film's timeline, and we are introduced to Monica Swinton (Frances O'Connor) and Henry Swinton (Sam Robards), a fairly well-to-do couple whose only son, Martin (Jake Thomas) is in cryogenic suspension against the slender hope that he will awaken from an unnamed illness. Henry is dealing with his grief and preparing to move on, but Monica is having a more difficult time.

Henry, who works for Cybertronics, is secretly approached by Professor Hobby to receive a special prototype mecha. This is the very first of Hobby's "love-enabled" robots, a replacement child designed for grieving human parents that have lost their own. "Always loving, never ill, never changing," this slender, bright-eyed mecha is called David (Haley Joel Osment). If a human being instructs David to concentrate on them and reads him a sequence of seven code words, David will "imprint" on that person and feel an overwhelming, incontrovertible love for them.

After begging Monica not to kill him, Henry unveils David and describes his function. Monica is deeply upset, and Henry only barely convinces her to allow the machine to remain in their home. At first, she hardly tolerates David, but as time passes she grudgingly opens herself to him and eventually decides to unseal the envelope containing the seven code words. After she reads these to him, he imprints upon her, and for the first time she allows herself to accept the fantasy that David is her own flesh-and-blood child. The artificial boy and his real parents are just beginning to craft a newer, happier domestic life when they receive word that Martin has awoken from his coma and can come back to them. The stress that Martin's return creates proves too much for Monica, and she agrees to return David to Cybertronics, where he will be dismantled. At the last minute, she finds herself unable to deliver him to this "death", so she abandons him in the woods instead.

David, confused and devastated, thinks back to the story of Pinnochio, which was read to him by Monica on an idyllic afternoon shortly after Martin's return. Unable to separate fantasy from reality where the words of his beloved "mother" are concerned, David decides to seek out the Blue Fairy of the story and beg her to make him a real boy. If only he can find her, he is certain that Monica will take him back and love him forever. The quest for the Blue Fairy becomes the defining adventure of David's existence.

What Works...

Haley Joel Osment's astonishing performance as David anchors the impressive first half of the film, which deals with David's evolving home life as Henry and Monica's artificial boy. Osment never allows the audience to forget for a moment that David is artificial, a grandiose toy, a piece of machinery designed to fill a human need. David moves like a ghost from room to room, cheerfully clueless about human life and punctuating his inhuman qualities with eerie non sequitors ("I like your floor," he tells Monica at one point). Although later parts of the film give him little to exercise but his tear ducts, that's hardly his fault. Osment's portrayal is disciplined and meticulous. His eyes move before his head does, he never blinks, and he moves with just-a-tad-off clockwork steps.

Many of the incidents arising from David's lack of basic knowledge could have been played for cheap laughs or smarmy cuteness. Instead, they are used to effectively portray just how creepy an artificial boy might be. This is the most Kubrickian passage in the film, with a delicious Twilight Zone flavor enhanced by Janusz Kaminski's dead-on atmospheric cinematography. The greatest strength of this section of the film is that it keeps the audience pondering the Big Important Questions previously alluded to (Can humans and mecha truly love one another? Is it wise for them to do so?) without even directly referring to them. Given that Spielberg's messages in recent films have had all the subtlety of a brick to the head, I was impressed and fascinated.

Once David moves out into the world, he finds an unlikely ally in the form of Gigolo Joe (Jude Law), a pleasure robot/ sex therapist with personality to spare. Law's performance as Joe is another standout, and remains strong even as the film's story unravels past the halfway point. Joe has a sparkling attitude, smooth moves, and even comes equipped with his own multipurpose soundtrack. Law and Osment are the dynamic heart of the film, each investing their roles with totality and passion. Virtually everyone else, in comparison, is gray and muted.

Wait... my Y chromosome wants to tell you one more thing. Gigolo Joe has a brief word in passing with his female counterpart, Gigolo Jane (Ashley Scott). Not to put too fine a point on it, but Jane is achingly foxy. Arf arf. Okay, sorry, I'm back under control now. Jane's two seconds on screen definitely work.

What Doesn't...

Sadly, A.I. eventually trips over its own Big Questions not long after it does an excellent job of introducing us to them, and the story meanders gradually down the quality scale until its ghastly, brain-deadening anticlimax unrolls and leaves the audience slack-jawed in its wake.

I'm not even going to comment on most of the wonky science and speculation of the film. It clearly wants to use the setting as a vehicle for its ideas and encounters, and nothing more. It's the background equivalent of a "Gentleman's C." I'm fine with that. An examination of what turned me off requires that I delve into major plot revelations and spoilers, so be warned. If you haven't seen this film yet, you might not want to read further until you have.

The second half of the film doesn't begin terribly. Gigolo Joe, as mentioned, has great screen presence, and there's something appealing about the idea of him ending up as David's guide. Joe is a fully-functional "adult" mecha, but it's clear that his primary function skews his worldview enough to make him as much of a liability as an asset to David's quest. Shortly after they meet, Joe and David are both captured by a roving lunatic called Lord Johnson-Johnson (Brendan Gleeson), who drifts above the forest in a high-tech hot air balloon looking for renegade mecha to capture. Apparently, the woods are full of them. Yes, it's at this point that suspension of disbelief punches its time card and goes home early.

Lord Johnson-Johnson takes his captured mecha to the "Flesh Fair," an outdoor festival of lights, noise, and Ministry (!?!) music where cheering crowds celebrate the unique, special human condition by watching mecha being subjected to creative forms of destruction (Chris Rock's cameo mecha is launched out of a cannon into the whirling blades of a gigantic fan, for example).

