“A.I. Artificial Intelligence” Review: Twisted Intrigue

Spielberg’s A.I. is as interesting as it is disturbing to discuss, leaving this viewer as obsessed as the film’s lead.

A.I. Artificial Intelligence is a film I was not prepared for. When its most abrasive elements are read as a purposeful contradiction, the film proves itself to be more profound than my prior Spielberg experiences had me anticipating. Not that one of the greatest filmmakers in history aims low, but prior to this viewing I primarily knew him as the director that could make even the most staunch, pessimistic critic shed a tear by invoking memories of childhood nostalgia and deeply intimate yet universal depictions of one’s most significant relationship: that between parent and child. These inherently emotional themes are typically contained within the loving framework of grandiose, awesome adventure; one cannot watch Spielberg’s greats and not recall the best moments of the years they can hardly remember. God rays highlighting family members in an angelic silhouette with the comforting, affective feeling of “memory” evoked from the glowing bloom and grainy film are what defined my version of the legendary director. At first glance, A.I. appears to fit this mold; after all, how depressing could a film adapting a fairy tale like Pinocchio possibly be? Well, when the source material is not the childproofed Disney depiction of the puppet **we all grew up with, but instead a separate story inspired by the same tale, one’s expectations are again usurped. This iteration of the story: a deeply unsettling peek into the “life” behind another falsified boy. "Supertoys Last All Summer Long” by Brian Aldiss follows David, a cybernetic child abandoned by his family with a robotic teddy coldly ending the story with “you ask such silly questions, David. Nobody knows what real really means.” Not exactly what you’d expect from a blue fairy.

And yet, that is exactly how the icon is treated in Spielberg’s take on the themes that intrigued Aldiss enough to crush readers with existential self-interrogation, and Kubrick to communicate his interest to his contemporary. Kubrick introducing Spielberg to the premise explains the film’s uniquely warm tone with the injection of Kubrickian irony. With these dueling creative minds, it becomes understandable, if not inevitable, that A.I. is as terrifyingly thought provoking as it is earnestly shot. Truly, inspirations of both the film’s authors are felt within every frame and line of dialogue, clashing effortlessly to make for a more interesting end product than I believe either filmmaker would have created on their own. It’s wrongfully dogmatic to claim either creator as the sole influence of either end of the film’s binary nature, partially because it is exactly their melding influences that make A.I. such an unnerving yet hokey, nostalgic yet existential adventure into the depths of humanity’s grandest questions about godhood, life’s meaning, and the thin yet bold line between humanity and artificiality.

The nostalgic haze of Spielberg’s gentle touch is immediately offset by the steely hues of Cybertronics Manufacturing office’s, leading manufacturer of “mecha’s,” humanoid robots who were created to serve humans in a variety of ways without having to consume any of the now limited resources organic matter does. Giving the speech is Professor Hobby, the painfully human Gepetto equivalent of Spielberg and Kubrick’s take on the puppet turned real. Here, the film not only immediately introduces its engaging themes, but proves the magical efficiency of Spielberg’s camera. Complex blocking demonstrates a restraint unique to masters of the form, genuinely highlighting the most significant information by selectively choosing when to move the camera rather than hard cutting on every separate line. Thus, the camera pivots around Hobby like the earth revolves around the sun, both the apparatus and himself believing himself to be the most important element of the scene. Hobby frames himself as god when introducing the film’s core conceit: he plans to develop the first mecha capable of genuine human love. However, no matter how much the resultant product may seem to be real, the uncanny artificiality of the androids are immediately prominent in the sheer unwavering obsessiveness of their loving. The inherent human weakness of naivety becomes the thematic declaration of the film with the concluding line of the film’s opening scene. An employe asks “If a robot could genuinely love a person, what responsibility does that person hold toward that mecha in return? It’s a moral question, isn’t it?” Hobby replies “The oldest one of all. But in the beginning, didn’t God create Adam to love him?”

So maybe the film’s subtlety is one of it’s oscillating elements, but overt and intriguing are not mutually exclusive characteristics. Prior to the exposition that matches Cybertronics in efficiency, we hear in god-like voiceover that, oh yeah, rising sea levels have devastated the world and reduced both the population and planet’s resources to the point of having to build humans. Again, one wouldn’t expect existential dread from the film’s presentation, especially when exiting the confines of Cybertronic’s offices and into the comforting suburbs where residents purposefully buy into their own blissful ignorance. This is just one level of escapism from reality the film highlights, with the second, more granular investigation manifesting in the form of Monica and Henry’s family dynamics. The couple become the first owners of the new loving mecha that they purchased to fill the void of their ailing son, Martin. Meaning, now occupying his room is David, convincingly played by Haley Joel Osment to make the android seem just human enough to be lovable, yet artificial enough to remain buried in the steeps of the uncanny valley no matter how hard his programming fights it. Complications regarding human’s ability to believe in the unreal they themselves created bring to life the moral question proposed by Cybertronic’s employe that is promptly ignored by its CEO. David’s unflinching gaze is more creepy than loving, despite the programs best intentions. However, Monica eventually warms to the commodity, officially opting to perform an “imprinting” process that will tie the android to its designated parental figure for eternity. In the flip of a switch, David becomes obsessed with Monica, willing to do anything for a love human’s have to believe is real, but in reality, is nothing more than hard code.

