First, it's a rip-off, or rather a pastiche of rip-offs, of other, better stories: 2001 is here, along with Frankenstein, Jaws, The Twilight Zone, E.T., Oedipus, Blade Runner. And--oh yes--Pinocchio, warmed over and rewritten.

It is tabloid stuff: "Secret Life of Pinocchio Revealed." Or, "I Was a Prisoner of the Coney Island Ferris Wheel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea Quest--and Lived To Tell About It To Aliens After the Warming (Er, the Freezing)!" As Higgins would say: "Oh My GODDDD!" I have rarely spent so much of a movie just wishing it would end. I wanted it to end because I knew early on that it was not going to turn out well. From the get-go it has all the earmarks of BAD WRITING. I actually spent some time in A.I. writing my own additional authentic synthetic-person dialogue:

A., I., howzit?
A., who? Say what?
I. M. B. O., I.C. A., B., C. D. goldfish?
I.M.N.O. see no goldfish.
O.S.A.R. goldfish,
B. O.K., now I.C.
A., who R. U.?
I.A.
O. ....... I. thought U.R.L.
L. no!
N. here I thought U.R.1.,2. Hahahahaha.
No, I.M.str8. N.U.?
O.G., don't even *.

Even more wooden than Gepetto's boy are ALL of the performances in this movie. The mother is a ditz, the father a geek, the real son a dork. And by that I mean BOTH the actors AND the characters they half-bakedly attempt to create. All are flat as a pancake, and just as cliche. Remember the interesting, funny, three-dimensional kids in E.T.? Or their hassled but competent mother? They stood up to the Feds!

None of that here. The real son and his dufus bratty friends are each and every one two-dimensional teenage stereotypes. They couldn't pull off the rescue of E.T. and fly to the moon on their bikes to save their asses. "A brat is a brat, and that is that...."

This real son has been in a fatal accident and has been in cryogenic suspension. Now he gets resurrected. Yet that profound experience has had absolutely no effect on him. It hasn't altered him, mellowed him, bent him, molded him, changed him. I'm sorry, but I don't believe it. Remember Dickens's opening to A TALE OF TWO CITIES: "Recalled from the dead," and what a profound thing that meant in everyone's lives?

The mother (Monica) is a bitch like Mary Tyler Moore in Ordinary People, but without the layers and depth and history that made Moore's performance so chilling. Monica is utterly unaware of what is going on around her, utterly unable of parenting in the slightest. And her husband is a grinning cowardly airhead who, when he calls on the phone to give her the news that their real boy has been resurrected, is ANGRY, not excited or tearful or joyous or speechless or wondrous or humble or thankful or fatherly or manly or adult or loveable. Just why even a cyberboy like David would want THESE people's love in order to define himself is a mystery.

These people live in a future time when families can ONLY have one kid. Now, by the grace of God, they have two, and they can't deal with it--for unknown reasons that are never explained. Oh, Lordy, the Hollywood coke-liners and glue-sniffers are at work here. "We'll dazzle 'em with the special effects." When they see Radio City underwater, they'll forget all about characterz and storiez." Snort.

And what the hell has happened to William Hurt (Gepetto)? Is that the best role you can write for such a gifted, sympathetic actor? Why not just cast the corpulent Marlon Brando in the role and let him mumble arcanely through it? Why not cast Bill Maher? God, where is Whoopi Goldberg when you really need her?

We can find nobody to love here, as John Gardner's ON MORAL FICTION said we must. And Spielberg, who is credited with writing the screenplay, has not only forgotten John Gardner, but also William Faulkner and Aristotle. In his 1950 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Faulkner said, "I decline to accept the end of man." He reminded us that it is the writer's duty to teach us that MANKIND will not merely survive but will prevail. All else is writing not of the heart but of the glands. It "grieves on no universal bones." A.I. is about nothing less than the utter annihilation of humankind. No archetypal universality here. No hope and pity and sacrifice and glory.

