A.I. Artificial Intelligence

Spielberg's strangest, scariest film. And that's not, as some would claim, for lack of competition. In my armchair psychoanalysis of the director, I had always ascribed his early-to-mid 2000s run of morally fraught films with strange, disturbing imagery - I mostly refer to Munich and War of the Worlds, but Minority Report also counts - to post-9/11 anxiety. But how to account for A.I., released months before that event, containing more unsettling imagery than all those films combined, and a bone-chillingly nihilistic outlook on humanity's future to go with it? Well, to me, this is Spielberg's take on the twitchy techno-anxiety that came with the turn of the millennium and Y2K that was reflected in plenty of great art around that time, one example from the non-cinema world being Radiohead's Kid A (which I'm re-listening to as I write this; proving a solid soundtrack to reviewing this movie). This manifested as fear of what we humans are doing to the planet through technology, how that was changing the ways in which we related to one another and our own personhood, and, particularly, a concern about climate change. That, then, sets the stage for A.I.'s terrifying depiction of a world on the brink of ruin. This is a future where the damage we've done to the planet has become incontrovertible, a world where we've brought about our doom but it's not merciful and instant; we get to sit and wait for the inevitable. With all the still-living humans knowing we're beyond saving, the only impetus for technological development is not to try and combat the thing that's bringing about our doom, but essentially to provide the wealthy with all the cheap entertainment they need to at least make the end comfortable; to fill the void of an increasingly lonely, pointless existence, in the form of human-passing androids programmed to do everything for you that your fellow humans never could. A world on hospice care. So, some very fucking bleak stuff, basically, and the film will do nothing to alleviate that bleakness, despite charges to the contrary. This is where the auteurism debate comes in; here we have a horrifically bleak scenario, but we're telling a story within it that could be ripe for easy sentiment, in the wrong hands. And what prodigious hands this story found itself in; first Stanley Kubrick, and then Spielberg. Each filmmaker comes with his own very different set of sensibilities, and A.I., indeed, feels very intriguingly caught between two worlds, Kubrick by way of Spielberg here, Spielberg by way of Kubrick there. The project was given to Spielberg a few years before Kubrick's death, but it only really gained momentum once he passed, and it's genuinely touching on a metatextual level to watch Spielberg, perhaps out of tribute or sentiment, trying to reconcile his own sensibilities with those of a filmmaker who was very, very different from him. What touches were whose, to what degree? I should here point out that the people who once again lazily accused Spielberg of adding a bunch of gooey sentiment and thus mucking up Kubrick's nihilistic satire are quite wrong on multiple levels. One factual, as much of the darker passages (such as the Flesh Fair) in fact originated with Spielberg, and much of the stuff chalked up to Spielberg being a sentimentalist was in fact Kubrick. The second and more important level on which they're wrong, though, is that what may appear as straightforwardly Spielbergian touches here are in fact not. Particularly once the film has set forth its breathtakingly bleak macro-scenario, the stuff that might normally engender that kind of sentiment feels so out-of-whack as to come off more like a simulacrum of sentiment, which reflects our protagonist, as well as the relationship between this situation and the world of the film, perfectly. David has been hard-coded to love, he genuflects at love, but on some level he's not terribly convincing at it, in part because we know he's not actually feeling it - in the same way that Spielberg's film is not particularly convincing as a straightforward attempt at sentiment, because we know the horrific situation that underpins it. None of it feels right, from the sterility of the home, to the desaturated color scheme and blinding highlights of Kaminski's photography, to the flashes of unnaturally warm lighting around each onscreen appearance of David's "mother" after she activates him; this all comes off as artificial, parodic, like a mocking facsimile of a Spielberg film. And I suppose I have no real way of confirming that this was Spielberg's intent, but it's hard for me to read those opening 45 minutes any other way. I think that's what my take on this comes down to, that the marriage of sensibilities is much more seamless than most think, and in fact, any tonal dissonance it creates just serves to mirror and magnify the situation the film has presented. Many regard A.I. as a fascinating but heavily flawed curiosity, one that works more on the metatextual level I mentioned earlier, as a study of authorship, than as an actual film. I think it works as both - an icily Kubrickian sense of satire is baked even into Spielberg's blockbustery flourishes (I'm going off sheer sensibility here; as I said, we have no way of knowing what was really the brainchild of either man). Look, for example, at the design of Rouge City, garish, flashy, and colorful; exactly the gaudy hell that a dying society concerned only with mindless, distracting, dispassionate entertainment and pleasure would create. Not that it working "well" makes it any less fascinating to me, particularly because the extent to which it works or doesn't work could be purely accidental. Ultimately, none of us were present for the creative process of this thing, so it's all guesswork based on what we know of each director. I mean, hell, that's a fascinating paradox in and of itself - the idea that the less it works as a movie, the more the seams between the two auteurs are visible, the more it works as a fascinating study of authorship. Not that there aren't any seams, of course. The aforementioned Flesh Fair is a wildly uneven addition, appropriately terrifying in parts and goofy at others (the Chris Rock cameo is the one thing in the film I would excise entirely), feeling largely out of step with the film. But these flaws and others, for the reasons mentioned above, almost make me love the movie more. And this in particular is something we have Spielberg on record claiming as his idea, so it's one of the only things in the film we can pick at from a place of knowledge. Was the Flesh Fair conceived by Spielberg as an attempt to think of the darkest thing he possibly could, to "prove" that he could go as dark as Kubrick? "They made us too smart, too quick, and too many. We are suffering for the mistakes they made because when the end comes, all that will be left is us. That's why they hate us." It's an unnecessary touch, if so - the film is plenty disturbing on its own, moment to moment but particularly in its implications. I'm almost surprised Spielberg was even capable of something this nauseatingly downbeat, but then I snap back and remember that only he could make something this disturbing in this specific way, that it was only possible because of how he weaponizes his usual Spielberg Touches. It leaves a lot of room for ambiguity in terms of artistic intent, and I think that's where a lot of the divisiveness comes from. Hell, the first time I watched this, even I fell into the trap of thinking the film's final section and ending was the film lapsing into schmaltz, at least until I picked at it and realized hey, that was actually a little fucked. Now, seeing that ending again in context of the rest of the film, it's almost nauseatingly bleak, one of the most horrifying closing passages I can think of. That section feels, appropriately, like Spielberg's answer to 2001 (I'm sure it's coincidence that this came out in the actual 2001, but what serendipity!) - a more advanced lifeform situating us in a twitchy, semi-comforting echo of the cosmically smaller life we once lived, though here out of benevolence rather than toward a goal of transcendence, as in Kubrick's film. Unexpectedly, though, Spielberg's take on this is much more hopeless than Kubrick's. There's still hope for humanity at the end of 2001 - maybe we'll make all the same mistakes again, but we'll always have another shot. In A.I., hope doesn't exist even as a distant memory - we're gone, and we can only come back as briefly comforting echoes of our long-dead selves, and as the simulation fades, we're once again gone forever, lost to the infinity of space and time. "I am... I was!"