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A.I. Artificial Intelligence

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Artificial Intelligence: A.I.
Theatrical film poster
Directed bySteven Spielberg
Written byScreenplay:
Steven Spielberg
Screen Story:
Ian Watson
Short Story:
Brian Aldiss
Produced bySteven Spielberg
Kathleen Kennedy
Bonnie Curtis
Jan Harlan
Stanley Kubrick (posthumous credit)
Walter F. Parkes
StarringHaley Joel Osment
Jude Law
CinematographyJanusz Kaminski
Edited byMichael Kahn
Music byJohn Williams
Distributed byWorldwide Theatrical & Non-USA DVD/Video
Warner Bros. Pictures
USA DVD/Video
DreamWorks SKG
Release dates
Premiere (NYC):
26 June, 2001
Premiere (LA):
28 June, 2001
Theatrical (USA)
29 June, 2001
Running time
146 min
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Budget$90,000,000
Box officeDomestic
$78,616,689
Foreign
$157,309,863
Worldwide
$235,926,552

Artificial Intelligence: A.I. is a 2001 science fiction film co-produced, written, and directed by Steven Spielberg. It was the last project on which filmmaker Stanley Kubrick worked; he died before the film started shooting, and Spielberg dedicated the film to him.

The film won five Saturn Awards, including Best Science Fiction Film. It was nominated for Academy Awards for Best Effects, Visual Effects and Best Music, Original Score.

Production

A.I. was initially inspired by "Super-Toys Last All Summer Long", a short story published in 1969 by UK science fiction writer Brian Aldiss.

During the 1980s, Kubrick and Aldiss began to develop the story into a script for a feature film. Aldiss said later that Kubrick's theory of writing features revolved around six to eight "non-submersible units" — his name for interesting sequences. They came up with three or four of these, by taking ideas from other Aldiss stories.

Aldiss claims he never felt the story could be successfully expanded into something bigger, as its original focus was intimate, and this seems to have been the origin of his problems with Kubrick, who was equally certain it could be fully fleshed out. There was also a dispute over money.[citation needed] These factors, along with Kubrick's desire to use elements from Pinocchio,[citation needed] caused their relationship to deteriorate. Kubrick fired Aldiss in 1990.[1]

Irish science fiction novelist Bob Shaw was brought on board for a few months, but he found Kubrick too demanding.[2] Kubrick turned to UK science fiction notable Ian Watson, and the two produced the long treatment (credited to Watson). Both British feminist writer, Sara Maitland[3] and Arthur C. Clarke added ideas to the story.[citation needed] A science fiction painter, Chris Baker, also known as "Fangorn", was commissioned to produce hundreds of pieces of concept art from ideas and descriptions given to him by Kubrick. Chris Cunningham, a British music video film director (famous for the video "Come to Daddy" by Aphex Twin), worked for over a year on the film.[4]

After Kubrick died in 1999, his widow contacted Spielberg, whom Kubrick had previously asked to direct the film and with whom he had discussed the project at length, and she asked him to finish producing the movie. Spielberg used the Kubrick-Watson treatment as the basis for the screenplay, which he wrote himself.[5] He bought the rights to Aldiss' two brief sequels to "Supertoys" and ideas from them appear in the movie.

The movie had an unusual publicity campaign consisting of a new type of "game" involving approximately 30 interlinked websites. This type of game has since become known as an alternate reality game (ARG). The A.I. game did not have an official name, but became known as The Beast by its most ardent fans.

Plot

The story is set at an unspecified date in the future. Global warming has led to an ecological disaster resulting in a drastic reduction of the human population and rising sea levels. Cities like New York City and Venice lie in ruins. Mankind’s efforts to maintain civilization lead to the creation of android artificial intelligence (known as "mecha"). These efforts culminate with the creation of David (Haley Joel Osment), an android child programmed with the ability to love. Cybertronics, the company that created David, wish to test their latest creation on a loving couple wanting a child. They approach one of their employees with the idea.

File:Judeai l.jpg
Android Gigolo Joe

Henry and Monica Swinton (Sam Robards and Frances O'Connor) are a married couple whose son Martin (Jake Thomas) is dying of a rare illness. Hoping for a cure, the Swintons have their son placed in a state of suspended animation until such a cure can be found. The emotional toll of such a long, chronic illness nearly shatters the marriage. Henry agrees to bring David home to Monica. Although she is initially frightened of the android, she eventually warms to him after activating his imprinting protocol, which irreversibly causes David to feel love for her as a child loves a parent.