Aristotle taught us the Three Unities--time, space, and action--that underly all well written stories. Yet in A.I., we suddenly leap over 2,000 years, and out of the sky comes a deus ex machina--the aliens, who have the limited power to resurrect from DNA a human who lived two millennia ago. Shades of Klaatu and Beringa in THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL and Jeff Bridges in STARMAN. Read rip-off again. And contra Plato, this story will not save us. I truly was waiting for the final voice-over: "Suddenly shots rang out and everyone fell dead." When we saw New York under water, I really thought we would catch a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty ripped off from the first Planet of the Apes. I thought SHE would turn out to be the Blue Fairy--then I remembered that she's green. But that wouldn't have been any more dopey than who the Blue Fairy really turned out to be.

As Bruno Bettelheim truly taught us in his 1989 book, THE USES OF ENCHANTMENT: THE MEANING AND IMPORTANCE OF FAIRY TALES, such stories indeed teach us about the world and its problems, sorrow, death, illness, infidelity, and so on. Recall the abandonment in the woods of Hansel and Gretel, or the wicked step-sisters of Cinderella and her corpulent sister, Mozarella. Recall the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood. But the enduring stories give us the key to get out of the woods. There is always a charm, a magic potion, a secret word, a prince, a princess, a glass slipper. Once you figure out that "As you wish" in The Fairy Princess means "I love you," and that it's Peter Falk/Columbo reading the bedtime story, it's all downhill from there. Once you know that it's really Mike Myers behind the Irish brogue of Shrek, you are home free. And none of these is there EVER any hint of the annihilation of mankind.

I cannot imagine who the intended audience is for this film. Kids? The violence and darkness of the story are guaranteed to scare the bejesus out of any kid--without the safety nets and redemption at the end that we got in E.T. or even Schindler's List. I suppose we are supposed to be brutalized or tantalized by the Flesh Fair, where beer drinkers and red necks pay to see the machines brutally destroyed with all kinds of torture devices. Actually, I think that if mankind could take out all its primeval urges this way instead upon each other, it would be great. I say, bring on the gizmos and stuff 'em in the compactors. Round 'em up. I'll pay. Make more as pleasure models. I, for one, didn't weep when the Terminator or the machines in Star Wars got theirs in the end. Nor did I weep when Joe got pulled away from David and Teddy in New York. Better them than me.

The story combines the worst of Kubrick's unintelligibility with Spielberg's demons. And those demons are growing. Spielberg seems sometimes to lose his soul. Certainly he has lost his whimsy. Even in the direst moments of Jaws, Raiders, E.T., we had some huge laffs and some real tears. There were none of those among the audience I saw A.I. with. This is not even good Frankenstein. In Mary Shelly's novel, the Creature actually turns out to be "more human THAN human" (I'm borrowing the motto, incidentally, of Eldon Tyrell's company in BLADE RUNNER).

Even the cutesy-pie Haley Joel Osment, seen here as David, or the Bubble Boy at the end of 2001 now grown older, cannot work that magic. He is capable of more and better, as witness his performance with Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense. Remember how much we cared when Bishop, the "synthetic person" in Aliens, died, ripped apart by the Mother of All Aliens? Bishop WAS a real person without ever whining about it. In A.I., the Mother of All Bores, Spielberg can't even put a face or a heart-light on his aliens any more. They look like art-deco blown-glass kitsch figurines. Or Paris runway models. Or hookers from Mars.

The problems here are the same ones that Spielberg evidenced in both of his Jurassic Park blunders. He is a masterful technician of film imaging, but he is not a better writer than Michael Crichton. Nor is he a better writer than Alice Walker, whose The Color Purple he "spielberged" by removing the lesbian love story. He has forgotton that the best stories are character- driven; not dinosaur-driven, not plot-driven, not effects-driven, not global- warming-driven, and not even driven by his own super-name.

If there was one thing that characterized Spielberg at his (past) best, it was his freshness. He was never derivative. Even starting with his early Duel with Dennis Weaver, the delight always was the surprise. When had we ever seen anything like Raiders or E.T.? When had we ever met anybody quite like Indiana Jones? Now we get A.I., which is like one of those Academy Award Night montages of "the best tear-jerker movies of the past."

