1 of 3
Ending a three-year hiatus with a much-hyped new sci-fi film, Steven Spielberg is back, and better still, he is back in familiar territory. After years of "stretching" to heavy-duty subject matter—the Holocaust, slave ships, and Normandy Beach—seemingly to prove he has grown up after all, Spielberg is telling another "lost boy" story.
Given the high profile of his recent films, it's easy to forget that Spielberg's fame and considerable fortune were built in the first instance on tales of boys in danger, boys threatened with the loss of innocence, family, and joy. So enamored of the notion of lost boyhood was Spielberg that in very successful mid-career he actually went so far as to make Hook, a frenetic, overstuffed sprawl about Peter Pan that starred, appropriately, the eternal pubescent cut up Robin Williams. But that misfire came after a string of momentous, inventive films, most of them completed before he turned forty: Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (featuring men who would like to be kids again), E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, and the much neglected Empire of the Sun—not to mention the three ultimate boy-adventure movies featuring the exploits of archaeologist Indiana Jones.
With A.I., we run again into a "young" Spielberg, though now in his mid-50s. While it is good to see that he still has his youth about him, it is also clear from A.I. that the young fellow is now a good deal wiser, braver, and darker. And Spielberg knows it, freely admitting that he would not have made such a film 20 years ago. Even in comparison to Schindler's List (1993), Amistad (1997), and Saving Private Ryan (1998), where he set out to grapple with darkness, A.I. is grim. Gone, or at least greatly modulated, is Spielberg's bent for what one prominent critic recently called "ruthless sentimentality."
Special effects don't overwhelm the story; more important, the cinematography is muted, Spielberg containing his penchant for the visual pyrotechnics that make so many of his climactic scenes look like the Transfiguration of Jesus. Tempered, too, is his haste to deflect uncomfortable emotion with a joke, as was his wont in his early days; he's now far more willing to let characters' fear or sorrow have their way with viewers. In A.I., in fact, there is remarkably little humor of any kind, and that little is mostly darkly satiric. Finally, and most notably, A.I. simply lacks heroes and a clearly happy ending.
In this imagined future, the human prospect has turned bleak, global warming having melted the ice caps, submerged coastal cities, and caused catastrophic climate change worldwide. What remains of America now prospers because of strict population control and the use of very smart robots. In most ways these "mechas" (future slang derived from mechanical) are indistinguishable from people, setting about their narrowly designated tasks with pleasantness and efficiency, whether as nurse, nanny, or gigolo. They don't fret about their own fate—whether they "live" or expire—nor about the fortunes of others. In short, what they lack is "feelings," a big part of that mysterious innerness that makes people people.
The rub comes when the leader of Cybertronics, Inc., Dr. Hobby (William Hurt), decides to create a mecha that can feel and love. Since there's a large potential market among childless couples, he starts with a child-bot. Twenty months later, the prototype, named David (Haley Joel Osment), is ready for testing.
He's placed with an upscale family, the Swintons, whose ten-year-old son, Martin (Jake Thomas), has died, sort of. For five years, Martin has lain cryogenically preserved, waiting for a cure. His mother, Monica (Frances O'Connor), hopes still, going daily to read to her frozen son, until one day husband Henry (Sam Robards) shows up with David in tow.
RSS Feed
