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A.I. Artificial Intelligence


Day 111: August 19th, 2010

A.I.



David is 11 years old. He weighs 60 pounds. He is 4 feet, 6 inches tall. He has brown hair. His love is real. But he is not.

Oh, how I wish it were Kubrick directing this. I can only imagine how different it would have been. Spielberg is not as visceral as Kubrick and is too smooth with his filmmaking. Kubrick was hard edged and A.I. needed that because the subject matter certainly was.

A.I. or Artificial Intelligence, tells the tale of a robot boy who desperately wants to become real. Pinocchio for the updated generation. It stars the hottest young actor at the time, Haley Joel Osment as the young robotic boy and Jude Law as a robot named Gigolo Joe.

A.I. tries so hard to capture that Kubrick feeling and if this is Spielberg's tribute to the filmmaker, then it's a shallow one. There are people out there who would argue otherwise and say that it is the perfect tribute to such a filmmaker. I guess that's what made Kubrick so good. Imitated, but never duplicated, sorry Steven.

The film went on far way too long. It should have ended with the boy lost forever in time under the water. Had that been the actual ending, the ending I have to believe was the one that Kubrick wanted, I would have given this a better rating. But this is not the case. The dark and brooding ending was elongated into something that Spielberg was hoping would make people shed a tear.

A.I. has some interested ideas and some nice special effects, but the material was simply not in Spielberg's taste. The themes and subject matter was Kubrick, the images and stlye was Spielberg. Do they work together? In my opinion no, but it was an interesting mix, I'll say that. A.I. fails to deliver in my opinion and is a bore to watch. Is it a coincidence this was Osment's real last big film? Second Hand Lions was his attempt to try and come back but it obviously didn't work.