Artificial Intelligence

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Rating: D

I should have suspected something was amiss when the theatrical previews didn't show any actual clips from the movie. Apparently, the marketing people realized they had a celluloid meltdown on their hands, and decided the less they revealed of it, the better. Think Katzenberg and Geffen had the guts to tell writer/director Steven Spielberg that his latest effort is a colossal turkey? They probably had heart attacks in the Dreamworks screening room the first time they saw this thing projected. Across town, however, there was rejoicing among the executives at Disney. Now Pearl Harbor won't be the summer's biggest bomb after all.

I can genuinely empathize with the dilemma the marketing people were in. Looking back, I can't think of a single good scene, either. Haley Joel Osment plays David, a robotic boy created by William Hurt and his gang of high-tech geeks at a company full of high-tech geeks. I probably should mention that we're in the future here, and the polar ice caps have melted and put coastal cities like Manhattan under a few hundred feet of water. Before you complain that that's not an original idea, I should warn you there isn't an original idea anywhere to be found in this entire movie - so get used to it already. Anyway, David is special, because unlike the multitudes of other androids being concurrently mass-produced, David can dream. Or something like that. Because Frances O'Connor and Sam Robards have a real son who's comatose, Robards thinks it'll be a neat idea to bring David into the family as a sort of replacement. (Actually, the comatose kid fits in better with the rest of the script, but I digress.) What follows is scene after tedious scene of David acting inappropriately in one situation after another, to the befuddlement of O'Connor and the growing restlessness of the audience. Things hit rock bottom during a sequence at the dinner table where David eats spinach and it almost kills him. I could've told him. And of course, a Spielberg film wouldn't be a Spielberg film without some sort of cloying gimmick, and here it's a talking mechanical teddy bear. Which would have been okay if we ever got our wish to see the thing torn to shreds by rabid pit bulls, set ablaze, and then launched into outer space strapped onto the back of a ballistic missile. But we never do. Instead, the stupid bear hangs around for the entire movie like a persistent toothache.

The question of what separates a thinking, feeling android from a real human being has been examined in numerous science fiction stories, as well as episodes of Star Trek and The Twilight Zone, to name but a few. While regurgitating a common theme is no sin, pretending the idea is an original revelation is. Also, the moral and ethical questions raised by man's increasing technological capabilities were recently much better addressed in The Sixth Day, which A.I. spends a lot of time borrowing ideas from (when it's not busy ripping off the film's production design, as well as those of Total Recall and A Clockwork Orange). The end result is A.I. comes off as a tired rehash, vastly inferior to its source material. Spielberg even has the pretentious nerve to give us a sequence which implies a parallel between the destruction of a group of robots and human genocide. Give me a break.

If you want to get philosophical, part of what makes this film such a failure lies at the heart of its premise. What does it say about our times that Spielberg and company can't understand what differentiates a human being from a machine that looks and behaves like a human being? At least in The Sixth Day, the Sim doll was shown for the grotesquery that it was - a superficial mimicry of a human's appearance, but with no more heart and soul than a toaster oven. Nor is the film consistent. In one scene, David smashes the skull of another "David" robot with a lamp, effectively "killing" him. The film doesn't condemn this action in any way; in fact, the opposite is true. So why should we care what happens to the main David? Still, my disagreement with the film's premise isn't what earned it such a low grade. It gets a low grade because it's highly derivative, self-indulgent, filled with ham-handed references (to Pinocchio, no less), and is simply no fun to watch. This movie isn't entertainment - it's punishment.

Toward the end of the film, if you maintain consciousness that long, you'll learn William Hurt still resides in his office building even though the first eighty stories are now below sea level. (Where does he buy groceries? Does he ride a motorboat home at night?) You'll also learn that the damn aliens have invaded, like we always knew they would. If none of this makes any sense to you, don't despair. None of it made any sense to me, either. My brain had long since gone completely numb. As I walked out of the theater, several people in their late teens ahead of me were exchanging barbed criticisms of the movie. "That ending was sooo lame," offered one female. But I kind of liked the ending. It meant the movie was finally over.