A.I. - any good or not?

The frustrating thing was that there's so much that could have been done with it, so many interesting ideas left to die on the vine, so much nauseating sentimentality where there could have been insight... The only character who retained any sympathy was the stuffed bear. What a waste. I'm no great Kubrick fan, I thought "Eyes Wide Shut" was appalling too, but the guy must be turning in his grave...

I don't think I would have a problem with that -- the problem was that it wasn't even proper Spielberg, it's Spielberg trying to mimic Kubrick (except Kubrick wouldn't have tried tacking on a pseudo-happy ending) and it doesn't work. It was just a very long and uninspiring film.

The only redeeming feature of the film is Jude Law's neo-Duran Duran look. Everyone should dress up like old school Duran Duran.

I loved Teddy. Throughout the film I was saying things like "why doesn't Teddy give that organic brat the finger?" or "where's Teddy? I'm gonna cry if he dies!"...They should make AI2 with just Teddy and not that Holey Joe Osmin brat. My friend said Holey Joe was really pissed off that he didn't get the role of Harry Potter.

Back to the film...I doubt if Kubrick would've liked it. But you know, oh well. It's better than alot of films this year. Though I for one didn't cry, coz Teddy didn't die. I should write proper reviews.

Most, if not all, the critisism of AI seems to be based soley on anti-Spielberg snobbery: 'Spielberg's ruined Kubrick's vision!'
Which is a joke, I mean, if Kubrick could have made it he would have. He didn't because he had LOST IT. He tried to push the film onto Spielberg in '91, knowing only SS could make a go of it. Spielberg rejected it and Kubrick spent the rest of the decade dithering as usual before going for the easier option of Eyes Wide Shit, which ended up being shit. Thanks to Spielberg, AI is the best Kubrick film ever. Apart from The Killing.

Why do cynics always confuse emotion with sentimentality?

ps. the beings at the end aren't aliens, they are super-evolved Mecha. Everyone keeps saying they're aliens. And they ain't.

Like some other folks, I could see something GOOD hiding inside all the BS, but it got beat down Rodney King style. And I don't care if they're aliens or robots or Pokemon - adding that extra half-hour (after the underwater scene nearly redeemed all the previous missteps) did nothing more than placate Spielberg's need to give the folks a happy ending. And damn if the folks I left the theatre with weren't as pissed and confused as me.

The [super]Mecha appear throughout the movie - there is a model of one in the debating room, right at the start. The company logo is of one (which is also David's first 'memory'). They appear in statue form overhanging the building. They refer to David as one of 'the originals' and so on.

The film would have worked if it had ended with the Ferris wheel coming down - hasn't the Coney Island Ferris wheel recently been dismantled? For some in the audience I was with, it was all too much, and they were shifting in their seats a lot, huffing.
But the images from the final section are the ones that stay with me the most, and the ending was terribly sad - like fuck was it happy!
I don't get it though, what's so wrong with a happy ending anyway? People have been complaining that Spielberg 'just had to have his happy ending' (which he didn't, but anyway... ) isn't it a bit silly and juvenile to always prefer an unhappy ending over a happy one, just for the fuck of it.
I mean;
happy ending = bad
unhappy ending = good
How does that work exactly?

It comes across so strongly here because the film’s architects have such a heavy presence. It’s easy to suspect that Spielberg was being overly deferential to someone else’s vision, especially during the clinical, slightly sterile first third. Later, when the film takes us to more familiar sci-fi territory, with futuristic decadence and a post-apocalyptic feel, it seems to be a more workman-like take, as if the notes left behind had been getting sketchier.

As for the final sequence, which astonished me for jarring so much in style with what had gone before, it may have been that Kubrick, who considers and discards hundreds of ideas while developing plots, had got as far as this one before his death. A different week, and we would have seen another plot. Alternatively, of course, it may well be Spielberg’s own solution to finishing off the Pinocchio metaphor after having landed the boy with this seemingly intractable problem. I felt it referenced the conclusion of 2001 – a post-mankind quietness taking place in familiar surroundings created by unknowable beings from the memories of the protagonist. I doubt Kubrick would have wanted to do this twice.

