It begins dreadfully and stays that way for ages. It fumbles for what it thinks it wants to say, often missing the objective completely. Its ending is too long and too confused, and it casts a pall over the good things that came before. It marries the efforts of two filmmakers in uncomfortable ways and often short-circuits them both. But for better or worse, it is A.I. Artificial Intelligence--the best, most resonant, and most disturbing film Steven Spielberg has made in years, and a movie that deserves far more respect than it's been getting.

Let me be frank. Not only have I been a major opponent of Spielberg, who brought this project to fruition, but I've also been leery of Stanley Kubrick, who initiated the project (long) before his death in 1999. While the former has become an exponent of cheap sentiment and conservative politics since his breakthrough with Jaws, the latter was notable chiefly for a virulent strain of misanthropy that blotted out whatever was gained by his technical precision. Given these apparent opposites, the thought of their combination caused me real fear, reminding me of the disastrous match-up between Ken Russell and Paddy Chayefsky on Altered States. But the Janus-faced film that resulted from the fusion of Spielberg and Kubrick is a small miracle, a work that minimizes both directors' faults and builds on their strengths.

More or less.

I'll admit that the opening to this robot opera seems deceptively like the same domestic scenario Spielberg has given us a thousand times before. When, in the near future, a grieving mother (Frances O'Connor)--whose ailing son is cryogenically frozen until science can cure him--agrees to try out a prototypical robot child named David (Haley Joel Osment) that is programmed to love, the scene is set for the same parent-child symbiosis that marks Spielberg's other work. For what feels like an eternity, we watch a tedious bourgeois family with a boring enamel-white house bond with the new little marvel, and we wish that we had decided to see another movie.

But then something happens that blows the whole Spielberg scenario sky-high. When the absent son is released from suspended animation and returned to his parents, he asserts his place as a horrible brat who loves to torment David. This leads to David's accidental threatening of both mother and son and, consequently, his fall from grace in the household. In what must be a first for the director, we watch the mother tearfully abandon her robot child in the woods, casting aspersions on not only the relationship of the literal parent to the child, but also the power dynamic that allowed David to be created and tossed aside. The bubble is burst by a prick of Kubrickian hubris, throwing the thrust of his successor into confusion.

Pretty soon, each of A.I.'s creators are staring into the abyss of the other, thinking about their points in common and creating something that nervously approaches harmony. This becomes apparent when David hooks up with framed sex-droid Gigolo Joe (a killer turn by Jude Law): we see the enthralled child of Spielberg--who seeks his self-annihilation in the arms of a parental god--lock horns with the bitter cynicism of Kubrick, who sees such love for such a manipulator insane. As David and Joe seek the former's creator (Dr. Hobby, played by William Hurt) in an attempt to make sense out of the meaningless existence as mecha trash, we witness contradictory points of view reach an understanding and create a vision of power and creation unlike anything else in either director's oeuvre.

This is not to say that A.I. is a seamless work of genius. Spielberg, alas, lacks the crisp visual menace of Kubrick and smoothes over too many of the source material's rough edges. One wishes that Kubrick were alive to realize Rouge City, the brothel-strewn metropolis to which Gigolo Joe takes David as they elude the police--Spielberg lacks both the sexual imagination and the horror for the body that the late master would surely have brought to such a me-so-horny location. And he has a nasty habit of making literal what Kubrick would have made more conceptual: the interminable ending (actually, three endings) renders a return to the womb reminiscent of 2001 into a banal cuddle-with-the-folks that nearly blows the film out of the water. A little more killer instinct and a little less blunt thinking could've made A.I. even better than it is, and it's a pity that it never quite achieves its full potential as a result of its director's lack of nerve.

And yet, I wonder if that's the point; the act of the two auteurs coming into contact draws a spectacular number of sparks. There may be a bit of surface noise as a side effect, but for what this film says about both Spielberg and Kubrick is surprising and profound. Whatever discomfort one might feel at the film's frequent low points, it synthesizes a pair of sui generis worldviews and enables us to look on them with new eyes. It's enough for me to recommend the film, which has almost no mainstream competition as it grapples with things most summer films can't begin to think about--when they think at all.-Travis Hoover

Luckily, A.I. makes a smooth transition to the small screen, arriving on DVD in your choice of widescreen or pan-and-scan as part of a deluxe 2-disc set. We received the widescreen version for review, which presents the film in a 1.85:1 anamorphic transfer with a layer of artful grain throughout. The steely, severe-contrast visuals are rendered with care--A.I. very definitely carries the bleak signature of its cinematographer, Janusz Kaminski. Saturation fares well in the Rouge City set-piece, appropriately the most colourful portion of the film. The sound, designed by guru Gary Rydstrom, is in both 5.1 DTS and Dolby Digital. Apparently, this an unlabelled ES/EX mix with an extra centre channel, but I can't confirm that with my current set-up. Most of the soundtrack consists of dialogue over Kubrickian roomtone (a silence of which you're aware), but the pounding mecha round-up and Flesh Fair sequences (chapters 15 and 16, respectively) envelop us like we've come to expect from Spielberg.

