A.I. Spielberg's Strange Love

By Richard Corliss Reported By Jess Cagle/Los Angeles

A noted scientist of the remote future lays down a piquant challenge to his colleagues at Cybertronics Manufacturing. "I propose that we build a robot who can love...a robot that dreams." Hurrah and alas, his dream is realized. Two years later, Cybertronics has assembled the perfect child, "always loving, never ill, never changing," and has found a potentially ideal couple to adopt him--or try him out. But we know the danger of answered prayers. Real life is messy; love can break your heart. Even the heart of a "toy boy" like David, who will be abandoned by the one he loves most and have to face a brutal world before he can find a saving human touch.

A love story, a prophecy and a fairy tale (Pinocchio, to be exact) in the guise of a science-fiction film, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence represents the collaboration and collision of two master filmmakers: Stanley Kubrick, who spent parts of more than 15 years on the project; and Steven Spielberg, whom Kubrick finally asked to direct it, and who did, from his own screenplay, after Kubrick's death in 1999. The film, whose genesis and shooting have long been cocooned in secrecy, opens next week.

For his first sci-fi project since 2001, Kubrick had planned, as Spielberg says, "to take a step beyond the sentient relationship that HAL 9000 has with Bowman and Poole, and tell a kind of future fairy tale about artificial intelligence." When he suggested that Spielberg direct it, "I thought he was out of his mind. He was giving up one of the best stories he had ever told. But he said, 'This story is closer to your sensibilities than my own.'" Once Spielberg began work on the film, at the behest of the director's widow Christiane and her brother, Kubrick's producer Jan Harlan, "I felt that Stanley really hadn't died, that he was with me when I was writing the screenplay and shooting the movie."

A.I. will beguile some viewers, perplex others. Its vision is too capacious, its narrative route too extended, the shift in tone (from suburban domestic to rural nightmare to urban archaeology) too ornery to make the film a flat-out wowser of the E.T. stripe. A.I. boasts a beautiful central performance--Haley Joel Osment, 13, plays David with a kind of buoyant gravity--and a canny turn by Jude Law as a robo-stud, while other actors are wan. The film is bold, rigorous and sentimental by turns, and often all at once, as should be expected from a two-man movie where both have strong wills to match their great gifts, and one is dead. "This will be a repeat of 2001," says Harlan. "Some people will hate it. Never mind."

Even when A.I. meanders or stumbles, it is fascinating as a wedding of two disparate auteurs. Kubrick took five, seven, a dozen years to make a movie; he optioned Brian Aldiss's short story "Supertoys Last All Summer Long," on which A.I. is based, in 1983. Spielberg has shot multiple films in one year, and in his spare time he helps run the DreamWorks film studio. Spielberg has the warmest of directorial styles; Kubrick's is among the coolest. One aims to seduce the audience; the other wanted to bend moviegoers to see it his way, or to hell with them. The resulting fugue is like a piece composed for brass but played on woodwinds, a Death Valley map on which Spielberg has placed seeds, hoping they will somehow blossom...

...the way a boy robot might hope that a woman's love could make him human. David is the cybergenic triumph of Professor Hobby (William Hurt). Who wouldn't want this perfect child, years past colic and teething, years before the gonadal eruptions of puberty? The chosen "parent" is Henry (Sam Robards), a Cybertronics employee whose wife Monica (Frances O'Connor) has sunk into remorse because their son Martin (Jake Thomas) is in a coma. So here's a pick-me-up for a grieving mother: a machine that looks and acts like a kid--the best kid ever.

Monica, initially spooked by this shiny-faced, irrevocably pleasant simulacrum of a boy, comes to appreciate David's virtues; he has no flaws, except that he is not "orga" (organic) but "mecha" (mechanical)--and not Martin. From a closet she retrieves an old supertoy, a stuffed bear named Teddy, who becomes David's most faithful companion. Soon David is calling her Mommy. Bereft of her only natural child, she cradles this artificial one. Bathed in Nativity light, mother and child melt into a Pieta.

A medical advance restores Martin, who is instantly resentful of the new kid in the house. Martin tries to get the cute intruder to break a toy, but David can't. He's being tested and tempted. The real boy tells robo-boy: Try being a kid; it means smashing things.

A few unfortunate accidents persuade Monica to abandon David in a forest. Quick as a face slap, David and the audience are in a strange new world containing refugee robots with half-faces and a jaunty "love mecha" named Gigolo Joe (Law). In Kubrick's script, says Law, "Joe was much more aggressive, more twisted." Here he is, in Spielberg's word, David's "scoutmaster." (This was the section Kubrick could not solve and which Spielberg, in developing it, has softened. The Kubrick version would have been rated R; this film is PG-13.)

