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Brave
New Idiocy Mr.
Podhoretz is a columnist for the New York Post. |
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If you want to read all about how Spielberg decided to make A.I. in homage to the late Stanley Kubrick, who worked on it for 15 years, find another article to read. It is of no moment to any non-cineaste moviegoer what parts of the film are "classic Spielberg" and what parts are "classic Kubrick." What matters is what's on screen, and what's on screen makes precious little sense, and who cares whether that's because the visions of Spielberg and Kubrick are in conflict? Some critics are essaying the notion that A.I.'s problem is that it's just too overstuffed with ideas — that it bubbles over with interesting explorations of the nature of humanity, free will, global warming, sex, robotics, a new ice age. A.I. is indeed a film of ideas. The problem is that they're dumb and obvious ideas, and they are surrounded by a meandering and distended plotline. It's the future, you see — or actually, you don't see. A narrator tells you the polar ice caps have melted and that people have grown to rely on robots because there isn't enough food. But Spielberg doesn't actually show us this. What we see is a house somewhere in the country where a couple is chosen to take in the first robot built to look like a boy — and designed to feel love. The wife is whiny and petulant, the husband nondescript. And yet we are forced to spend about 45 minutes trapped with them in a house that doesn't even have any cool futuristic gadgets. When David the Boy Robot's feelings are activated and he begins mooning for his new "mommy," you can only wonder why he bothers. If this character were your natural mother, believe me, you'd have a hard time loving her. Suffice it to say that the love between robot boy and human mother is not going to end happily, and for the rest of the picture David goes on a journey to find the Blue Fairy who turned Pinocchio from wood into a real boy. The only actual pleasure to be had in the course of the movie's 2 hours and 25 minutes comes from a querulous talking teddy bear who is forever warning David to be careful, and from Jude Law, the British actor who plays a vain blabbermouth sex robot called Gigolo Joe. Haley Joel Osment, the great child actor who plays David, does his best to seem inhuman when he is robotic and all-too-human when his feelings are engaged, but he still has no character to play. A.I. concludes with a freakish sequence that turns this updated effort at a fairy tale into a clinical depiction of the Oedipus complex. That's kind of interesting, but I'm really not sure it's what Spielberg has in mind. Then again, I don't think Spielberg really does have much on his mind most of the time. |
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teven
Spielberg's new movie is — let me try to put this delicately
— really, really, really bad. It's bad in almost every way.
A.I. is bad in ways you never would have believed Steven
Spielberg could be bad. It's painfully slow and boring; at least
five times during the course of it I found myself making little
wheel motions with my hands in hopes that I might speed things up
on screen. It's cheesy and (for the most part) visually unimaginative,
resembling mid-budget science-fiction movies of the 1970s like Logan's
Run or Damnation Alley. (It even borrows colored motorcycles
from Tron.) I am not kidding when I say that you get a better
sense of a depopulated future from Woody Allen's sci-fi spoof Sleeper
than you do from the ponderously self-serious A.I.