An ending at the Ferris-wheel would have felt appropriate. Indeed, I thought that was the end of the film, as it was just cloying enough to have justified the criticism it received; imagine my surprise when I had to take my seat again to watch half an hour of futuristic special effects talk to one another in subtitles, then with pictures, and finally in English. I think it is fair to say the ending is sentimental: the conversation with the blue fairy and the limiting the return to the mother to a single day are both quite manipulative devices. It certainly isn’t happy, though.

2nd half was so unbelievably bad that I felt dirty walking out of the film theatre.

i would have enjoyed the movie more if I wasn;t being slapped around by the obnoxious values listed above. I need to find my Eisenstein essays!

I saw this movie for the first time this week and I can't say much more than "fucking hell". I think I liked it. I found parts of it very moving. It's an unholy mess and it certainly doesn't work. I tried to describe it to my partner, and after I finished breaking down the plot she said, "Are you drunk?" And in a way the script feels like it was written after a person who'd been told the plot while drunk tried to piece it together the next day. It doesn't work, but there are great parts of it that provoke or are incredibly sad or powerful. I don't think it would have had such an impact on me before I was a parent, though.

Of course it works! It even worked on you. :)

i’ve been afraid to rescreen it since i became a parent tbh, i’m sure it would absolutely fucking wreck me

p easily my favorite spielberg these days and yeah i could not imagine watching this as a parent, radioactive

I liked this movie a lot, and even though there are massive amounts of people who hated the ending and tried to tell me to hate the ending, I though the ending was great. It was so creepy. The Spielbergian wussiness kind of backfired into a creepy alien fake world around the robot and mother. I liked how long the ending was and how far into the future it went. It went into a more abstract cerebral style. Not really deep, but shallow, allowing me to imagine how deep it is.

― A Nairn (moretap), Sunday, December 22, 2002 12:53 AM (sixteen years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

v otm post from sixteen years ago

Of course it works! It even worked on you. :)

Ha! x

The Spielbergian wussiness kind of backfired into a creepy alien fake world

the uncanny valley thing was very intentional throughout?

oh yeah lol i agree

hm maybe i should watch a.i. again

nothin wussy wtf r u talkinbout

Kubrick gave the project to Spielberg before he died, with SK to produce

ok that post is less otm than i suggested but i mainly want to say the ending is good

couldn't get through the whole thing tonight but the first 50 minutes of this thing are exquisite and heartbreaking. haley joel osment going "no. no no no no no" is maybe the most awful i've ever felt during a film

also my god the cinematography

Came in here to defend Allen Iverson. Now disappointed.

I saw this film when it first came out but the only thing I can remember about it now is the really cool alternate reality game that went with it.

“is 50 years... a long time?”

“i don’t think so.”

ok yeah “spielbergien wussiness” is completely wrong-headed, this movie isn’t sentimental it’s emotionally unsparing. it also has a ton of contempt for the rich

I think the scene with David shoving spinach into his mouth to gain love from his mother until his face starts melting off is a perfect microcosm of this movie.

Everytime I see this I feel different things. It’s his Vertigo. Perverse self examination that could be picked over forever.

The ending is absolutely crucial. Never grasped the simple mawkish reading. It’s primally bleak. One of the great movie endings.

It's among the best movies ever made.

I should also step back from the sentimental/horror dichotomy. It’s a lot of these things simultaneously. I think it is messy and awkward. And heartbreaking, mythic, and self-annihilating. In totally fluctuating levels. But that’s what makes it.

When you have the big E.T./Amblin moon rise for the first time gloriously and it turns out to be an agent of destruction... you kinda know.

I agree that this is one of if not the best, and far and away the most fascinating and interesting movie by a major director of the 21st century so far. Has easily the 2 singular best performances in any modern film I've seen in Haley Joel Osment's David (still unfathomable to me that such a labyrinthian performance was produced by an 11-12 year old!) and the still to this day criminally underrated Frances O'Connor as his "mother" Monica (one of the rawest and most devastating performances in any film I've ever seen). I'm not one to usually comment or care much about the "INTENSITY" or Academy Award worthiness of actors performances in movies I watch, as that is so far down the totem pole about what usually interests me most in films (especially high concept Sci Fi like this)... but those 2 main performances are truly incredible, and they are so so integral to the movie as a whole. I can't imagine this movie with a different actor in either part having even a fraction of the visceral impact that it does with them.

