fucking AI
Well, I’ve built my soapbox, so now I’ll use it.
It’s a bit of a shame when Stanley Kubrick spends decades working on a project, then dies, and Steven Spielberg can step in, spend a few months on it, and churn out a spineless, diseased whelp of a film, who only looks like its real daddy in the most hauntingly pathetic way.
I’m a Kubrick fanatic. So there are many things about AI that bother me. Oddly, I quite enjoyed watching it for some reason trying to pry the Kuby bits from the Spielie schlock was an enjoyable thing to do while eating popcorn. But the more I think about it, the more I hate it. This is a movie that should’ve been buried with Stanley. Conversely, come to think of it, now would be a good time for Kuby to rise from the grave and reclaim it, maybe taking time to feast on Spielberg’s deliciously light-tasting brain.
The biggest problems, as I see it, are a) the framing devices, and b) the theme of “love.” In the first case, we know it is Spielie who does the framing, as both Saving Private Ryan and Schindler’s List have frames. Also, the last time Kuby did a voice-of-god-style narration was The Killing, almost 50 years ago. Both framing scenes at the beginning are unnecessary at best, harmful at worst (would it not be better to discover the effects of global climate change gradually, over the course of the film?). But the worst, of course, is really the end frame. Now at first I thought that had Kubrick done this film, it would have ended with little David trapped underwater by his oh-so-human desires. But then again, we know Kuby is predisposed towards violent time cuts, and here’s a great chance – the human-emotional-feedback loop could continue for thousands of years, since it’s a robot we’re talking about, becoming eventually yet another artifact to be dug up by the descendants of our toasters and web-surfing fridges. If this kid wanted to become real so badly, what would he think in a world where ‘real’ humans were an archaic memory? Apparently, this was the ‘weak’ part of the script where Kuby really needed Steven’s ‘help.’ The ‘help’ consisted of some semi-comprehensible inanity, whereby a real human is dredged up by the expository speech-bots and paraded around to make the dumb kid happy. (Sorry, but wasn’t the real mom hanging out in a virtual house? Or did the fancy, possibly Apple-designed future robots actually build a replica house for David and the meat puppet to hang out in? The pointlessness of it all. She threw him out, for fuck’s sake, that’s not even a happy ending anyway!)
And then there’s that thing called love. When did love become the ultimate goal of AI designers? Do we really think only humans can love? Maybe I’m a heartless post-romantic, but I thought it was our intellect, not our ability to miss our mommies, that separated us from the beasts. Interesting to note that the ‘love’ theme is missing from Aldiss’ story. The thing that makes David different in his version is the use of ‘synthetic flesh’. So, did Kubrick read the story and think to himself, “he forgot about the love”? Um, probably not. We know who the big flapping heart is. But sadly, by making David the loving boy and the rest of the bots cold, inferior scraps of metal, Spielberg weakens the slavery theme that Kubrick clearly wanted to explore.
There were many more moments when a glimmer of cold hard Kuby shone through for an second, only to be lost again under the waves of sentimentalism that wound up drowning this poor, poor movie. But I guess that’s how Spielberg pays the bills. Until I see notarized photos of Kubrick handing him the deed to A.I., though, I’m going to be suspicious of this particular transaction. Someone wanted to recoup their development costs. I hope they’re happy.
The preceding rant contained spoilers.