David and Joe are locked in a cell to await destruction along with other captured mecha, and here's where things really go wrong. It's clear that the audience is expected to sympathize with the plight of these unjustly persecuted "innocents," and indeed it just might... if only the first scene of the film hadn't quite brilliantly established that mecha do not have feelings. Even David is emotionally incomplete, and appears to show little fear of the fate that awaits him. As a result, the scene is utterly devoid of poignance. These things waiting to be destroyed are just industrial artifacts. They are machines. There is nothing essentially tragic about their situation, and we have already been conditioned to think of them as objects. In essence, all the specific problems with the film from this point on can be described as a clumsy desire to have everything both ways. This is but the merest foretaste of Spielberg's wishy-washiness.

David eventually escapes the Flesh Fair when, in a plot twist straight out of The Simpsons, the formerly bloodthirsty crowd turns on Johnson-Johnson for daring to harm a cute widdle boy wobot. Someone even yells, "You're a monster, Johnson!" No, seriously.

After escaping from this deadly brain trust, Gigolo Joe and David hitch a ride to Rouge City, a sort of futuristic red light district that encompasses Joe's horizons of knowledge. Joe directs David to seek clues to his quest at a "Dr. Know" kiosk, where a bouncy Robin Williams-voiced CGI effect proves that Williams should be killed now if this is the sort of awesomely irritating crap cameo we can expect him to be wasted in for the rest of his life.

Improbably, acting on a tip from Dr. Know, David then steals a police "amphibacopter" and flies to the flooded ruins of New York City, where only the tips of the tallest buildings remain above water. For some strange reason, Dr. Hobby and a large number of his Techtronics staff keep offices here, and it is lamely explained that they have engineered every stage of David's journey. I take great exception to this pathetic revelation, since it has been clearly established that Henry and Monica were having a genuine emotional problem with David. Monica wasn't "subtly manipulated" to drop David off in the woods... she was in a highly unstable frame of mind and found herself incapable of delivering him to his "death." None of the incidents in David's adventure seem orderly enough to have been planned or contrived. This feeble attempt at creating an actual excuse for David's adventure is the first of two great insults this rapidly declining film hits its audience with.

After speaking with Hobby, David slips away into the Techtronics facility and discovers row upon row of boxes advertising "Davids" and "Darlenes," robotic children that will love their human parents. The revelation that he is a commercial prototype is another blow to David's fragile emotions (but still fails to explain why on earth the geniuses/morons at Cybertronics wanted him to undertake his quest in the first place). In a black mood, David retrieves his amphibacopter and dives into the murky depths of flooded New York. There, he ends up at the submerged remains of Coney Island, and is astonished to find his Blue Fairy... in reality an old statue from the Pinnochio section of a theme park.

David begs the unhearing Blue Fairy to make him a real boy. He continues begging and praying and hoping as years pass, and then decades, and then centuries, and then millennia. He continues pleading with his own private Blue Fairy as another ice age sweeps the globe, encasing his tiny craft in a frozen tomb.

After that, Steven Spielberg pretty much proves that he is, in layman's terms, a big old pussy.

The Unkindest Cut of All

God forbid that the film should have one ending when it can have two, and God forbid that the film should end with anything but a saccharine fantasy of muted golden lights and happy smiles. Spielberg presents an eerie, startling, effective, unhappy ending, waits just long enough for appreciation of it to sink in, and then he shoots it in the head. In the end, he doesn't have the courage to leave the film alone. He wants everything both ways. Ambiguity is an art, but throwing two mutually contradictory endings into the story is not.

Two thousand years later (says the dignified voice of the omniscient narrator) highly advanced mecha (beings that look somewhat like slender, bulbous pop culture aliens and, indeed, are so poorly explained that many actually thought them to be aliens) excavate David's tiny amphibacopter from its icy grave. These beings revive David and explain that they want to make him happy, as he is their last link to the now-extinct human race. To make him happy, the future mecha offer to clone the long-dead Monica Swinton so she can tell David she loves him. There's only one hitch: Due to techno-wonkery so stupendously dumb that Star Trek: Voyager has nothing on it, any cloned being can only live for a single day before passing into a deathly sleep.

Thus, the future mecha clone David's "mommy," and she and David spend a "perfect day" together doing little human things like making food and reading stories. At the end of the day, David tucks his mommy into bed, she dies, and he himself drifts off to sleep, at last allowed, the omniscient narrator informs us, to dream happy dreams. It's magic! It's got everything except Mickey Mouse in his "Sorcerer's Apprentice" costume to signal the roll of the credits.

It isn't enough that this second ending is totally antithetical to the themes and questions raised by the rest of the film. It isn't enough that this entire postscript is unnecessary, tacked on, and barely coherent. The most damning thing about it is that is is stiflingly dull. These fifteen minutes are so boring my eyes were actually watering by the time the last few seconds slowly unreeled themselves.

Spielberg's weakness of vision is so cowardly it left myself and my friends quite bitter. On their own, the logical flaws of the film's second half are easily surmountable when viewed as part of a whole. The film's first ending is poignant and respectful to the story, redeeming what has gone before. The second ending, with its crassly calculated "happy" resolution, feels designed to appeal to a totally fictional Joe and Jane Average that are believed to be somehow incapable of comprehending a movie that ends on a sad or ambiguous note. This ending is a simpleton's capstone to a complex, engrossing film that doesn't deserve it, and a giant celluloid middle finger raised to an audience that doesn't need it.

Postscript

Gamers take note- one of the marketing tools used to promote A.I. was a massive, complex, and intricate internet puzzle involving dozens of bogus websites and imagined personalities. Dr. Jeanine Salla, quoted at the beginning of this review, is one such character. The full extent and subtlety of this game really has to be seen to be believed. The Guide is a good place to start, and I strongly encourage you to visit while it's still around. Some have argued, not without justification, that this game was a more fascinating and fulfilling entity than the film it was meant to promote.