Many posters on this board detest Spielberg so you should feel at home. I saw it for the first time today on cable a few hours ago and liked it, though I wouldn’t put it on my top-ten list. I’ve said before on this board that Spielberg has guts to spend big money on movies like these which he knows in advance will not be popular crowd-pleasers. Other mainstream directors are not taking chances like this. He did it in this instance at least in part as a favor to his deceased friend Kubrick, who had been working on the script for almost twenty years, and I admire his desire to pay homage in this way.
I agree with you that Osment was amazingly brilliant; unlike you, I liked Jude Law and liked the special effects and cinematography. William Hurt was also memorable (as he always is) in the Geppetto puppeteer role. I don’t understand what you didn’t like about the effects. Spielberg is always good at effects; if anything, the usual criticism is that he is too much spectacle and not enough heart or intelligence. For example, I looked closely at the seamless transitions between human and robot and couldn’t figure out how they were done, but they were realistic and impressive.
The problem most people have with Spielberg in his later movies is that he excites your expectations by making movies with important themes, but he doesn’t always have much to say about these themes. In this movie, for instance, Spielberg asks important questions like the following: Can a machine ever learn to feel emotions such as love? What separates true emotion from a response to stimuli? If a robot learns to love, will a human love the robot back? Does being human require that the person be unique, rather than one of many other identical robots? Like elves (Geryk are you reading this?) how might a robot feel if it outlives its humans?
As in Minority Report, Spielberg plays with these big themes, but viewers expecting answers to or a deeper understanding of the questions will be dissatisfied. Just as Minority Report was essentially simply a Hitchcockian thriller, I saw AI as simply a reworking of the Pinocchio fairy tale. (AI is also based on an Aldiss short story which I haven’t read.) As in Pinocchio, a toy is made by a toymaker, the toy seeks to become human, it has various adventures, and it eventually succeeds in its quest after a journey to the depths of the sea. (In Pinocchio, Geppetto and Pinocchio end up together in the belly of a shark.)
The ending in AI as much darker though than in the Pinocchio fairy tale. In Pinocchio, the puppet becomes human after sacrificing fifty coins to rescue the Fairy with Azure Hair. In AI, David becomes human only after the Blue Fairy crumbles. He is now the only entity alive who remembers the humans. He is enabled to resurrect his mother, knowing that she will live only for a day, she tells him that she loves him, and he becomes human. He now can sleep, which he couldn’t do before as a robot, and he remembers her in his dreams (shades of Proust).
I’m reluctant to read too much into this ending, although I might have more thoughts after time for further reflection. View Spielberg primarily as attempting to address the important questions and themes he raises, and you’ll probably view him as a dilettante who dabbles in waters too deep for him. View him primarily as I do as a skilled teller of adventure stories (Hitchcockian thrillers, fairy tales, war stories, Indiana Jones!, etc.) with great spectacle and, on occasion, a heavy thematic undertow and you’ll like him better.
I have seen rumors in print that Spielberg will make another Indiana Jones movie. Inquiring minds want to know: Will all of the Spielberg bashers on this board find fault with that too?
