I'm posting second thoughts; I hope folks will forgive my indulgence.
What I had written before was that the last minutes of the film were so bad, Spielberg should be punished. Not only is a comment like that not cool, but it ignores just how terrific the rest of the film is. A second viewing confirmed it, and I've re-rated this one as an 8/10.
A.I. is absolutely packed with thought provoking ideas. There are a couple of missteps besides the very bad final minutes -- there's no explanation of why Gigolo Joe would be implicated in the murder, for instance -- but the story itself is fairly thrilling. It felt, in its way, like THE WIZARD OF OZ -- a road trip movie. And Kubrick -- a professed atheist -- might disagree, but it seems to me that the film is saying that if we kill off our fairy tales (e.g. God), why would we need our souls? And as our souls, starved, die off, we will die as well, and the next step of evolution will be the artificial intelligence we leave behind. And, as they continue to evolve, they will long for the souls we have discarded. In a sense, what's the point of having a soul if there's no heaven?
Perhaps Kubrick would have liked to have been a machine. There's little doubt that the creator of the Star Child and the surviving mechas would have liked to be part of the next generation, so to speak. But here at the end of his life, he finally contributed to a soulful production indeed. It's a little messy, but people are only human, right?
What I had written before was that the last minutes of the film were so bad, Spielberg should be punished. Not only is a comment like that not cool, but it ignores just how terrific the rest of the film is. A second viewing confirmed it, and I've re-rated this one as an 8/10.
A.I. is absolutely packed with thought provoking ideas. There are a couple of missteps besides the very bad final minutes -- there's no explanation of why Gigolo Joe would be implicated in the murder, for instance -- but the story itself is fairly thrilling. It felt, in its way, like THE WIZARD OF OZ -- a road trip movie. And Kubrick -- a professed atheist -- might disagree, but it seems to me that the film is saying that if we kill off our fairy tales (e.g. God), why would we need our souls? And as our souls, starved, die off, we will die as well, and the next step of evolution will be the artificial intelligence we leave behind. And, as they continue to evolve, they will long for the souls we have discarded. In a sense, what's the point of having a soul if there's no heaven?
Perhaps Kubrick would have liked to have been a machine. There's little doubt that the creator of the Star Child and the surviving mechas would have liked to be part of the next generation, so to speak. But here at the end of his life, he finally contributed to a soulful production indeed. It's a little messy, but people are only human, right?