Your first post circa is absolutely OTM; you can intensely feel something entirely different and find a dozen different things in it that've burrowed into your skull to pick over endlessly on every viewing. I don't disagree that the ending is totally obliterating and very dark (the whole film is in general!), but I don't think the surface sentimentality of it is an incorrect reading or simple window dressing to disguise the horror and darker implications of what's going on. The constant juxtaposition of those sometimes schmaltzy but always intense and honest feelings of wonder, sentimentality, and the wanting and need for love intrinsic to a child's "human" experience against the ceaselessly dark and eventually apocalyptic backdrop of the film's world constantly bearing down against them is a feature, not a bug or distraction, and wholly intended IMO. It's what gives this film its great and terrible power to evoke so many different and intense feelings so candidly.

OTM. Love this film.

The ending is absolutely crucial. Never grasped the simple mawkish reading. It’s primally bleak. One of the great movie endings.

― circa1916, Tuesday, June 9, 2020 8:08 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

fiercely otm

but also trevor is right too

i think about this movie all the time, but oddly have seen it only once. need to revisit.

I have been fighting the good fight for this movie since it came out but I don't think I've watched it in at least a decade...there's something deeply, foundationally, unnerving about it. In Freudian terms, it's where unheimlich meets melancholia.

I think a lot of people don't get the movie, in part, because they fail to get that it has a rare instance of a diegetic narrator -- he's speaking to an audience within the film itself. (Sort of.) (But it's still important.)

though it's overly reductive of both their sensibilities, the kubrick vs spielberg thing that gets read into this movie is somewhat of a handy way to describe the tension at its heart. intention doesn't matter, but if spielberg intends a "happy" ending then this is like staring in the blinding white light of emotional need in a way that's so hard to stomach, not unlike Lear going mad at the death of Cordelia.

I love this film. I didn't read the ending as bleak, I read it as something profoundly alien and basically incomprehensible. But I haven't seen the movie since it came out, need to revisit.

Loved it when I watched it last year, & realized I'd completely misunderstood the ending when it came out.

Watch me forever seems to be completely shut down. I miss your crazy antics Kakler!

suspended due to this mishap: https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3pymx/ai-generated-seinfeld-show-nothing-forever-banned-on-twitch-after-transphobic-standup-bit

I did like it quite a bit, faults and all. It's one of those things that gets really overrated by people who love it to counter the hate from the haters. Should watch this again.

rewatched this movie this week after not seeing it since it first came out and it's so weird and incredible and sad. the effects and makeup are amazing and haley joel osment's performance is miraculous. there are maybe 10-15 minutes that could be trimmed out of the middle but overall i was blown away. this is so obvious i probably don't need to say it, given the textual pinocchio parallels, but it feels like a fairy tale in the sense of the original brothers grimm/charles perrault sense of having this innocent character who is tortured by terrible and horrific life circumstances for 90% of the story.

going back and reading old posts above clarified for me how the movie has a surface-level mawkishness and also a deep undercurrent of pure tragedy somehow simultaneously. it's a fucked-up movie

otm

it's a fucked-up movie

deeply

im gonna pretentiously quote my own old pretentious post because i still kinda like this idea: there's something deeply, foundationally, unnerving about it. In Freudian terms, it's where unheimlich meets melancholia

"I'm sorry I didn't tell you about the world."

was glad to see Jonathan Rosenbaum had this on this Sight and Sound list...he was a very lone voice in its favor when it came out.

Didn’t Jim Hoberman like it too or am I misremembering?

I don't remember! I do remember Armond White loving it too.

this and eyes wide shut were the big critical fights i took an interest in during my early cinephilia.

According to the ballots, it just missed making the top 250

xp same, plus Femme Fatale

Let us revisit: https://www.villagevoice.com/2001/06/26/the-mommy-returns/

"Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence is less a movie than a seething psychological bonanza."

hell yeah it is.

Femme Fatale was good too, as Eric seems to be pointing out. It’s currently not available to stream on any service according to JustWatch.

Is there any movie that lays bare the dark heart of the fairytale better than the one this thread is about, intentionally or otherwise, although I charitably assume Spielberg did intend it, all of which somebody probably said way better than me a few posts up.

intention doesn't seem to matter if you're gonna be this psychologically exhibitionist whilst retaining artistic control. it's quite a feat. might be a good double feature with Fabelmans. it also feels spiritually akin to vertigo for me.