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Spielberg's fantastical epic

A.I. is a strange, beautiful amalgam of two of cinema's most influential and important filmmakers, Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick. Hatched from Brian Aldiss' short stories (brilliant in their own respect), A.I. stunningly takes two decidely different tonal artists and produces a kind of thoughtful fairy tale, the likes of which I've never seen.

This is Spielberg's finest film, a true step forward in an already magnificent career. It makes me all the more excited for his next SF project, Minority Report.

In the future, people cannot have children at will. They have to receive permits and can go their entire lives without producing a true offspring. One company, headed by Professor Hobby (William Hurt, wonderfully subdued), decides to begin production of a mechanical being (mecha) who can be programmed to love. It can weep, become jealous, experience despair. A colleague asks, "If you program a mecha to love a human, what responsibility does that person have to the robot?" Hobby brushes off the question with religious dogma, surprising for such a man of science: "After all, didn't God create man to love him?" The ignoring of this dilemma is the crux of Spielberg's opus.

Henry Swinton (Sam Robards), an employee of Hobby's company, Cybertronics, and his wife Monica (the luminous Frances O'Connor) have a son who is cryogenically frozen, awaiting a cure for an unknown illness. Devastated by their loss, they are chosen as the first candidates for the David model. After a bit of reluctance, they agree.

Haley Joel Osment, one of the movies' most studious and effective actors, embodies David with eery precision. David never blinks, and his eyes always move toward a focal point before the rest of his body. Though it's largely during the movie, Osment even took the exact same amount of steps across variousunseen rooms every time he crossed them. He is a meticulously dedicated actor, and this is the finest performance by a child actor in movie history.

There are two scenes in the film that are as fine examples of perfect movie acting as I've ever seen.

The first comes at the moment when Monica decides to go ahead and activate his emotional responses. She must read seven words in a precise order to trigger this behavior. In a few short seconds, an amazing transformation takes place. Through only a facial expression, Osment takes David from an emotionally empty mecha to a truly precocious human child. It is a stunning piece of performance.

The second comes after the Swinton's son Martin (Jake Thomas) returns home. Both boys react to one another with jealousy, only David lacks a true understanding of his feelings. He has been programmed to be jealous, but he does not know why. At Martin's birthday party, a human child attempts to trigger David's pain reflexes. Frightened, David cowers behind Martin for protection. With nowhere to go, he escapes into the Swinton's swimming pool. But his robotic instincts don't kick in with the threat of drowning, because he cannot die. Martin, on the other hand, can, and the Swintons decide that David is too dangerous to keep. So Monica takes him for a ride, presumably to return him to Cybertronics where he will be destroyed. But the conundrum of Hobby's peers comes into play, and Monica has grown to love David. She cannot bear his destruction, so she abandons him in the woods.

Here is where Osment ripped my heart out. You see, it's difficult to realize that David is really just a machine. He doesn't truly feel these emotions, but has been programmed to feel them. What's complex about Spielberg's film is that it suggests that since David does not know he has been programmed to love, the love he feels is experienced by him as real. So his programmed instincts kick in and he begs for his mother to keep him. She doesn't, and his rejection is devastatingly portrayed.

From this point on David, fueled by the storybook Pinnochio, embarks on a mission to find the Blue Fairy, confident that if she can turn him into a real boy, Monica will take him back. I say Monica, and not the Swintons, because his only real devotion is to Monica, whom he calls Mommy. She is the one who activated him, and his programming has linked him to her forever. He merely calls Henry by his given name.

Spielberg takes David on an amazing, and often terrifying, journey. This is a surprisingly dark and horrific film for the master, and he pulls it all off with flying colors.

The terrors of the Flesh Fair, where robots are destroyed by mecha-hating humans, is remniscent of Romero's ending to Night of the Living Dead, where bloodthirsty rednecks torture and kill mindless zombies for fun.

From there, where he meets the dazzling Gigolo Joe (Jude Law, hysterically funny and droll at the same time), he travels to Rouge City to consult an electronic psychic of sorts, then finishes his journey in the obliterated city of Manhattan. At this point, his trip becomes a trippy mix between 2001: A Space Odyssey and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I don't indulge in spoilers, but this really is where you'll either love or hate the film. You see, a strange thing has happened in the reviews for A.I.