There is a feeble attempt here at some sort of philosophical or existential center when the bitch-mother turns David out into the lone woods, saying, "I'm sorry I didn't tell you about the world." How could she? She's a ditz. Later, when David and Joe (an almost three-dimensional character) go to seek wisdom from Dr. Know, they see a vision of the inscription on the door of the Tyrell Company (oops! I mean William Hurt's company): "There is more weeping in the world than you can ever know." But that was also true in Schindler's List and The Matrix, both of which had oracles to lead us through that world. In A.I., all we get are skinny Las Vegas decor aliens that assure David in azure voices: "All we want is your happiness." Give me a break.

The problem is set up at the beginning when Gepetto assembles his crew to build a better boy. The problem, he misperceives, is to create a phony that will really love real humans. A female colleague challenges him by saying, The real problem is getting the humans to love HIM. Gepetto avoids the question, and she challenges him on that, too.

Well, the failure of love is a good story premise because most of us have experienced one form or another of that failure. "That's the story of, that's the glory of, love." But what you require to make that premise work, don't you see, is some character(s) in the mix that YOU actually love. Then THEIR failure of love is poignant, heartbreaking, exquisite, redemptive because ("willing suspension of disbelief") it becomes YOUR failure. The love that the warmed-over bitch finally delivers to David at the behest of the aliens is as synthetic as he is. She/her isn't really her/she. It is feigned love, which, like feigned orgasm, doesn't work. And she is now artificial. Perhaps Artificial Love (like artificial dinosaurs) satisfies an Artificial Intelligence, but it does not satisfy us, and we are the ones who count.

I didn't weep when I learned that all mankind had perished in the Warming. Mankind in this story is the rednecks at the flesh fair, plus Mommy, Daddy, and Sonny Dork, and Gepetto. Who cares that they're gone? The aliens? Dumb aliens. And they want to bring HER back?

The animated Dr. Know sequence is reminiscent of Spielberg's similar contribution to his segment of The Twilight Zone. It is Looney Toons with attitude and loudness and evil. Maybe you are amused by that; I'm not. Or maybe you are amused by the single running joke of Joe's studliness; I'm not. How much more interesting (and funny and threatening and three-dimensional) were the Mutants in Arnold Schwartzenegger's Total Recall. "You ever had sex with a mutant?"

Can we hope and pray that this is Spielberg's mere detour into Kubrickism, and that he will emerge from this phase unscathed? Oh, I hope so. I miss the old Spielberg Kidz, including Richard Dreyfuss and Indiana Jones. Spielberg is a HUMANITARIAN. He made Schindler's List. He founded Shoah, the zillion- dollar online interactive remembrance of the Holocaust. He made the terrible shark, and he made the humans who beat it. He can do it again. Global warming and the Big Freeze are not worthy adversaries.

It will be remembered that Stanley Kubrick came to the world's attention with Dr. Strangelove and Spartacus, which HE took over from another director back in the 60's. And what a surprise and delight Strangelove was: A dark sparkling comedy about the annihilation of humankind! Recall Keenan Wynn warning Peter Sellers: "I don't want no preeeversions; you'll answer to the Coca-Cola Company." Or George C. Scott as General Buck Turgidson. "You can't fight in here--this is the War Room." Or Slim Pickens as the redneck Air Force pilot. And Sterling Hayden as General Jack D. Ripper. And that final scene: the mushroom cloud with the song, "We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when."

Remember The Shining? "Heeeeeeeere's Johnny!"

I will give credit to one actor in A.I. who turned in an admirable performance against all odds: Teddy, the Supertoy. He was, indeed, more human THAN human. It is he who gets to (actually, must) witness the tasteless Oedupus/Electra ending, where the warmed over bitch dies again, and David lies smiling for, well, another 2,000 years? Will that, God help us, be the sequel? All who see that final shot must surely compare it with the final voice-over scene in Mrs. Doubtfire, where the safety net for the kids was put firmly in place: "You'll be all right."

You're not all right at the end of A.I.

P.S. -- Now, for you boyz and girlz who want to read a little bit about true storytelling and good writing, try Aristotle: http://www.richardhay.com/documents/eeunities.html

and Faulkner:
http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/1949/faulkner-acceptance.html

and take it from there! You'll be all right!

Bob

bobmorris@mysimplelife.net