Empire Magazine Greatest Movies List - #265: A.I Artificial Intelligence

A unique marriage between the styles of Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick, A.I Artificial Intelligence (2001) is Pinocchio set in a dystopian future. Originally developed by Kubrick in the 1970s, it languished until 1995 when he handed it out to Spielberg who ended up directing the project after Kubrick’s death in 1999. The result is the engrossing story of a robotic child wandering a crumbling America as he tries to become a real boy.

The movie came out in 2001, the year of one of Kubrick’s most famous movie. That year was also one of the last I spent in Peru, as my family and I were living in South America because of my dad’s job. This was one of many movies I saw in English playing with Spanish subtitles and like many Steven Spielberg movies I saw it with one of my parents. Between E.T and Tintin, Spielberg has given families plenty of films to watch together. My mom loved it and of course rooted for the robot to have a happy ending, even if at the end of the day he is an artificial being.

Like many science-fiction movies, A.I is set in a rather grim future. Global warming has done its worse by flooding major cities and reducing a great part of the human population. But also like in many visions of the future technology has taken a huge leap forward, with robots becoming extremely intelligent and human-looking on the outside. Known as Mecha, they can emulate human thoughts and emotions. Professor Allen Hobby (William Hurt) wishes to take things a step further by creating a robotic boy who could actually display love, the most elusive of emotions.

Hobby creates a prototype called David (Haley Joel Osment) for the Cybertronics company who gives it to one of its employee for a testing phase. Henry (Sam Robbards) and Monica Swinton (Frances O’Connor) already have a son, but he is ill and in suspended animation until a cure can be found. Initially frightened by David, Monica warms up to him after she activates his love program, causing David to project love onto her like a real child would to a mother.

Yet after their real son Martin (Jake Thomas) returns from the hospital trouble ensues. A series of incident resulting from sibling rivalry makes the father see the robotic boy as a threat to his real son and decides to have him destroyed. On the way to Cybertronics, Monica cannot bring herself to destroy David even though he is a machine. He certainly does not act like one, seeming heart-broken when she abandons him in the woods and tells him to stay away from humans.

This is where the fairy tale really takes off. Believing his mother rejected him because he is not a real boy, David sets out on a quest to find the Blue Fairy, thinking she is a creature that can make him human just like in Pinocchio. Joining him on his quest is a robotic teddy bear (voice of Jack Angel) he befriended at the Swinton’s home, and Gigolo Joe (Jude Law) a male prostitute who has a different definition of love imprinted in his system. Their journey takes them in a forest where humans destroy Mechas for entertainment, to the futuristic Rouge City where they gather information from a holographic search engine, and finally to a flooded Manhattan.

There are many great things here, from Spielberg’s expert directing of a project with a troubled history and Janusz Kaminski’s cinematography depicting a world that is at times grey and dull and sometimes filled with beautiful neon colours such as in Rouge City. Then you have Osment proving his Academy Award nomination for The Sixth Sense was no fluke, as he initially behaves like a machine and eventually convinces us there might be a soul in there. You really end up rooting for this boy, whatever he is.

The ending has often been derided as being a touch too Spielbergian, as many assumed it was his idea to flash forward to the future when tall beings give David one more day with his mother. However he has said in an interview that this was the ending originally intended by Kubrick. Either way, I don’t think the audience would have gone with any other ending. For all the time David spent in his watery grave, he deserved one happy day with his mother regardless of his humanity.

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #147: Notorious

Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946) has many of the master director’s signature elements: spies, lies, a handsome leading man, a domineering mother, and of course a MacGuffin. As it is set after World War II the villains are logically former Nazis, but the plot is so tense in many scenes that it remains an effective thriller to this day. It also bears a huge influence on John Woo’s Mission Impossible 2 , which retains plot elements and similar dialogue, but of course has more explosions than all of Hitchcock’s films put together. Notorious is so well-made it can be studies in film classes, which is exactly what I did while taking a course on Hollywood Cinema 1930-1960 during the summer of 2009 at the University of British Columbia. As this is Hitchcock we are talking about here, there are subtler things to analyze than explosions in Notorious , no offense to the skills of Mr. John Woo. Famously there is a kissing scene between stars Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman that seemingly las...

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #91: Return of the Jedi

If you want someone to give you death stares, tell a die-hard Star Wars fan the original trilogy is not perfect. I am however going to take a risk and write that if there is one major flaw with Return of the Jedi (1983) is a lack of imagination when it comes to the central plot. After the good guys blow up the Death Star in the first movie, the bad guys are almost done building a brand new one, which of course needs to be destroyed again in more or less the same way. Richard Marquand may be directing this time, but it was still George Lucas writing. Plot hole aside, as a kid you can’t help but have fun as the good guys join forces with a tribe of living teddy bears to get the job done. Like many people in their early 30s, I was introduced to the first Star Wars trilogy by my parents who had recorded the movies, commercials included, when they were showing one night on TV. Upon first viewing, a few things stick out in the mind of a young boy watching Return of the Jedi such as:...

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #85: Blue Velvet

Exactly how do you describe a David Lynch movie? He is one of the few directors whose style is so distinctive that his last name has become an adjective. According to Urban Dictionary, the definition of Lynchian is: “having the same balance between the macabre and the mundane found in the works of filmmaker David Lynch.” To see a prime example of that adjective film lovers need look no further than Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), which does indeed begin in the mundane before slowly sinking in macabre violence. My first introduction to the world of David Lynch was through his ground breaking, but unfortunately interrupted, early 1990s TV series Twin Peaks . This was one of the first television shows to grab viewers with a series-long mystery: who killed Laura Palmer? A mix of soap opera, police procedural, and the supernatural, it is a unique show that showed the darkness hidden in suburbia and remains influential to this day. Featuring Kyle MacLachlan as an FBI investigator with a l...

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