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movie review - AI, Artificial Intelligence

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

This is the longest write-up I have ever (or will ever do). Enjoy/Endure as desired.

I've just finished watching a downloaded copy of "AI" that appears to have been filmed in a movie theatre in Singapore (perhaps). It seems to have subtitles in Chinese and something like Malay or Thai or Bahasa Indonesian (in roman charactes).

Anyway, I have to strongly advise that you never see it, if it isn't too late. Here's why:

1. It's got the worst of both directors:
• pacing by Kubrick
• music by ET guy
• strange appended scene that happens 2000 years later (involving a snap ice age) to which both directors are prone
• a second, even stranger appended scene (involving aliens, and the worst case of Deus ex machina that can be imagined)
2. It breaks all of its internal rules
• robots aren't supposed to feel or have self-interest, yet almost every one evidences one of these traits
3. It breaks many a convention in story-telling
• it introduces a narrative at the seeming 'end' of the movie (e.g., I was expecting the credits, but the process bar was only 80% of the way through the second half of the flick).
• shitty dialogue throughout
• unexplained events
• big boring stretches
• irritating, ill-fitting, and almost non-stop score via stringed instruments
• ending way out of left field. No, forget left field. More like imaginative six year old on three cans of pop.
4. It's supposed to be sci-fi, yet there's not one ounce of science, or regard for basic things like the rules of physics
• at the outset, the sea levels have risen thirty metres or so, but the sunken city of Manhatten still stands (more or less; there are one or two toppled towers, but - and this is crucial to the plot - everything at sea level and below is miraculously untouched. This may sound trivial, but the kid robot spends 2000 years praying to a blue fairy statue from the Pinoccio portion of an amusement park. I'm not making this up).
• equally important, ice has locked up the entire world, but the same buildings withstand that, too, thereby making the excreble double ending
• and the nausea thereby engendered - possible.
5. The story is bullshit, essentially running like this:
• family has son in coma
• father works for a Cyberwhatsit company
• crazed genius in Cybercompany lost _his_ son, and builds kid robots that can love, IN THE IMAGE OF HIS DEAD SON.
• the family gets the first of these robot kids
• the family also has a teddy bear that's an early robot 'toy'
• everything is fine for all of two minutes of movie time, but the 'real' son comes to before the father even seems to get used to having the kid around the house!
• the new kid hates the robot kid, and has the mother read Pinoccio to them both (both kids are around ten years old, but are treated like they're half that age, I mean who reads to a ten year old! Bart Simpson is ten! Eric Cartmen is 8!)
• The robot kid siezes on the idea that a blue fairy can turn him into a 'real' boy. THIS FORMS THE REST OF THE PLOT.
• after some hyper-imaginative story-telling, the family decides that the robot kid is a danger to them all! He must be taken to the woods and abandoned! But not before the robot kid has taken a lock of his 'mother's' hair, which the teddy hangs onto for a couple of millennia.
• meanwhile, in another part of this future - where the cars are three wheeled electrics, but people still sign pieces of paper, mothers stay home to tend to empty houses (childbirth being severely restricted), and there's plenty of greenery and fine country settings, despite the 'chaotic weather' reported by the brief narrative at the beginning - a sex-robot (played by Jude Law) is framed for murder most evil.
• in the woods, the kid comes across some human scum flying a balloon that's designed (and internally lit) to look like the moon. The balloon is the coolest part of the movie. But the scum collect the kid and a bunch of other robots that had turned up for spare parts (dumped by the scum). For some reason - and by unexplained means - Law appears in the woods as well.
• Scum take robots to open-air colleseum where Ministry is doing a concert while robots are violently destroyed.
• Robots get away through an annoying scene featuring the Irish actor who played the sherrif in "Lake Placid" (and the ex-con in "I went down"). This happens also despite the fact that the sex robot 'doesn't have a sense of self-preservation, nudge nudge'.
• Robots team up and eventually - through half an hour of 'crazy adventures' that make little sense and get tiring quick-like - find the home of the BLUE FAIRY.
• The home of the blue fairy is, of course, the place where the kid was built.
• Kid flips when he learns that he's not unique, tries to kill self.
• Sex robot - having run from the flipping kid to hide in the stolen cop flying car they acquired, despite the fact that it took the sex robot's non-existent sense of self-preservation to do so - watches the kid tumble into the sea, and goes to get him.
• Luckily, the flying cop car is at home under water (and, as we shall see, under a hundred metres of quick-freezing sea ice).
• Once they're safely back on dry land, the kid robot says, "But I saw the place where the blue fairy lives underwater!"
• So the sex robots says, "Quick, let's go back down!" but the cops come in a second flying air/water/ice machine, and take him away. His final words are, "I am! I was! Remember me to the ladies when you grow up!" So passes the only interesting character in the movie (except for maybe the teddy, whose presence I couldn't understand until the final scene/hell).
• Kid robot takes car to the bottom of the sea, and parks it in front of a statue of the BLUE FAIRY, and begans to plead with her to make him real. We start to pan back from the car. I think, 'hmmm, not great, but that ending kind-of saves it really, not bad actually. Wait, why does the progress bar still have a centimetre to go? Damn you, ET-guy and your "Saving Private Ryan" endings!
• Sure enough, a narrative kicks in, and we learn that the kid prays to the statue for 2000 years. During that time, the sea freezes (for some unexplained reason, I'm sure we're to believe that the bastards blew it up, as it were, because we've already been shown the wrist and torch of the statue of libert poking out of the waves) in an unprecedented hurry.
• At the end of the 2k(2), aliens come flying in low over the ice, and land in an extensive excavation they've been conducting. In the exposed cuts, we're treated to views of buildings intact, locked in ice. The aliens are also flying under sunny conditions, which means that perhaps:
1. the Sun has cooled considerably
2. the Earth has moved away from the Sun quite a distance
3. the Earth is now smaller, and thereby no longer as massive, and not producing as much internal heat due to compression at its core
4. the writers and directors are assholes
5. The aliens resurrect the boy robot with a touch to the forehead, and tell one another smugly that the boy must have been down here since there were 'people' around.
• The plot, part three (only read if you have sedatives at hand, or you'll find yourself writing long and scathing write-ups about the ordeal)
1. To make a long and irritating section of the movie short, the aliens have figured out how to bring back people from things like, say, a lock of hair. We know where this is going, but we're handed a warning to make it more ET shmaltzy. They've also found the way to bring back memories (the answer was in the space-time continuum!).
2. But - sniff - they can only bring back people for one day, because their essence fades away when they go to sleep, as if the space time continuum wants its memories back or something.
3. Anyway, resurrected mommy spends a day with the boy. They have a birthday party, she tells him she loves him and always will, and they fall asleep.
4. The end.
P.S. Real artificial intelligence is not about robots walking around. It was a defined set of fields of research, such as speech recognition and neural nets that had already had its day. An autonomous synthetic life-form is light-years away from our childs-play grade AI accomplishments today. And to wire such a feat - something that might be unique in the universe for all we know - and then wrap it in such a story is inexcusable.

Avoid.