It’s so weird that for most of a career delivering rip roaring action adventure movies or sentimental family movies, Steven Spielberg tended to get fairly serious when he focused on science fiction. OK, so E.T. doesn’t quite fit into my little scenario and neither does Jurassic Park or Ready Player One, but more often than not, whenever the filmmaker turned his gaze to either the skies or the future, chances are the results were way more edgy than you’d expect. For example, Close Encounters Of The Third Kind is a devestating melding of wonder and terrified awe, while Minority Report and War Of The Worlds delivered both a starkly cruel, man on the run flick and a deadly serious, post 9/11, alien invasion film.
However, possibly the most telling example of how Spielberg was maturing as a filmmaker after the likes of Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan was the rather compelling strangeness of A.I. – the film that put both the styles of he and the late Stanley Kubrick into a blender and then pressed purée.
In the future, rising sea levels caused by global warming has resulted in many coastal cities getting wiped out and with the human population in decline, many jobs have been taken up by mechas, humanoid robots who fulfill a multitude of needs. In this climate, Professor Hobby gets his company, Cybertronics Of New York, to put their energies into creating a new mecha to fill the needs of childless parents by creating David, a prototype mecha who resembles an 11 year-old boy who is programmed to bond with a parent after a certain set of commands are given.
The prototype David is given to Monica and Henry Swinton whose own child is currently in suspended animation after contracting a rare disease and while Monica is understandably creeped out by the angelic, eager to please child who is pumping out uncanny valley vibes all over her home. However, in a moment of weakness, she activates his bond programme which can’t be switched off once turned on and while David is every inch the devoted son, matters grow incredibly complicated when the Swinton’s son, Martin, is cured and comes home.
As jealously swells between of boys, a sequence of events leads to David being labeled unsafe, but unable to bear the thought of the little robo-boy being dismantled, Monica drives him and toy robot bear Teddy to a remote location and sets him loose to keep him safe.
However, using the story of Pinocchio as a starting point, David embarks on an odyssey to try and become a real boy so he can return to his “mother” and get the love he so desperately craves. Along the way, he’ll team up with robo-prostitute Gigolo Joe, flee the mecha hating Flesh Fair and take a trip to the decadent Rouge City to try and gain answers for his existential questions – but no one could ever predict how he eventually discovers the answers he’s been so desperately seaching for.
So, in order to set the scene, we’re going to have a quick history lesson and A.I. was originally a project that was going to be made by Stanley Kubrick before he died. However, the famously reclusive director of The Shining and A Clockwork Orange held off on making it for two major reasons – the first was he was waiting for visual effects to adequately realise the film he hoped to make but the second was that he was utterly convinced no living child would be able to deliver the performance needed to bring David to life. In 1995 he handed the project over to Spielberg to make one day and a mere four years later, the auteur died, which is deeply ironic considering that he passed in the exact same year that The Sixth Sense was released and essentially put one of those missing components right in Spielberg’s hands when Haley Joel Osment uttered the immortal phrase “I see dead people”.
As a merging of the sensibilities of two very distinct cinematic voices, A.I. is every bit as a fascinating creation as its lead character as the harsher undertones of Kubrick’s rather cold style swirls around Spielberg’s more blockbuster-y notions – and yet this is still the director who gave us the unforgettable D-Day invasion and that heart breaking sight of a discarded red coat. As a result, we get the most adult themed sci-fi film that Spielberg had crafted since Close Encounters as he attempts to create a world tinged with fantasy (it’s essentially a cyberpunk retelling of Pinocchio) that still is ugly and cruel to a being created tragically innocent.
To watch the director approach this sort of movie with his more serious head on is a fascinating experience as all the sheen and showmanship is still present and correct, but there’s a grime and grit to this future that we hadn’t quite seen before that director carried into future genre films.
Still, while Spielberg is positively reveling in fusing fairy tale to hard sci-fi and letting his freak flag fly (robot prostitutes who come with their own in-built music players, tech hating Flesh Farms that destroy mechas in front of a baying crowd), the film is really carried by Osment who delivers arguably one of the most impressive child performances ever seen. He should be annoying – after all he’s a clingy, doe-eyed robo-moppet in a Spielberg film – but the movie puts David through so much heart breaking shit and the actor is so affecting that it’s impossible not to emphasise with the mecha child completely. In fact, the scene where Frances O’ Connor’s Monica drives him to the forrest and attempts to “White Fang” David out of her life for his own good is absolutely brutal to the point of being legitimately difficult to watch.
It helps that Spielberg is in full world building mode to create a future on screen that shifts as David leaves the walled off safety of his home to the cruel and rather sordid world that lurks outside. The Flesh Farm (arguably the movies high point) sees a whole mess of battered, Stan Winston created creations get burnt, beaten and busted for the amusement of a paying audience and a later trip to Rouge City gives out vibes that the megalopolis of Akria has been sponsored by Pornhub and it’s a magnificent feast for the eyes while David’s misadventures tug at the heart.
However, not everything works. The tone and pace of Kubrick is extremely tough to blend with anyone’s style, let along the guy who made Hook and at times, A.I.’s ambitions take it to pretty strange places and not everyone is going to get a completely whack-out ending that jumps ahead 2000 years and delivers all of David’s answers in a way that feels a bit too divorced from everything else that’s came before. Also, the juxtaposition between sci-fi and fairytale doesn’t always compliment each other as much as you’d like, leaving certain plot twists feeling overly convenient.
However, A.I. not only sees one of cinema’s greatest filmmakers entering a while new phase of his career that saw his blockbuster leanings take a more experimental feel and gives us a child performance for the ages (11 year-old Osment is essentially carrying a movie with a $100 million budget – which is insane), but it also introduces us to the sight of a tap dancing Jude Jaw as a sex droid teaming up with a long suffering teddy bear. Now if that’s not a vision of the future, I don’t know what is?
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