Review: A.I.

As you might have expected, several of the slashdot folks went to see A.I. this weekend. Jon Katz and I were brave enough to write about it. In case you've been dead for the past six months, there's a huge game being run to promote the movie (though the plot of the game apparently has little to do with the plot of the movie). Read on for a thorough dissection of this much-hyped tale of the robot boy who can (sniff, sniff) love. (Usual warnings about spoilers apply.)

michael: Looks like I get to go first. Let's get some basics out of the way. Some reviews by others: Slate, Salon, Wired. You may want to read the short story that started it all. But if you see the movie, you'll find that the short story has less influence on the movie than a famous and beautiful poem by W. B. Yeats, The Stolen Child. Since it's out of copyright, and since it happens to be one of my favorite poems, and since you uncouth heathens could use some exposure to beauty, I'm going to reproduce it here.

The Stolen Child

Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the Lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water-rats
There we've hid our faery vats,
Full of berries
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand

Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim grey sands with light
Far off by furthest rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances,
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight,
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And is anxious in its sleep
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand

Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scarce could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams,
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand

Away with us he's going,
The solemn-eyed
He'll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest
For he comes, the human child
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
From a world more full of weeping then he can understand

--W.B. Yeats, 1889

The poem itself in is in the movie in two places, and crops up in several other places as well - "Till the moon has taken flight" takes on literal meaning, for example. Faeries, yep, we got faeries. And there's no one more solemn-eyed than a kid who sees dead people.

I'm sure one of the other slashdot authors will go into the whole Kubrick/Spielberg deal so I'll skip it. The movie is slow, light on dialogue, heavy on music and long meaningful camera shots. (It reminded me of The Thin Red Line several times.) The audience didn't particularly appreciate the slower scenes (one anonymous coward in the back row shouted out "Boring!" at one point), which makes me think this isn't going to be a box-office smash. The acting is superior - a great deal of effort has been expended in having the mechanicals show a consistent face to the world - they don't break character in the slightest, not even an extraneous eye-twitch. Special effects are also superior - rarely in your face, but always there, and entirely realistic. (I'm going to ignore the aliens.)

One area I kept looking for was hard-coded limits on robotic behavior. These robots have neither the First, nor the Second, nor the Third Laws of Robotics, which seems like a foolish design oversight. Several major plot points would been eliminated if the robots were obedient ... but why would humans make disobedient robots? At the very least, it seems like emotion would come well before disobedience on the robot evolutionary scale.

Anyway, A.I. is well worth seeing, at least once. I don't know if time will call this a masterwork or not. It's certainly a fine piece, worthy of respect, and it will certainly be referenced in the many future movies about artificial intelligence (just wait and see), but it seemed to fall a bit short of master-level.

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Jon Katz: In A.I., Steven Spielberg (and the ghostly spirit of Stanley Kubrick) has made one of the most astonishing and original scientific fairy tales of all time. The movie is unlike anything you've ever seen, visually or conceptually. Like so many Hollywood movies of the past decade or two, it doesn't quite know how to end, but that's a minor squawk against the backdrop of a masterpiece of story-telling genius and moral power. Through the life of a lost boy -- an artificially engineered one -- Spielberg has brought a fresh, contemporary eye to enduring questions of moral responsibility and technology, and their impact on human life. Be prepared: this is a very disturbing movie. In cinematic terms, Spielberg has chillingly evoked Mary Shelley. He combines his dramatic flair and his acute sensibilities about childhood with fantabulistic animation and design. Spoilage warning: Plot is discussed, no endings.

This is the story of David (played wonderfully by Haley Joel Osment), a robotic boy sent out into a world ravaged by ecological catastrophe (global warming has submerged the great coastal cities of the earth). Although the future is filled with mechanical beings, David is the first child programmable to feel and need love, and to dream his own dreams. His desire to love a mother deeply, once activatd by a spoken imprint sequence, is irreversible. If the relationship doesn't work, David must be destroyed.

Osment's tormented robot-kid is disturbingly convincing, especially his transformation from a machine trying to learn about emotions into a sentient being overwhelmed and consumed by them. Alternately predictable and inappropriate, endearing and creepy, he struggles to fit into a conventional family. Henry and Monica, the parents who take him in (Frances O'Connor and Sam Robards) have accepted that their biological son, who is in a coma, will never awaken.

Already, the moral lines are drawn powerfully around this family, a stand-in for our morally obtuse society. Henry agrees to bring a robot child into his home as a surrogate kid without even telling his wife, to help assuage her grief. Monica, mourning her stricken offspring, is a sucker for a loving kid, even a programmed one. David is used in the most profoundly unthinking way. At first, Monica is unnerved by this alien creature, then succumbs to his unequivocal affection.

