Hey folks, Dave here, your pal El Cosmico, with a look at what I'd like to consider the last Kubrick film made, since Eyes Wide Shut was so mediocre. Damn that piano playing that note over and over during a long pan through the dining room and kitchen!

It's A.I.! Hooray! Be forewarned, though, once I finish with the niceties, I'm gonna throw out a bunch of spoilers. Heed the warning when it comes.

So, I actually liked this film, until it reached the point at which it CLEARLY should have ended. From this terribly OBVIOUS point, it didn't end, and instead continued into territory which sort of...ruined the whole thing.

First of all, though, the performances were wonderful all around. Jude Law was fantastically amusing and dead-on perfect, perfect, perfect. Frances O'Connor was exceptionally endearing and had great presence on screen. The Osment kid was quite convincing as an all-around mechanical weirdo. I would have liked some more of the Jane character, though. Like three or four films worth.

Anyway, I'm tired so I'm not gonna go long-winded on you here. Point is, up until it should have ended, this film had me moving along on a really nice vibe, thinking..."yeah, I like this. Not SUPER wonderful, but really, quite alright." That's not to say that there weren't problems with the first two thirds or so of this film, it's just that somehow, they didn't bother me, they didn't really piss me off until I saw that horrible last eternity of a ruinous nightmare ending.

Here's my tip to you, kids. The first time you think it's over, get up, run out of the theatre, and don't look back. Don't listen to your friends who tell you that it isn't over, because it is. Move your butt!

What comes after the obvious ending is what I like to consider the crappy sequel to A.I. No big deal, I figure, lots of films have crappy sequels. They usually don't have the names Kubrick and Spielberg attached to them, but hey, why not?

Anyway, before I get into the spoiler section, I'll just say that... you probably ought to check out A.I.. Just be prepared for some disappointment. Set that expectation nice and low, and the result will be more pleasant, I think. To be sure, there's stuff to like in A.I., and considering the other crap that's in the theatres, what else are you going to watch? Well, now that I think about it, you should just go see The Fast and the Furious. Because Vin Diesel rules. Once you've seen that, though, if you're both bored and a sci-fi slut, you should see A.I.. Really.

SPOILER ALERT

There are really two things that frustrated me in A.I.. First was mecha design, and second was the horrible ending sequence that takes place after our man Osment is trapped under a Ferris Wheel for two thousand years.

Yes, it's true, some of the plot moves in a sort of...oddly contrived way, like the way that Osment's character of David and Jude Law's Gigolo Joe hook up in the woods. The Flesh Fair was a bit strangely done too, and I was really sort of put off by the way that David's mom Monica dropped him off in the woods. All of this, though, I could put out of my mind, because while it might not be the most brilliant work, it can at least be explained as a series of odd human behaviours. That, to me, makes sense. I understand people acting in strange ways. So, it didn't bother me... much.

As for the design of David, it bothered me A LOT. The problem here, I think, is that those writing and directing this film, no insult to them, but as writers and directors, they're very obviously out of their element in terms of industrial design. David eats spinach...whereby we discover that his artificial esophagus (A.E.) creates a direct path to vital internal circuitry. So, the spinach lands on said circuitry and has to be removed, as it apparently causes malfunction.

Now, I don't design robots for a living, but folks, when you put vital circuitry into YOUR robots, you don't leave it exposed in a place that's likely to have food dropped in it. AT THE VERY LEAST, they could have put a cover or receptacle inside. But they didn't. AT THE VERY LEAST, they could have given David an instruction overriding any attempt to place food into his mouth. But no, that didn't occur to them. Well, in the real world, there's something you do to engineers that fuck up in just such a major way...you fire their asses. If I had a design team that came up with such an obvious and glaring oversight on MY multimillion dollar project, I'd not only fire them, I'd hunt down their friends and family, and burn their damn house down.

I don't want to sound like I'm kidding here, though, because this is a recurring problem in science fiction film and television. The people writing and directing don't do their research, they don't think things through properly, they don't have the scientific mind required to execute their vision. You've got people with degrees in film playing armchair engineer. It COULD work, if they placed enough importance on it, but in A.I., as in so many works, scientific sense is shoved aside in favor of what the filmmakers perceive as their vision.

So, the spinach is cleaned out. Later, David takes his newly feeling-well brother for a near-deadly dive into the pool, when he perceives danger to himself. It's not clear if the water affects David's circuits in the same way that the spinach did, although to me, it looked like maybe the circuits were only reactive to spinach, which is obviously a problem. Aside from that, though, this incident presents us with the best example of David's GOD-AWFUL design.

