The End Of Intelligence

Here's Film Comment's best of the decade. They agree with me, Mulholland Drive is #1. However, Steven Spielberg's Artificial Intelligence makes #30. It shouldn't be anywhere near that list.

I was watching some old Roger Ebert reviews and saw his (and Roeper's) take on A. I.. The film was based on a 1960s short story that Stanley Kubrick spent years developing. He handed it off to Spielberg, who, as far as I can tell, mostly followed Kubrick's plan.



For those who don't have the patience, they both like the film a lot but think Spielberg fails in the final act where he gets too sentimental. This was a common reaction. I feel exactly the opposite. (BTW, a lot of people thought Spielberg was just being himself in the end when, in fact, he probably followed Kubrick the closest there.)

I'm about to discuss the plot, so there'll be spoilers. I'm not going to retell the plot, though, so if you don't know it, you can read about it here.

Overall, I think the film is bad. Disastrously so. Almost everything in the first two acts makes no sense. Let me go over just some of the most obvious problems. (I'm doing this from memory. I haven't seen the film in years.) Barely a scene goes by that I accept.

1) David is supposed to be special, but I can't see how he's any different from the other mechas. Heck, the Teddy Bear is just as amazing.

2) The mother make it so that David only imprints on her. Why would any parent have the kid only love one of them?

3) If they're going to keep a mecha along with their real kid, fine, but you'd think the parents would be extra careful to make sure their son is safe with this new model.

4) Much of the movie is taken up with David's search for the Blue Fairy, but (unlike in Pinocchio) there is no Blue Fairy, so the whole trip is pointless (as far as we know).

5) Humans don't like mechas and destroy them at Flesh Fairs. Maybe they figured it's such a great metaphor for intolerance that they didn't think they needed to explain how or why humans feel this way. (And, by the way, since mechas only have the outward appearance of feelings, is a flesh fair that big a deal? This isn't Toy Story.)

6) David and Gigolo Joe travel a long way to find Dr. Know, who will answer their questions. Maybe when the story was being developed in the 70s, Kubrick figured big computers with lots of information would be rare and hard to find, but this is set in the 22nd century, and already today it's ridiculous that you'd have to go somewhere far away to get information you could look up almost anywhere.

7) William Hurt's plan for David to return seems an absurd test and rather unlikely to bear fruit. But when David does return, does Hurt immediately bring David--now quite valuable, seems to me--in for interrogation? No, he leaves him alone (with hundreds of other Davids for him to find conveniently) so he can leave any time he wants.

So we get to the final act, thousands of years in the future, where David is found frozen far under water, having at last seen what he thought was the Blue Fairy (an absurd coincidence). He's brought back to life by powerful, futuristic mechas. (A lot of people thought they were aliens. I think Ebert might have made this mistake.)

They read his mind and discover he just wants to become a boy so his mother can love him. I think people take what happens next too literally. Otherwise, it's all far too convenient. After the Blue Fairy (created by the futuristic mechas) truthfully tells David he can't become human, the mechas decide to grant him his wish. But what they're actually doing is putting him to sleep. It's like a condemned prisoner getting his last meal.

First, it turns out Teddy has saved a lock of the mother's hair. Second, it just so happens they can reconstruct her from this hair. Third, she can only come back for a day. That's the story they tell him, anyway. So she comes back, and David has one perfect day with her before he's put away forever. It may all just be happening in his mind.

The whole sequence is shot in an otherwordly style. I find it icy. Even spooky. Anything but warm and sentimental.

And that's how the movie ends, narrated by Ben Kingsley as a fairy tale. But it's a mecha fairy tale, about a final gesture in an empty world where life, and feeling, have long since disappeared.