It's been three years since Saving Private Ryan, which was Steven Spielberg's last film, and the one that netted him his second Best Director Academy Award. His latest is called A.I. Artificial Intelligence, and it is, amazingly enough, the first time he's directed a story set in the future, rather than the past (1941, Schindler's List) or the present (Jaws, E.T. The Extra Terrestrial), although he has worked with science fiction material before: Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the two Jurassic Park movies, others.

The story for A.I. comes bearing the handprints of many a midwife - it's based on the 1969 short story Super-Toys Last All Summer Long, by Brian Aldiss, the rights for which Stanley Kubrick bought in 1983. Such writers as Ian Curtis (who receives credit for writing the screen story) and novelist Sara Maitland (Angela & Me, Daughter of Jerusalem) have worked on the script and story, while Kubrick and Spielberg, reportedly close friends since the early '80s, traded notes and faxes regarding the project over the last two decades. Eventually, through reasons which are shrouded in speculation, and doubtlessly sealed by Kubrick's demise in February of 1999, Spielberg took the helm. While Spielberg and DreamWorks have both downplayed the idea that they've attempted to make Kubrick's "final" final film (which would be an unwise and unfair dismissal of Eyes Wide Shut), many linkages remain. Jan Harlan, Kubrick's brother-in-law and longtime producer, serves as one of A.I.'s executive producers. One of the title cards reveals that the movie is in part a "Kubrick" production, and the closing credits reveals that A.I. is also dedicated to the revered 2001 director.

And the stew, as if shaped by these numerous chefs (chiefly Kubrick and Spielberg), contains many ingredients, some effective, some not so much. The result is a somewhat shapeless pastiche that often works as a compelling piece of visionary science fiction, but one that gets lost in the makers' attempts to draw more out of a story than what realistically could have been expected. This is not the case of the tarnished masterpiece, the magnum opus marred by a few passages of banality or tedium - rather, it is the case of a bloated, nearly directionless monster, a short story painfully over-extended to two and a half hours of screen time, one that barely retains its original dramatic impetus or philosophical engine by the time the credits roll.

The story is a fantasy told in three acts. The first concerns the Swintons, Monica (Frances O'Connor, Kiss or Kill, A Little Bit of Soul) and Henry (Sam Robards, American Beauty). Their son is afflicted by an incurable disease, and he's cryogenically frozen in the hopes of finding a cure. In an attempt to draw his wife out of her preemptive mourning, Henry brings home a specimen of new technology: a mechanical boy who looks just as real as a real boy, and is programmed to love its designated parents as such. The robot-boy David (Haley Joel Osment, made famous by The Sixth Sense) acts like an eleven year-old, to an extent: he's kind of creepy, he's overly cheerful, and he smiles in a way that's just not right. Monica, however, is won over, and she decides to keep him, even after their "real" son Martin (Jake Thomas) returns home from the hospital. But Martin's homecoming only makes matters worse. He taunts David, condescends to him, and dares him to cut off a lock of his mother's hair, an incident that makes Henry think the android may be dangerous. In trying to make Martin protect him from other boys at a birthday party, David nearly drowns his brother, and with a heavy heart, Monica leaves David deep in the woods, alone.

The character of Gigolo Joe - an android designed for pleasure and seduction, and played by Jude Law - is introduced in the second act, when David makes his way through the cruel, outer world. Robots and androids are popular for Flesh Fairs, circus-like events that revel in the destruction of the artificial humans (the band playing in the scene is Ministry), and in a collision of characters that echoes Spielberg's Empire of the Sun's Basie and Jim, David and Joe meet through mutual peril, and escape with their necks and CPUs intact. David talks about his mission: to find the Blue Fairy of the Pinocchio story, and have her make him a real boy so his mother will take him back in. This is, of course, an absurd, impossible quest, and what outrageous flights of fancy Spielberg brings into the third act should remain unknown, as they may infuriate or delight (or both), and thus should be experienced purely and without foreknowledge.

The fundamental problem with A.I. is, alas, so fundamental that it affects one's reaction to the movie as a whole. It is that the central character is not a human being - and more so, he doesn't act like a human being. He imitates one well, and thanks to Haley Joel Osment's brilliant performance, he has certain tics that give the game away, particularly his unbelievably hard-headed commitment to goals, ignoring all signals or information that would make an ordinary human reconsider the situation. It may be that, as God gazes upon us, His creations, that He (and I'm guessing) feels empathy but could otherwise not care less - an oversimplification, to be sure, but one that's linked to a philosophical quandary mentioned early in the film. Even if Spielberg can be credited with bringing this off, however, the script suffers from rampant contrivance, and I suspect the old deus ex machina was dusted off and brought into action a few times during the last thirty-five or so minutes of the film, particularly a plot thread related to the hair-lock-stealing incident that belongs in Silas Marner or an O. Henry story (and I'm not thinking of The Gift of the Magi), for all its neatness and force of coincidence. Accepting the entire last act requires a leap of faith that I was, personally, unable to take, or even consider taking.

While I was disappointed with A.I., I can't say I was bored. The first act, with the Swinton family, is compelling, funny, and creepy. The production design throughout is spectacular, and the cityscapes rival anything in Blade Runner or Star Wars: Episode One - The Phantom Menace, and double-Oscar-winning cinematographer Janusz Kaminski's work is among the best color motion picture photography I've seen this year. Along with Osment, Jude Law warrants grand praise for his performance as Gigolo Joe, a perhaps robotic descendant of his Dickie Greenleaf in The Talented Mr. Ripley, with a dash of Gene Kelly tossed in for good measure. Like all of Spielberg's films (even his bad ones), A.I. is certainly worth a look. As with another film that could not be more different, Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark, A.I. is bound to either sweep you off your feet or leave you outside in the rain. The question remains: do you bear the responsibility, or do the filmmakers? It is an old question, perhaps the oldest.

Recommended:
Yes

Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older