What's at the Movies

By Ian Pugh

Spielberg’s brilliant and provocative “A.I.” is much more than a film about the understandings of artificial intelligence. It is a film about love and mortality. Can someone ever truly stop loving a person? What happens to that love when the person goes away, or dies? “A.I.” tries to answer these questions with the perfect subject: someone who is not supposed to love to begin with. It is the distant future. After years of success in robotics, Professor Allen Hobby (William Hurt) proposes a radical new turn in production: to produce an android boy for childless couples—one that can actively love his “parents.” Twenty months later, a prototype “mecha,” David, (Haley Joel Osment) is given to one of Hobby’s employees, Henry Swinton (Sam Robards) and his wife Monica (Frances O’Connor), whose son Martin (Jake Thomas) is currently in cryogenic stasis with an incurable disease. Henry and Monica come to accept David as a son. That is, until Martin is cured and brought back home, and David seems to display erratic behavior. The Swintons subsequently abandon David, who goes on a search for a way to change himself into a real boy so he may be loved. He meets a world-weary mecha, Gigolo Joe, (Jude Law) on the way, who offers to help him. David’s “life” is portrayed as he slowly builds his emotional attachment to Monica, even after she leaves him. His mission to be changed into a human boy never leaves his mind—it’s all for his Mommy. It’s a tearjerker affair, but a successful one.

All of the performances are superb and heartfelt. Osment’s David is a budding mind, attempting to comprehend his problems in a world that rejects him. O’Connor and Robards are the reluctant parents of a robot, not knowing how to deal with a cyborg possessing feelings. Finally, Jude Law is a recently rejected “loverbot” that realizes the duplicitous nature of humans. Stanley Kubrick owned the rights to produce “A.I.” for a good 20 years, but the film lacked the special effects required for the story. Shortly before his death, Kubrick passed “A.I.” onto Steven Spielberg. Although the two directors’ styles are radically different, Spielberg is able to blend his own good-natured method with Kubrick’s bleak dystopic approach. The end product is a thought-provoking masterpiece that can’t be missed.