Together David and Joe travel through garish landscapes that, as imagined by artist Chris Baker (who was on the project in the early years) and production designer Rick Carter, handsomely evoke every sci-fi dystopia from Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange to Blade Runner and this year's Monkeybone. Come to the Flesh Fair--a sort of Thunderdome demolition derby where vengeful humans, led by the demagogic Lord Johnson-Johnson (Ireland's Brendan Gleeson), set hapless automatons aflame--and try to get out fast. Spend the night in Rouge City, a city of sensual schlock that is filled with Kubrick-a-brac like a Clockwork Orange milk bar and a sign reading STRANGELOVE's. End up in the grayest place on Earth, a submerged Manhattan, where David will make his home and pursue his dream: not just to love a human but to be loved by one.

Is it so farfetched to think a human can fall in love with a mecha? Multiplex audiences do just that whenever they surrender to the seductive contrivance of movie emotion. (Each tear you shed has been carefully programmed, folks.)

For ages, Spielberg was dismissed as the original toy boy of films--a movie machine, a thrill technician. At 53, he has finally won his share of Oscars. But he still wants to prove that his heart beats, not ticks. Even more, Spielberg needs to show that he can conquer daunting odds; so he runs with a project that a most assured and intimidating director couldn't quite bring himself to film. One might call this an act of devotion. Or possibly hubris.

Kubrick was a scholar of hubris. That was his persistent theme: the dream of being other, or more, than we are. The ambition that seems honorable in your standard movie hero is often revealed as idiot obsession in a Kubrick protagonist. He falls in love with a living doll (Lolita) or himself (Barry Lyndon), with an idea that may be decent (justice, say, in Paths of Glory), even artistic (writing a novel, in The Shining). But Kubrick sets him the sort of test and trap that real-boy Martin sets for David: a man must learn the limits of hope. And then, often, he dies. If there's a happy ending in a Kubrick film, it is in 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which an astronaut evolves into a Star Child. Man becomes not-man, better-than-man, by shrugging off that mean thing we flatter by calling humanity.

A.I., in Spielberg's hands, twists the notion of the Star Child: the nonhuman is more human, and in the sweetest way. All right, it's because man--playing God, playing tricks--programmed him to love, even as other film robots, like the Terminator, are designed to destroy. In the A.I. world, robots are made to give pleasure and, in David's case, offer joy. Gigolo Joe is a sex machine, David a love machine. The toy boy's sole purpose is to give and elicit affection. His obsession (in Kubrick's terms) or dream (in Spielberg's) requires him to do everything to achieve Monica's love--after she renounces him, after she abandons him, after she's gone. The woman is unworthy, but she's all he has, all he needs to get back to.

That's pure Spielberg: the story of a stranded or abandoned child searching for signposts to home, for the reunion of the nuclear family. This Hansel-and-Gretel motif has been playing from his first feature, The Sugarland Express (two young marrieds struggle to rescue their child from foster parents), through half a dozen other films he has directed or produced (Poltergeist, Back to the Future, The Goonies, Empire of the Sun, Hook, Saving Private Ryan). That's a pretty full gallery of lost boys and girls. And what is that little parchment-pated E.T. but a precocious kid, light-years from home, looking for a cell phone?

That's an old-fashioned theme, but so is robotics. The Aldiss story (in which a couple contemplate dumping their robo-child as soon as the state allows them to have a real one of their own) was published in 1969 just a year after Kubrick's 2001 was released. These days, artificial intelligence has been overtaken, as scientific hope and ethical threat, by genetic engineering. A.I., set far in the future, conjures up popular worries 30 years in the past.

Well, as the Disney people said about Pearl Harbor, it's not a treatise, it's a movie. And as a movie, A.I. engrosses without quite enthralling. It's got technological wonders (the seamless integration of Teddy as a puppet and a computer image) that are truly wonderful. Scenes like the Flesh Fair and a chase through the woods display the supple camera work, dramatic lighting and savvy editing that you get when a terrific filmmaker is on his game. He isn't always, though. Intriguing plot twists (like the exploits of the nicely malicious Martin) are dropped for excursions that are more about art direction than efficient storytelling. And O'Connor lacks the maternal and womanly radiance that's needed, since the film is basically about a boy's urge to crawl into his mother's bed.

A.I. could be seen as a work of artificial emotions and genuine cinematic intelligence. It is more than that because Spielberg laid the burden of the film on Osment like a backpack, and the young trouper carries it. A meticulous actor, Osment made sure that "whenever [David] turns a corner, he turns it the same number of steps every time, the same movements. And the eyes were important. Turn the eyes first, then the head. Don't blink."

You won't blink watching Osment. He has a, well, sixth sense for the hint of ecstasy or despair in a glance. Inhabiting such a character, letting humanity seep into him: that's not artifice. It's a fine actor's art, and enough to make any mother love him. Not to mention his two fathers, Spielberg and Kubrick.

--Reported by Jess Cagle/Los Angeles

To see the complete interviews with Steven Spielberg, Jude Law and Haley Joel Osment about A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, log on to time.com