"a.i." review

[Guest chirs3]

Starring: Haley Joel Osment (I might have misspelled one or all of the names) and... Jude Law, I think.

 

Plot: It's waaaaaaay in the future. The polar icecaps have melted, flooding a lot of costal cities, and there's neat futuristic looking cars and helicopters and everything.

 

Problem is, with the flooding, millions of people were displaced and left starving. Noticing that land mass was getting smaller, laws were passed on pregnancies, and robots, which didn't eat or use other resources, became popular.

 

Artificial Intelligence had been reached already - to a limited degree. But Dr. IForgotHisName, in the opening scene, explains his plans to create the first robot, or "Mecha" as they call them, that can love. That can feel emotions, and dream, and laugh, and all that neat stuff.

 

A few years later...

 

Cut to Monica and... Henry, I think his name was. A married couple whose only son is frozen. Why is he frozen? Excellent question. He's sick, and at the moment, there's no cure. Dr. IForgotHisName has been monitoring many couples, and he chooses this one. He asks Henry if he wants the prototype child Mecha (named David). Henry, seeing how much not having a child around hurts his wife, agrees.

 

Monica, at first, despises the little rustbucket, but over time she grows attached to him...

 

... and then a cure is found.

 

Forced to compete with Martin (the son), and unable to comprehend his mistakes, David soon loses favor with them all. Monica finally decides to bring him back to the company that made him, but she knows they will destroy him. She chokes, and instead drops him off on the side of the road and tells him to run.

 

I'll leave it off there.

 

The Good: There are some scenes in this movie, quite a few I thought, that for some indescribable reason really wowed me. The poolside scene, for example. It also has a walking talking teddy bear, and somehow, some way, they pulled it off in a way that made it not stupid. Kinda cool, actually. And there's pretty nice character consistency, with Gigolo Joe always striking those outlandish poses in an involuntary manner (he's a robot, you see). The whole movie kept my interest, even the last fourth, which goes under this category.

 

The Bad: They couldn't figure out how to end it. It went on and on. The last fourth of the movie follows this pattern: Do something wierd, then explain it. Then do something wierder and explain it. Then do something even wierder, and explain it. Had it ended with David in the helicopter pleading with The Blue Fairy, that would have been a really good (though really sad) ending. But it just drug on and on.

 

Overall: It's worth renting. A little slow to start, and the ending I could have done without, but it's got a really good, and occasionally thought-provoking story. And a talking teddy bear! Whoo!

 

Chirs3 gives this movie 7 Mecha-Gigolo's out of 10.

[Guest J*ingus]

I just thought it was uneven as all hell.  It would provide one moment that I really liked, and then follow it up with three shitty ones.  And pretty much everyone agrees that the ending sucked.  The whole movie was one of those doom-ridden tragedies that couldn't possibly have a happy ending, but they tried to provide one anyway.

[Guest Mystery Eskimo]

Would have been better if Kubrick had lived and finished it, instead of the tacky Spielberg feel-good ending we got, which destroyed the mystery you could have had if the film had ended with the aliens flying in.

[Guest J*ingus]

Ah, you brought up the eternal debate: at the end, were those aliens, or very advanced robots?  I vote for robots, as the whole theme of the movie was how humans were afraid of being replaced by machines, etc.

[Guest MDH257]

I thought this movie really got a raw deal when it came out. I remember seeing the movie on a saturday around 5:00 (the day after it was released) and there were a ton of parents who brought there kids. This was probably because the ad campaign made people think it was a family film.

 

1.) The movie should have ended with Haley Joel underwater staring at the blue fairy. Spielberg had finally made an interesting movie that wasn't for everybody until he decided he had to have the happy ending.

 

2.) I read somewhere where it was said that at the end of the movie they are robots, not aliens. (When I saw the movie I thought they were aliens) They said that, during post production, several people told Spielberg that it wasn't made clear enough that they were robots and that the audience would be confused. But he left it as is.

 

3.) I loved the Teddy Bear. I read where someone called him the "Anti Jar-Jar" because you can't get enough of him. I couldn't put it any better.

[Guest monkey]

I liked AI and now have it on DVD, and you read my mind when you said the film should have finished under the water.  The first thing I thought when I left the cinema after seeing the film was that Kubrick would have ended there but Speilberg just couldnt.