We live in a time where everyone, from the studio executive to the kid that rips the tickets at the local multiplex, is media-savvy. People on the street discuss box office grosses and overseas distribution rights, and entertainment gossip is at the pinnacle of its realm of influence.

In this climate of extreme media awareness, an unusual phenomenon has arisen. With the Internet especially, anyone can be a movie or television or music critic. Anyone with an HTML editor and sufficient web server space can become a widely exposed critic. I myself have no real credentials or education in the film arts. I steered clear of film school because of its coy self-importance, and I dropped out of a journalism and English major to provide for my new family. I'm a nobody, just a regular old filmgoer with maybe a more expansive knowledge of film history and grammar than most people.

But criticism is empowerment, and certain people place themselves in the mindset of being more important, or influential, than they are. This is not a new concept, just one that is much more evident with the vastness of Internet capabilities.

The past five years have seen many movies made or broken based upon Net hype. The Blair Witch Project benefited from extremely positive Net hype. Recently, films such as Pearl Harbor, Swordfish and Atlantis have been all but squashed by the deafening sound of negative Internet buzz. Like it or not, the Net is powerful, and of course opinion is opinion, so most people will scoff at my argument.

But I think it's the duty of any editorial writer to not take on an aura of self-importance, trying to make your opinions out to be Bible truths, rather than what they are: reflections from a student of cinema.

Now this isn't just me attacking those who have tried to discredit a film that I treasure. I would say the same about any film, in fact I have in another recent article.It's just that the self-involvement of some of the reviews I've read for A.I. have bordered on McCarthyism.

Take Aint It Cool News, a site that I normally support wholeheartedly. In the past weeks, its critics have departed on a crusade of sorts, one to completely discredit Spielberg and A.I. I don't even know that it's intentional, since the people who write for the site are normally very objective and open to other opinions. But sometimes, trends start, and often it's considered trendy to trash a particular film. Many people even make up their minds to hate something before they've even seen it.

They like to talk about what Kubrick would have done with this film. The fact is, Spielberg has made the movie that Kubrick himself wanted to make. In fact, if you've picked up the recent reprinting of Brian Aldiss' Supertoys Last All Summer Long (which includes the two most recent short stories that he wrote about David the mecha), you have seen that Kubrick was obsessed with the idea of Pinocchio and the Blue Fairy. Aldiss almost seemed taken aback by the intensity of Kubrick's desire to make a truly sentimental fairy tale.

Kubrick didn't make the film for many reasons. The technology was not advanced enough for his liking (originally, he wanted to use a real robot to play David); he got caught up in other projects (The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, Eyes Wide Shut); he thought that Spielberg was better suited to making the film than he; most likely, he finally resolved himself that audiences wouldn't accept a fairy tale from Stanley Kubrick.

Read the reviews. Everyone is lambasting Spielberg for his fantasy approach. They say that Kubrick would have made it different, but he wouldn't have, so he correctly predicted his own failure, even before the film was in pre-production. Sure, he might have made the Flesh Fair more violent, or added more sex to Rouge City, but the overall message would have been the same: fairy tales can come true.

I think people no longer want fairy tales. They don't want to see happy endings or completed missions, or Blue Fairies. They think that something must be cold and unattached for it to be effective, ambiguous for it to be important. Even Kubrick fans have gotten so caught up in their insistence upon the coldness of his films, that they've ignored the real heart that some of his films possess.

The prime example would be Kubrick's final film, Eyes Wide Shut. Some people praised it for its cold detachment, and while it is one of the best films of recent years, it's anything but cold and detached. On the contrary, I think it's one of the most moving love stories ever made. But even those who praised it got it wrong.

So, I guess fairy tales are dead, and people don't want happiness in their movies. I, for one, feel lucky to have been around for this one. I think, like 2001: A Space Odyssey (which, by the way, was almost universally panned upon its release), A.I. will only grow in stature with age. Too bad, though...I'm glad I don't have to wait to appreciate its grandeur and importance.

To both Kubrick and Spielberg, I say thank you, for no two filmmakers have collaborated to more satisfying results than the men behind A.I.