I've had enough time to digest A.I. since seeing it on Saturday to make some preliminary comments. I may need to see it again before I go into heavy detail, though. Again, these are just preliminary comments. 1. If _2001:A Space Odyssey_ and _Blade Runner_ are considered great SF films (not just sci fi, but true Science Fiction), then A.I. deserves to be up there with them. It's a difficult movie--it's hard to be happy with this movie--but it's a great film. 2. Professional reviewers who bitch and moan about how the movie has too much Spielsberg schmaltz and not enough Kubrickian grit are blowing smoke rings out their backsides. They've allowed their stereotyped expecatations of two disparare moviemaking styles to get in the way of watching the actual film. SPOILER ALERT! (Mild spoilage, I think, but it pays to be safe.) . . . . . . . . . 3. The movie has some technical and logical flaws. There's a brief moment of technobabble worthy of Treknology or (shudder) the dreaded "midichlorian speech" of Ep. I. But A.I. has a lot more going for it SF-wise than any episode of Trek or Star Wars, so it's easy to forgive. Also, there's a point that should be addressed but isn't: Ok, so the superbots can only "resurrect" people for a day, after which they invariably die--but if you can do that, you can get enough ova and sperm to create new people. Maybe the implication is that robots wouldn't think to revive the human race any more than modern archaeologists would try to recreate Babylonian civilization. (Which makes a creepy kind of sense, actually. Maybe that's not a flaw after all.) 4. The ending is hard to swallow for a lot of people, I think, because it's more of an epilogue than a proper ending, and thus it feels "tacked on." The kneejerk cynical response is to assume that Speilberg simply couldn't resist the urge to add a "happy ending." I don't think it's really a happy ending--not unless you redefine happiness, which is actually one of the core issues of the movie. (A-ha! A lightbulb goes on...) 5. What it is, actually, is a comment on the nature of happiness, on what it means to get what we want. But despite the soft focus, despite the fairy-tale voiceover, the ending is not a happy one...not for the human race, anyway. It is happy only to the extent that happiness, and human good, can be reduced to a rather simple robotic algorithm--or a marketing campaign. I'll have more to say, but I have to think some more. One parting thought, though: the form of artificial intelligence being examined by the movie isn't just the robot boy's artificial brain. Human understanding is on trial, and the verdict isn't reassuring. At least, not at first glance. If Blade Runner is grim, A.I. takes at least one step beyond that level, which makes it as good and as important as best SF films to date. Marvin Long Austin, Texas Nuke the straight capitalist wildebeests for Buddha!