The first disc is supplemented by the featurette "Creating A.I.," which really amounts to a teaser for the remaining extras, all of which were produced by Laurent Bouzereau. Bouzereau's best (his passion for every aspect of the filmmaking process) and worst (his brevity and his cutesy cutting: for example, Bouzereau goes to Teddy saying "I am not a toy" after an off-screen techie refers to him as such) tendencies as a documentarian are on parade here. Disc Two is divided up into the following sections:

Acting A.I.

"Portraits" of David (9 mins.) and Gigolo Joe (6 mins.)--interviews with Osment and Law regarding their characters. Something that might be fun to validate: Osment claims he doesn't blink once in A.I..

Designing A.I.

A.I. From Drawings to Sets (7 mins.)
Artist Chris Baker's (a.k.a. "Fangorn") discussion of the concepts he came up with for Kubrick gives way to the man who would eventually realize them, production designer Rick Carter (Back to the Future Part II).

Dressing A.I. (5 mins.)
Batman costume designer Bob Ringwood on accessorizing the cast. Find out what it takes to make your own Gigolo Joe outfit.

In "Lighting A.I." (4 mins.), Kaminski (under)states, "I probably like smoke a bit more than [Spielberg] does." "Special Effects" (8 mins.) focuses on such practicals as shooting Chris Rock-bot out of a cannon. (The entire Flesh Fair was staged live, an impressive and dangerous feat.) "Robots of A.I." (14 mins.) discloses that amputees played many of the mechas, that it took 6 people to work Teddy, and more.

Special Visual Effects and Animation: ILM

An Overview (5 mins.)
Dennis Muren, the man behind the best F/X in the Star Wars saga, remembers the Thanksgiving he spent with Kubrick answering technical questions.

The Robots (3 mins.)
Scott Farrar of ILM deconstructs that amazing shot near the beginning of A.I. wherein Canadian actress Sabrina Grdevich has her head opened up and a memory box removed. If the film's spectacular visuals aren't celebrated by the Academy, they didn't see this shot, in particular.

The Miniatures (4 mins.)
A fascinating glimpse into the simulated underwater photography. Gone are the Deep Star Six days when you wrapped the lens in blue cellophane.

The New York City Sequence: Shot Progression (5 mins.)
Doug Smythe guides us step-by-step through David and Joe's poignant amphibicopter journey around The Big Apple: post-9/11, there's a melancholy to the sight of collapsed, submerged skyscrapers.

Animating A.I. (8 mins.)
Animation supervisor Hal Hickel on Dr. Know, enhancements to Teddy, and various other characters I will refrain from mentioning so as to avoid spoilers.

The Sound and the Music of A.I.

Gary Rydstrom's disappointingly short synclavier demo in "Sound Design" (7 mins.) is nevertheless worth the price of this DVD package alone. John Williams touches on a very specific Kubrick influence in his terrific interview for "The Music" (6 mins.).

"Closing: Steven Spielberg: Our Responsibility to Artificial Intelligence" (2 mins.) features Spielberg preaching our...not responsibility, but debt, to that which we anthropomorphize. Waxing philosophically is not his strong suit, but its inadvertent defense of Wilson in Cast Away justifies this address. DVD credits are supered onto this segment.

Finishing off the second platter are the "A.I. Archives." Housed therein are two trailers for A.I. (in 5.1; "Trailer 2" provokes goosebumps), a selection of storyboards that go above and beyond the call of duty, seven illustrations from Chris Baker's A.I. portfolio, a portfolio of art department sketches (presumably by Rick Carter), an ILM portfolio of digital work, and two galleries of production stills snapped by David James, one of which is specific to Spielberg. Cast/crew bios/filmos and production notes that essentially rehash and summarize all that preceded them round out the disc.-Bill Chambers

© Film Freak Central; filmfreakcentral.net. This review may not be reprinted, in whole or in part, without the express consent of its author.

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