Review: A.I.

Mike and I watched A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) last night after a great raclette meal over at Eric and Annie’s place.

I had picked AI up at some garage sale at work a few years back and didn’t think I had seen it. Considering Vero is scared of anything to do with robots, I had to resort to my non robot hating friends to watch this film.

The scoop is that this film was the brainchild of Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielburg for the longest time and then Kubrick passed away so Spielburg continued with the vision of the future where robots are a part of our society and one robot maker wishes to see if he can make a robot which can LOVE.

So begins the tale of David, the boy robot who comes into the life of a family who think their son will never come back from whatever ailment he is suffering from. While the robot started off as being quite creepy in the fact that it just stood and started most of the time, the owners (parents) initiated the imprinting protocol which would allow the robot to love the parents. This is when David actually becomes like a normal kid which didn’t freak me out as much.

However, it’s just not David’s day as the parents real son makes a recovery, comes back into their life and then David is jealous and ends up getting taunted into doing crazy things by the real son (like taking a lock of their mother’s hair to show how much he loves her).

In the end, the robot gets booted from the house and then the real cool part of the film happens as you enter this Blade Runner-esque world where humans and robots interact but it’s all very film noir – you have thousands of robots being thrown into trash heaps because they are obsolete, you have flesh-fairs where they destroy robots by firing them through canons or dropping acid on them and the spectators cheer.

It was all very marvelous and I love the imagery once they started looking at the universe outside of the parents home.

While the concept was pretty cool, I really thought the ending was cheese – ala Spielburg endings. What can I say? I can’t knock the guy. He knows that he’s making a decent flick here about the hope of robots. It was like ET but for robots. 🙂

While I was watching it I realized I had seen it before but really couldn’t remember the ending and at one point in the film, something in my memory triggered the fact that I was entering new domain in the film – as in, I had seen the film up until that point and for whatever reason had shut it off. It was strange for my brain to register the exact moment where I had last seen the film…which would have been years ago.

Verdict: It’s a decent flick, but I prefer the darker futuristic movies (gotta check out Blade Runner – The Final Cut when it comes out in December!).

iplaying: Surf City Eastern Block – The Arcade Fire (2007-11-08 Berlin, Columbiahalle)