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Artificial Intelligence

Movie Artificial Intelligence Director Steven Spielberg Producer Kathleen Kennedy Cast Haley Joel Osment, Jude Law, Frances O'Connor

By Ad-Lib Steven Spielberg is the only person who can actually get away with putting ridiculous acts of day-dreams into celluloid. That’s because he tempers it with a very real story or a story that the viewers empathise with. AI is one such movie. It’s a Pinocchio set way ahead in the future. In this future, robots have become hot favorites with the human race. They occupy and satisfy all human desires and needs. David (Haley Joel Osment) is one such robot who has been designed to be a regular loving boy-emotion, feelings and all. After their own son is in suspended animation due to an illness, Monica (Frances O’Connor) and Henry (Sam Robards) take David to their home for company. Monica warms up to the boy and they are a regular family until Martin (Jake Thomas) returns and sibling rivalry along with a few near fatal accidents means that they have to dump David. Instead of sending him back to Cybertronics to meet his maker, she leaves him in the woods to at least try and survive. His companion Teddy and he stumble along in the forest where scavenger robots survive on the parts of robots destroyed at a Flesh Fair for human entertainment. David is captured for the Fair but makes a miraculous escape with Gigolo Joe (Jude Law), a “mecha” programmed to give pleasure that no man can to human women, back to the woods. Monica had told David about the story of Pinocchio and he believes that if he finds a blue fairy then she will make him a real boy and reunite him with Monica. To this end their quest starts for the mythical fairy. Their quest leads to them to Rouge City, a place of sleaze and sex. From there they steal a helicopter to Manhattan (Now submerged possibly due to global warming) and find David’s maker Professor Hobby (William Hurt). What is revealed to him drives him to suicide by drowning. That is when he sees the blue fairy and goes after her in the amphibian chopper. He sees her but gets lodged under a Ferris Wheel and stays there for 2000 years. Humans are history after this time and David is resurrected by Aliens who read his mind and grant him his wish-not to be human but to be loved by Monica as regular boy. His bliss only lasts a day but that is more than enough for him and I assume that he shuts his power off after Monica’s time is up. AI is almost ridiculous with its fiction but that’s what Spielberg will do to you. At the very core of it, David’s quest to be human so that he can be with his Mom again really pulls at the heart strings. Haley Joel Osment is going to be a great actor for years to come. All other characters are dwarfed by his performance. Jude Law really comes into his own when he makes a speech about human hate for robots. The entire futuristic feel is very well done and believable. I am not so sure about Robots replacing real men when it comes to sex though. There are some things that will remain an ace up our sleeves. Plainly put Osment and Spielberg are acting and movie making geniuses! AI is warm at 5 out of 10