* AI: Artificial Intelligence - this is the first time I have seen it since at the cinema in 2001, where I distinctly remember a woman in the smallish audience saying loudly at the end "well, that was weird". And let's face it, it is an odd movie: certainly the most expensive and melancholic story about future robots ever made. But it's a really remarkable looking film, and as with Minority Report, Spielberg manages a creepy vision of a half dystopian future that sticks in the mind for days after seeing it. The acting is also really fine, I think, and the direction extremely pleasing in the way Spielberg routinely is.
Watching it this time, it occurred to me that it is pretty much a realisation of what I read was George Lucas' original idea for Star Wars - to tell a story from the robots' point of view. While the film is not thematically novel (I think its most similar predecessor is actually Astroboy), it is the best treatment of the existential crisis that embodied AI itself may suffer that has ever been made.
Many people feel sure that the ending was Spielberg's idea tacked on to a story which probably originally ended with a robot suicide; certainly I can understand why people suspect this, as it has his familiar theme of "family" re-union. But he has stated in interviews that the parts which people suspect are his (and he must be referring to the last 10 or 15 minutes) were always in the Kubrick treatment which he turned into a script. Until someone else has seen Kubrick's treatment, I think we should just take his word for it, and so some of the criticisms about the movie are, in a sense, made on a false presumption. In any event, I don't think the ending is overly sentimental; or at least, it's certainly a bitter-sweet type of sentimentality. In fact, it is ambiguous as to exactly has happened with David - I have just read somewhere that John Williams says he dies at the end, and if the whole "resurrection" was designed to let him shut down in peace, that does make sense. Yet the voice over is ambiguous on the point. I guess ambiguity does not always hold back a science fiction film from greatness, but it tends not to help.
Which leads me to the the major point that the movie can be faulted for - the lack of clarity about the spindly creatures at the end. They are, everyone now accepts, meant to be advanced "robots"; but the cues by which one is meant to definitely understand that on first viewing are far from as clear as they should be. I don't even like their design, and the quasi weightlessness they exhibit which also adds to the confusion over whether they are meant to be "otherworldly" or not. There was, after all, one large spindly looking alien spied in the mists of the mother ship at the end of Close Encounters, and memory of that must surely have been in many viewers' minds.
But, having understood them as advanced, evolved "mechas", their apparent concern for David does raise a philosophical question of interest for transhumanism: do we really have a solid basis for assuming that love and altruism would be the outcome of super-advanced AI? Or would future intelligence, losing its connection to flesh and blood emotionalism, appear to us as just ruthless and cold? Frank Tipler argued that game theory was reason to believe it would be altruistic, but I am not sure how convinced other futurists are about this.
In any event, despite its flaws, it is a highly original and interesting film, and more praise to Spielberg for even attempting such "difficult" material and nearly pulling it off.
* Lost Horizon (1973 version): Oh Good Lord - I knew this film had a horrible reputation, but I attempted yesterday (mostly successfully) to plough through and check it out for myself. (My kids kept walking in and out of the room saying "you said this was terrible, why are you still watching it?")
It is spectacularly bad in every conceivable respect - a cast completely unsuited to a quasi-romantic musical; horrendous, cringe-inducing acting by nearly everyone (Michael York and Sally Kellerman in particular); a bunch of truly terrible songs by Burt Bacharach and Hal David with the only "memorable" one (The World is a Circle) working as an unpleasant ear worm that just won't stop; the rest of the music (melodramatic strings) sounding like it escaped from a 1940's film; an awful script; even sets which look cheap and tacky.
It's long; it's awful; it's a wonder anyone who appeared in it ever worked in film again. Comes close to being recommended as "so bad its good", but like Ayn Rand, its length mitigates against that recommendation.
*Sunshine (2007): I like space faring science fiction, generally, and while this one starts out in a sort of promising fashion, by the end it is a complete and utter mess.
The fault, I think, must be put down to the director Danny Boyle. I just can't believe that an editor alone could be responsible for such a hash made in the last 30 minutes or so. Sorry to keep bringing up Spielberg again, but Boyle here is like the anti-Spielberg in terms of making a film in which the action sequences become narratively nearly completely opaque.
As for science, we'll not dwell on the improbabilities of attempting to re-start the sun with all the fissile material on Earth. That's just an improbability to accept, and without which there is no movie. But it is remarkable that for a script which showed some vague concern for having a plausible looking massive spaceship, they get some science very wrong. The super-fast freeze of a body in the vacuum of space is the main example, but the whole "everything that gets out of shield shadow instantly explodes in sparks" shtick was not very realistic either.
I am really surprised that the movie scores 75% on Rottentomatoes, and am inclined, even without worrying about the science, to go along with this (spoiler containing) summary:
The crew seemed like a bunch of college dorm dwellers thrown into a really bad camping trip. The crew seemed… unprofessional. And far less trained and together than you would have expected. They also make sure one, and only one, person can do any job on the ship. For a crew replicating a previous failed mission, I might think they’d want to have multiple redundancies. And the worst part: I thought this was just an sci-fi thriller. No, it’s a slasher film. The director uses some stupid tricks (e.g., 1 to 2 frame still picture inserts to create a sense of foreboding) to goose the story, and the final bit with a psycho, 3rd degree burned astronaut from the first failed mission stalking the crew and slashing/stabbing them was just too much.I'm very glad I didn't spend money to see it.
4 comments:
The original story on which AI was based was written by one of my favourite authors, in SF or out, Brian Aldiss, and it was from this story that Kubrick originally got the idea of a film. (It was very basic, just three pages - an android and his robot teddy run away from home.)
It was one of the many stories in which Aldiss used a literary technique, at least in part, to work out his difficult childhood, specifically his relationship with a distant mother.
A lot of the other twists and turns and details in the film, I understand, were suggested by Kubrick. The film's lack of success was in part doomed by its complicated production history, going through first Aldiss, then Kubrick, then Spielberg. I hear Aldiss wasn't even invited to the premiere...
One revealing detail - for some time, apparently, Aldiss and Kubrick's discussions centred around the possibility of the part of David being played by an actual android!
Ah yes, Aldiss writes a little bit about the process of book to film here (sections 3 and 4).
Thanks for the links to Aldiss, Tim.
Re Sunshine - I seem to recall you mentioning that you had seen it and had some issues with it too.
I did see it. Can't remember what my issues with it were, but your description sounds about right.
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