But their son Martin does recover, and comes home angry and jealous. Here, the movie moves directly into Frankenstein territory. In one powerful scene David is so anxious to be like Martin, whom his new mother loves so deeply, that he starts wolfing down food, which nearly destroys his delicate circuitry. Goaded by their manipulative and somewhat unpleasant natural son, Henry and Monica come to believe they have a monster in their home rather than a loving child, and are overwhelmed by what they've done. Just like Victor Frankenstein, they take no responsibility whatsoever for this creature, sending him away into the dark woods.

David's "mother," to whom he is now forever devoted, takes him out for a drive and abandons him -- an echo of countless fairy tales -- rather than return him to the cybernetic firm that will destroy him. The film's lively middle section depicts a world in which thugs roam the countryside looking to torture and hunt down "mechas," capturing them for a "Flesh Fair," a carnival billed as a celebration of life devoted to "demolishing artificiality" and securing a truly human future.

David's creator Professor Hobby (William Hurt), also stands back as this tragedy unfolds, more curious about his experiment and its commercial possibilities than he is concerned for its consequences. It's a scathing rendition of America's ostrich-like attitudes about technology, as it unleashes AI, fertility, genetic and other technologies on an unprepared world, all in the name of progress, health, or convenience.

In fact, as in The Matrix and almost every other movie which deals with AI, the film delineates a world already sliding into civil war: humans ("orgas," for organic) caught between technological and environmental issues, feel increasingly endangered by the intelligent machines that are more adaptable than they are. It's interesting that almost no artist or futurist looks at AI and the future and sees much good.

As a renegade sex robot called Gigolo Joe (the phenomenal Jude Law) explains to David, whom he's befriended, humanity has belatedly come to regret devloping AI machines unthinkingly. "They made us too smart, too fast, too many," Joe says, perhaps presciently.

Dark and ominous from the beginning, the movie now turns wrenching. Wickedly, Martin has urged his mother to read aloud the story of Pinocchio, with which David becomes obsessed. He sees the parallels between his own story and the wooden puppet's, and he sets out at all costs to find the Blue Fairy who will transform him into a real boy so that his missing "mother" will love him as much as she loves her biological son. But by now, David is no witless, gullible Pinocchio. He is obsessed and resourceful, and has evolved in decidedly non-Disney ways.

The shadow of Stanley Kubrick, who conceived the movie based on a short story by Brian Aldriss, falls darkly across this ground-breakingly inventive tale. There are embedded visual and thematic references to A Clockwork Orange, and 2001: A Space Odyssey, along with Star Wars and E.T. There's even a sly homage to Pinocchio's "Pleasure Island." And the story draws heavily from the fairy tale genre, especially all those Grimm's fables about kids being abandoned in dark and menacing woods. Kubrick apparently spent many hours talking with Spielberg about the movie, but died before he could tackle it.

But Spielberg really honors him here. This movie is as disquieting as it is eerie, gorgeous and thoughtful; it dares to take on the serious issue of humanity's pell-mell rush to fiddle with human life -- from AI to robotics to genomics -- without realistically or carefully considering the consequences. You can almost hear the technologists of the future explaining why they couldn't possibly have foreseen the impact of the forces their predecessors unleashed.

When Mary Shelley sounded this warning in Frankenstein, technology was primitive and noninvasive, still a somewhat abstract fear. The world in whic David "lives" is not only imaginable but, by many accounts, is almost upon us, at least in terms of the possibilities of AI and the rapid evolution of computer systems into a sort of species.

Speielberg reminds us that we aren't ready. Not only may many humans get hurt, but so may the new machines, along with nature itself. It's a provocative twist on a big and powerful premise. What are we? What are we going to be?

There's a Freudian twist or two as well. What David yearns for is what the shrinks tell us we all want at some point -- pure, undiluted love from and time with Mom. David's fight for that is heroic, down to a shocking and unexpected series of endings, certain to be controversial and upsetting to many. (Parents who bring little kids to what they think is just another Spielberg yarn will be in for an unpleasant surprise). David develops some less attractive human qualities as well. Spielberg seems to be suggesting that it's all too easy to ultimately create machines that behave like humans, but we might not like the results.

This ability, he seems to warn, distracts us, lets us off the hook, prevents us from asking the most signficant question: What does it mean to be human, and what kind of humans do we want to be? That question doesn't often come up when it comes to technology, where the question is more apt to be: how can we create more cool stuff?

A.I. is shocking and haunting, beautiful and unique. For all his sometimes icky Boomer sentimentality, Spielberg's ability to grow artistically, to make deeper, richer, more inventive movies, qualifies in my book as an epic acheivement. When it comes to science, this movie begins where 2001 leaves off, and then goes a galaxy or two farther.