File:Haley joel osment6.jpg
David, holding Teddy, and Joe in Rouge City.

As he continues to live with the Swintons, David is befriended by Teddy (voiced by Jack Angel), a mecha toy, that takes upon itself the responsibility of David's well being. Martin is eventually cured of his illness and is brought home. The two are expected to live together like brothers, but a sibling rivalry builds between them. Martin's jealousy prompts him to manipulate David into more and more irrational behavior but his scheming backfires when he and his friends activate David's self-protection programming at a pool party. Thinking himself in danger, David grabs hold of Martin, begging him to "keep me safe." David falls into the pool, taking Martin with him, and sinks to the bottom. Martin is saved from drowning but David's actions prove too much for Henry; he wants David returned to the manufacturer.

Rather than turning David over to be destroyed, Monica releases him and Teddy into the forest to live as unregistered mechas, warning David to avoid the "flesh fairs", events where mechas are destroyed before cheering crowds by anti-mecha groups. David is captured and nearly destroyed at such a flesh fair, but the crowd is swayed by his "realness" and he escapes, along with Gigolo Joe, a prostitute mecha on the run after being framed for the murder of a client. The two set out to find the Blue Fairy, whom David remembers from the story Pinocchio as a being who has the power to turn him into a real boy, so Monica will love him and take him back. Joe and David make their way to the decadent metropolis of Rouge City, in search of the knowledge to find the fairy.

Information from a holographic personality called Dr. Know (voiced by Robin Williams) eventually leads them to the top of Rockefeller Center in the flooded ruins of Manhattan. They meet another David mecha, which David lashes out at and destroys to preserve his unique place in Monica's heart. David's human creator, Professor Hobby (William Hurt), enters and excitedly tells David that finding him was a test, which has demonstrated the "realness" of his love and desire, and the emergence of a self-motivated will to chase his dreams. To Hobby, this proves that David is a success as a robot model and the line of Davids will be fit for the general market. Disheartened, David allows himself to tumble from a ledge into the ocean.

File:Artificial intelligence bluefairy.jpg
David meets a holographic version of the Coney Island Blue Fairy.

David sinks to the streets of submerged Manhattan and sees what he believes to be the Blue Fairy. Joe tries to rescue him, but is taken by the authorities. David and Teddy return in a submersible to the fairy, which turns out to be a statue from an attraction at Coney Island. Teddy and David become trapped when the park's ferris wheel falls on their vehicle. Believing the Blue Fairy to be real, he asks to be turned into a real boy, repeating his wish without end, until the ocean freezes.

2,000 years later, Manhattan is buried under several hundred feet of glacial ice, and humans are extinct.[6] Mechas have evolved into an alien-looking humanoid form.[7] In the process of excavating New York City from the ice, they find David and Teddy: functional mechas who knew living humans. David wakes up and walks to the frozen statue of the fairy, which cracks and collapses as he touches it.

Using David’s memories, the mechas reconstruct the Swinton home, and explain to him via a mecha of the Blue Fairy (voiced by Meryl Streep) that he cannot become human. However, they can manipulate spacetime to resurrect Monica via a lock of her hair (faithfully saved by Teddy), but she will live for only one day and the process cannot be repeated. David spends one day alone with Monica, painting, and playing. At the end of the day, Monica tells David that she loves him and has always loved him, then drifts to sleep for the final time, David lying beside her. He closes his eyes and goes "to that place where dreams are born".

Reception

The film had a reported budget of $100 million (according to Box Office Mojo[8]) with a domestic gross of $78,616,689 and an overseas gross of $157,309,863 (for a total worldwide gross of $235,926,552) and ranked (domestically) in 28th place for the year of 2001 (it ranked 16th worldwide).