Fans of science fiction should be familiar with a man named Isaac Asimov. Now, he didn't make artificial people for a living, except for in the tales he told. He did, however, cover a lot of ground in terms of robot ethics, specifically related to artificially intelligent beings. Most commonly, when people think of Asimov and robots, they think of his Three Laws of Robotics. You might not have heard of these, but I guarantee you, everyone, EVERYONE who has anything to do with artificial intelligence is QUITE familiar with them. They are:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Very simple, very clear, very necessary. Now, I'm not saying that those who made A.I. absolutely HAD to follow these rules, or take into consideration the vast existing literature on the subject, but if they did, they'd have found a wealth of useful information, much of which could have made this a better film.

When David takes his human brother into the pool, for example...

He should have been able to assess the real harm to his being.

He should have understood the harm he was placing his human brother in.

He should have had a method of escape or defense that didn't put a member of his human family in harm's way.

There are other problems along the same lines...back to the dining table...David watches with fascination as his parents eat food. He doesn't understand the process at all. No clue. NO CLUE?

This is a MASSIVELY programmed robot here. Fluent use of HUMAN language. CONSTANT emulation of HUMAN behaviour. Designed SPECIFICALLY for human interaction. Do you know any young kids that don't understand the concept of eating food? Hmm? Finally, when his parents, including the "imprinted" mother Monica, tell him to stop eating the spinach...he doesn't.

In other words, take David's lack of understanding of human behaviour, along with his inability to follow clear, stern commands from his parents, and ADD TO THAT the lack of seemingly ANY safety programming and what you have is a seriously defective product. A seriously dangerous product, designed by a team of engineers that one would have to characterize as criminally negligent. A team that supposedly was very experienced in the field, with years of prior work and previous examples to work with.

So, to me, that's the design problem. Awful, inexcusable, and disappointing.

AAAAH!

Okay, so here's what REALLY bothered me about this film. David ends his seemingly fruitless journey at the bottom of the sea, in Coney Island, with a blue fairy, under a Ferris Wheel, the film feels as if it has come to a fine ending. There, I though, is a fine lesson, the right message for this film. I was contented.

Credits don't roll though, a narrator comes along. Here's a note to you filmmakers out there who are thinking about putting a narrator's voice into a film about artificially intelligent beings...watch BLADE RUNNER with and without the narration. Then, don't ever, EVER think about using a narrator in your A.I. film again.

That's still not the real problem, though, we're taken to a world, supposedly two thousand years in the future, where robots rule the earth, and men are no more. The robots look like aliens (what a relief to find out they weren't), and they're performing archaeological digs in the frozen wastes of old Coney Island, it seems. They find David, reactivate him, and then grant him his wish, which is to be with this mother, the human Monica.

All he ever wanted was to be told by her that she loved him. Well, that's nice, no doubt about that, but the problem is that they bring her back with a lock of hair.

Correct me if I'm wrong, biologists, but hair contains NO genetic material...right? The roots do, but we clearly see when David cuts it, and this bit of hair has no roots. No DNA, impossible to replicate, no matter how much you'd like it to fit into your story. Now, if David had YANKED some of Monica's hair, then we'd be in business...but then we'd still have another problem...

You wouldn't be bringing back Monica. You'd be creating a new being, a genetic twin. Now, supposedly, these super-advanced robots can bring back Monica with all of her memories intact. Okay, that, folks, is bullshit. On top of that, they can only bring her back for a single day, because of something along the lines of "each being only taking one path through space-time" or some such garbage. Okay, that is an enormous heaping stinking PILE of bullshit. What the hell is the cosmic significance of a single EARTH day? If this bullshit is true, how can you bring her back at ALL? When I heard that, I just about slapped everyone around me, stood up, and said, "That's fucking BULLSHIT!"

But, I didn't. Because, it's just a movie. If they want to put in their semi-religious nonsense, that's their business. But, it just makes A.I. into a train wreck. None of the last bit of this film makes a damn bit of sense, it's just completely contrived, amateurish foolishness. Meant to pull at the heartstrings of the audience one last time. OH, how I hate it when filmmakers put garbage like this into their films because they lack the creativity and intelligence to do something better. Must...get...more...tears out of them.

Well, if you shed a tear, it should be for the brilliant movie that could have been. A.I. has glimpses of greatness, veiled in confusion, contrivance, and bullshit. Altogether, I'm glad I saw it. I'm also glad that when the DVD comes out, it'll be easy to do the home re-cut. Just hit stop when the Ferris Wheel hits the ground.

Even if it somehow manages to play its way through to the end, though, you can at least be calmed by the fact that it's better than Eyes Wide Shut.