The remainder of the film’s first half constructs a daily routine of uncanny interruptions when Martin miraculously returns to health and begins a competition for Monica’s love that David could never hope to win. No matter how much of a brat Martin proves himself to be, David’s love and mechanical nature similarly proves itself too dangerous and unnatural for the suburban family that willfully lives in their own artificial reality, one where the tides aren’t knocking on their doorstep. Monica delivers David back to Cybertronics, or she would, if it wasn’t again for the film’s compelling script: “what’s for dinner, mom?” “you can’t eat David.” “I know, I just like sitting at the table.” Again, David displays enough humanity to remain convincing for both Monica and the audience, just enough to keep David in the painful realm of human existence. Monica sobs, her last real words to her falsified son being “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about the world.”

From here, David’s treacherous odyssey begins alongside a more singular-minded android, Bigolo Joe, an older model of mecha programmed purely for a…separate type of loving. Despite the betrayal, David’s programming that could easily be confused for genuine human love leads him to making the “logical” connection as to how to win back Monica from Martin: to become a real boy. David searches for the blue fairy as the film escapes its own artificial suburban normality into the grimy world of the 22nd century. Impressive production design doubles as immersive visual world-building, effectively constructing a dystopian future that to this viewer, still remained impressive over two decades later. The contrasting philosophies between Joe and David further deepen the moral complexities at the film’s core as the film and its world becomes more and more horrifying, generating a terror for the viewer that is inhumanely missing from David’s code; an ever present reminder that this boy is nothing but wire and programming.

A brief imprisonment within an arena made for humans to point and laugh at mecha’s destruction is followed by a hopeless journey to another seedy city, before David and Joe arrive at Cybertronic’s headquarters in the middle of a submerged New York. The settings are, again, brilliantly captured and thematically horrifying when thought about for more than a fraction of a second. David finally demonstrates an emotion besides obsession at the film’s most unsettling moment, where he realizes that he is not special, he is not one of a kind, but merely a replacement for what he can never hope to be, if he can really “hope” at all. At Cybertronic’s headquarters, David sees his own replacement. Seeing onesself in the third person would be disturbing enough, but the film heightens David’s fear to the point where the viewer becomes terrified of the android instead of sympathetic. Here, David loses it, smashing his replicant not only due to the threat it poses to his own existence, but of the twin’s potential for interrupting the quest between David and his mother’s love. If the audience was uncertain of David’s human nature being nothing more than a coded facade, then it is here where David is both his most human where he is also his most terrifyingly artificial. Professor Hobby doesn’t help when he introduces David to not just one, but dozens of mass produced “David’s,” with a model even gaining consciousness and shaking in their box. Viewer’s can only imagine the desperate pleas of a child prying at the chance for existing…and then realizing that whatever emotions caused that box to stir are of our own creation.

It’s this consistent wavering between artificial and natural, cold and warm, existential and nostalgic that makes A.I. so engaging. While these contradictions at times rub against each other in ways that make the film itself seem perhaps haphazardly constructed, emotionally manipulative or blind to its own logic, choosing to read the oppositional elements as purposeful thematic investigations makes what could be a failure at heart into a thought provoking turing test. The film commits to this more contemplative nature with its controversial third act. The film takes audiences two thousand years into a future where humans have long gone extinct, and the only form of sentience are androids even more robotic than David, so much so that now he is the last representation of humanity. This cyclical nature is but one of many narrative beats worth investigating in the film’s final moments, the other being the Freudian wet dream of David finally achieving his dream. Through less subtle exposition, David and audiences learn that he can somehow spend one more day with a semi-real version of Monica by linking her organic material with the android’s mystical technology that rips her persona from the space time continuum. After 24 hours, Monica won’t die, but rather enter a permanent sleep. The final time spent between David and his mother is at once a Spielbergian nostalgia-fest and a Kubrickian investigation into the strange, twisted intrigue that plagues humans when paired with painful naivety. The film ends with David taking the hand of his essentially dead mother, himself entering an eternal sleep now that his programmed mission of achieving love has been satisfied. Has David felt true human connection, or has he simply reached his programming’s goal? The humanist will read sincerity while the pessimist sees love as human curse, and it’s this extreme polarity that again demonstrates what I find makes this film so fascinating. Yes, A.I. is messy, and at times unconvincing in its portrayals of dense explorations into what makes one human. Some set pieces and visual effects distract from the more intriguing thematic undertows giving the film life, the pacing in the second half is ironically slow despite the numerous perils David finds himself in, and despite its success at provoking existential dread, the ending can understandably be too much of a reach for the common viewer. But that is all what simultaneously makes A.I. as great as it is. Not in spite of, but because of all of its contradictions, A.I. becomes as complex as the silly humans constructing it, naively believing themselves to be their own gods exploring the nature of man through this silly medium we call film. I’m not sure how much Spielberg intended for this to be the case, but despite what this viewer anticipated, A.I. is only as successful as it is for all of the ways the film seemingly doesn’t work.

Once again, my expectations were surpassed.