Critics affiliated with Rotten Tomatoes gave the film 129 "fresh" reviews out of 178, thereby giving the film a 72% rating.[9]

A substantial number of viewers and critics interpreted the beings in the final act – which bore a resemblance to the extraterrestrials in Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and whose nature was not clearly explained in the film – to be aliens, rather than the descendants of human-built mechas.[10][11] These individuals commonly criticized the ending as an unsatisfying "epilogue"[12] which did not follow from the rest of the film.[13]

Roger Ebert called the film "both wonderful and maddening"; he ends his print review noting:

A.I. is audacious, technically masterful, challenging, sometimes moving, ceaselessly watchable. What holds it back from greatness is a failure to really engage the ideas that it introduces. The movie's conclusion is too facile and sentimental, given what has gone before. It has mastered the artificial, but not the intelligence."[14]

James Berardinelli writes:

While A.I. is consistently involving, and has moments of near-brilliance, it is far from a masterpiece. In fact, as the long-awaited 'collaboration' of Kubrick and Spielberg, it ranks as something of a disappointment.[15]

In a review for The New York Times by A. O. Scott, A.I is described as the "best fairy tale — the most disturbing, complex and intellectually challenging boy's adventure story — Mr. Spielberg has made." He comments on the film's ending:

After the Flesh Fair and a tour of the artificial fleshpots of Rouge City (which looks like a fusion of the old Times Square and the new), David and Joe, with the help of Robin Williams's voice and William Butler Yeats's poetry, come to the end of the earth, the half-submerged island of Manhattan. A.I. goes even further: on at least two occasions, it seems to be ending, only, like 2001, to push into ever stranger territory, ultimately leaving the human world altogether. The final scenes are likely to provoke argument, confusion and a good deal of resistance. For the second time the movie swerves away from where it seemed to be going, and Mr. Spielberg, with breathtaking poise and heroic conviction, risks absurdity in the pursuit of sublimity. The very end somehow fuses the cathartic comfort of infantile wish fulfillment — the dream that the first perfect love whose loss we experience as the fall from Eden might be restored — with a feeling almost too terrible to acknowledge or to name. Refusing to cuddle us or lull us into easy sleep, Mr. Spielberg locates the unspoken moral of all our fairy tales. To be real is to be mortal; to be human is to love, to dream and to perish.[16]

In an interview with film critic Mark Kermode on The Culture Show broadcast on November 4 2006, Spielberg responded to some of the criticisms of the film, stating that many of the so called 'sentimental' elements of the film, including the ending, were in fact Kubrick's and vice-versa the darker elements were his own. In a late 2007 interview, the director revealed he felt it was his darkest film.

A.I. is about the end of the entire human race that is superseded by the Frankensteins that man has put on the planet in the greedy effort to make a boy who could love you. But the boy himself is not human, he’s next to human. A substitute love child, you know, is almost a crime, and the human race pays for that crime. And so I think it’s a very tragic story, and I think I was as true to Stanley Kubrick’s vision as I possibly could be.[6]

Cast

See also

References

  1. ^ Watson, Ian (2000). "Plumbing Stanley Kubrick". The Kubrick Site. Retrieved 2008-01-02. Tony told me that "Aldiss was fired for faxing "banal crap."
  2. ^ Watson, Ian (2000). "Plumbing Stanley Kubrick". The Kubrick Site. Retrieved 2008-01-02. Bob was sacked half way through his brief tenure with Stanley for presuming to pop off to an SF convention without asking permission
  3. ^ Watson, Ian (2000). "Plumbing Stanley Kubrick". The Kubrick Site. Retrieved 2008-01-02.
  4. ^ The Work of Director Chris Cunningham
  5. ^ Creating A.I., DVD extra
  6. ^ a b Jim Windolf (2007-12-02). "Q&A: Steven Spielberg". Vanity Fair. Retrieved 2007-12-02. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  7. ^ Kubrick FAQ
  8. ^ Box Office Mojo
  9. ^ A.I. Artificial Intelligence from Rotten Tomatoes
  10. ^ ROTTEN TOMATOES: A very long, bizarre, and paranoid movie
  11. ^ Celluloid Nightmares Review; Artificial Intelligence
  12. ^ Movie: A.I.: Artificial Intelligence
  13. ^ Rotten Tomatoes
  14. ^ Roger Ebert's review of A.I.
  15. ^ A Film Review by James Berardinelli, a 2001 review from ReelViews
  16. ^ Do Androids Long for Mom?, a June 2001 review from The New York Times

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to A.I. Artificial Intelligence.
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