Jar Jar Gabor
Posts: 250
Joined: 30/9/2005
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One of the richest and most philosophically complex films to come out of Hollywood in, well, ever. Just as one would expect coming from the mind of Stanley Kubrick and the hands of Steven Spielberg. The perfect tribute to a great director from a great director.
It's at times strange, maddening, challenging and baffling yet always visually appealing and symbolically interesting. People always claim to be looking for original films that don’t insult the intelligence, that don't fit into easily defined categories, that don’t follow standard Hollywood formulas, yet as soon as they get one most of them don't know what to make of it and in fact deride it for not being what they expected. Before his death the great Billy Wilder said of the film; 'I regard Spielberg’s Kubrick homage, A I, as the most underrated film of the past few years. A I is far ahead of our time and asks important questions such as ‘What makes humans human?’' And he knew a thing or two about movies.
And before the traditional cries of 'Kubrick would have ended it differently' arise (as if none of Kubrick's other films end on controversial notes) here is what Ian Watson, who wrote the screen story with Kubrick, says of AI:
‘I adore Spielberg's A.I. Of course I'm a wee bit prejudiced, since so much of my story got used, and Jude Law is so wonderful as Gigolo Joe. Dr. Know didn't much appeal to me, being so much like a Disney cartoon, but nothing is perfect for everyone. A.I. seems to have polarized opinion considerably, some people deriding it and others loving it and weeping in the cinema and writing passionately about it as something very special, quite different from the usual Hollywood movie, and important—even philosophically so. There's been quite a bit of confusion among critics, especially about the final 20 minutes, which aren't Spielberg being sentimental (his main addition was the cruel, brutal Flesh Fair), but are exactly what I wrote for Stanley and exactly what Stanley wanted. And as for sentimental, well, at the end of his perfect day David is alone without his mother for ever and ever in a universe which contains no other life, only the evolved Mecha (robots, not visiting aliens!) who can only study the traces and leftovers of extinct human life. David miraculously sheds a tear, and I don't exactly blame him.
The evolved robots are marvellous—"machines of loving grace," to quote a line from a poem by Richard Brautigan. The ending is quite multilayered. A.I. is a movie that is going to need, and receive, a fair amount of reassessment, and this will probably happen sooner rather than later. I think Stanley would have been pretty pleased with what Spielberg did. I am.’
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"My mother did throw me against a brick wall when I was an infant. I didn't get hurt at all. I've mentioned it to her a couple of times. She said I was a little prick."
DVD's wot I own.
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A.I. Artificial Intelligence - 
(yes, very GAAAAAAAAAAAAAY!!!!). 
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