 Starring: Haley Joel Osment, Frances O’Connor, Jude Law, William Hurt
Director: Steven Spielberg
Year Of Release: 2001
Plot: A couple, Monica and Henry, whose son was injured and is now in a permanent coma, are given a chance to try a new technology – a child robot called David who once imprinted will genuinely love its parents. After some resistance, they accept David as part of their family, but after their son recovers, they begin to see him as dangerous. Monica is not prepared to take David back to the factory, as she now he’ll be destroyed, so she abandons him. However David is incapable of stopping loving his mother, which sets him off on a quest to find the blue fairy from Pinocchio, who he hopes will turn him into a real boy. |
AI got a lot of stick when it was first released, with people saying it was boring, silly, too depressing and that the 20-minute epilogue was unnecessary and ruined the movie (that said, there were a fair few other people who liked it). However what I’ve always thought about the film is that the critics were looking at in the wrong way.
People saw the words Steven Spielberg and that it was a sci-fi film full of special effects, and immediately decided it would follow in the footsteps of ET and Jurassic Park. However, whereas the primary goal of those films was pure entertainment, AI is just as interested in getting you to think. It’s actually a very philosophical and rather nihilistic movie, about the nature of humanity, responsibility, technology and intelligence.
In fact in many ways it has more in common with a rather intellectual art movie than Spielberg’s earlier blockbusters, but critics seemed incapable of thinking about it in any way other than sheer escapism. It iusn’t escapism and was never meant to be – this is a film that wants you to consider the nature of humanity, which it takes a rather dim view of, when the credits roll, not just to think that you’ve had a jolly nice time. In my opinion the difference between AI and philosophically minded art films is more one of scale than anything else.
When Spielberg made AI he was in a fairly unique position. For a start, he’d inherited the project from Stanley Kubrick (another man who made big budget art movies), and used a lot of the work the 2001 filmmaker’s had done on the film during the two decades before he died as a template for the movie.
While there’s been a lot of debate about how much of the film is Kubrick and how much Spielberg (with a lot of people deciding that because of the sentimental moments, it must be all Spielberg, which just goes to show they haven’t really watched Kubrick’s films properly), there’s another reason AI isn’t like Spielberg’s earlier blockbusters and was never meant to be. Basically, at that point in his career, he was in a position that few filmmakers have ever been before.
He had directed many of the highest grossing blockbusters ever made (BoxOfficeMojo still ranks him as the most successful director ever, with his films making twice as much at the US box office as his nearest rival), and had achieved the rare feat of gaining both critical adulation and massive commercial success with Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan (it should be remembered that at the time he made Schindler’s List, Spielberg’s reputation as a serious filmmaker was so shaky that Universal only agreed to fund the movie if he directed Jurassic Park first).
He was of course also running his own studio, Dreamworks. This meant that he could literally make any film he wanted to, in any way he wanted to, and then write his own cheque to fund it, which is undoubtedly a pretty unique position for a mega-budget director. While he had to co-produce AI with Warner (as they owned the rights to the film when Kubrick was involved), because of the massive power Spielberg wielded, they were more than happy to let him do anything he wanted to, without any interference. However making Schindler’s List had changed Spielberg’s outlook and he was no longer content just making unabashed blockbusters. He wanted to make movies that actually dealt with things that he thought were important and that left the audience with something meaty to chew on.
This meant that rather than having a studio constantly checking that he was doing something unabashedly commercial with their $90 million, with AI Spielberg could literally do anything he wanted to. In fact it must be one of the most personal and least compromised mega-budget movies ever made. It was therefore never intended to be the successor to Jurassic Park – it’s supposed to be a personal art film, full of philosophical musing. It just happened to cost nearly $100 million to make.
Sadly that’s not how it was taken, as it was purely judged against other commercial blockbusters, with critics seemingly incapable of judging it in any other way. I’ve often thought it’s one of the most frustrating things about many critics, that they complain constantly about how all films in a particular genre are too similar, but moan if anyone ever tries to do anything different because it doesn’t fit their idea of what particular types of films are supposed to be.
Before I wrote this, I took a survey of the reviews written about AI when it came out, and nearly every one talked about it in terms of how it compared to the likes ET, Indiana Jones and Jurassic Park. Very few seemed to even consider that the film was never supposed to a balls-out slice of entertainment like those earlier movies, but it was only judged on those terms.
Although of course it’s impossible, what I’d love to know is what the critical and audience response would have been to AI if Stanley Kubrick had directed the movie. Although it’d be interesting to see his version, what I’d be more fascinated by is what would have happened if the movie was exactly the same as Spielberg’s but had the great Kubrick as director.
I have a sneaking suspicion that if critics were judging the movie against Kubrick’s back catalogue, it would have been classed as a fascinating and rather brilliant movie, simply because they would have expected the dark themes, its relatively few concessions to pure entertainment, the interest in the esoteric, the episodic plot and left-field plot developments. Instead it was a Spielberg film and so it was judged as a failure against films it was never supposed to have much in common with, such as Indiana Jones and Jaws. Of course in reality, if Kubrick had directed, he would have come up with something different to Spielberg, but I still suspect Spielberg’s film would have been far better received as a Kubrick movie.
Although it’s difficult not to judge new films against what a director has made before, with AI I think it’s a real shame, as in my opinion it’s one of the most fascinating, intelligent and thought provoking sci-fi films of the past 20 years, but because it wasn’t another Jurassic Park, it’s been pretty much dismissed as one of Spielberg’s failures.
TIM ISAAC
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