The original conceptualist of A.I. was Stanley Kubrick, or however the hell
you spell his last name. He had plans for this movie eleven years ago, but due to
either laziness, money, or as he claimed
"The special effects weren't advanced enough" the movie never got produced. After he
made the movie
Sex, Sex, and More Sex, I mean Eyes Wide Shut, he planned on producing
and directing A.I...
But what's this? UH OH! It seems Old Stan is pushing up daisies. So Steven Spielberg
decides to make it, seeing as he talked a lot about it with Stan. Now everybody thinks
it's gonna suck because the original person didn't make it. Or something. Anyway,
Spielberg makes it and it's in theaters and I saw it and you're gonna read my review.
Now, unlike The Animal, I'm actually writing this the day I saw it so I'll
remember it. The movie opens with a shot of the ocean, with a narration of what has
transpired over the last 200 or something years (sea levels have risen and the coastal
cities have gone kerplunk). It cuts to a bunch of old people in suits talking in some
sort of library about Artificial Intelligence. Then the main guy stabs
some girl in the hand with a pin, and it turns out she's really a robot. Then they go
into some shit
about how robots can't actually feel emotions, and their purpose is to make a robot boy
who can love. So
then it goes to some people in a cryogenics lab, and they're looking at their son
who is in a coma. The
lady reads to him and stuff. Then some more stuff happens, and eventually the dad
brings home a robot
(or 'mecha') boy who just walks around and does stuff for 15 minutes.
Then the dad explains to the mom
that if she does some stuff and says some words, the robot will be imprinted on
her and love her. She
goes through some moral dilemmas and eventually does and says the stuff.
Now, a la his complex programming, the boy will love the mother for all eternity.
So then stuff happens
and the mom gives the robot a toy bear, which is also intelligent. That is one
spiffy bear, I'll tell
you. Conveniently, their other son wakes up. Oh ho. So he comes home and
sees David (that's the robot's
name, by the way) as some kind of toy. He wants to get David in trouble, so he
tells him that if he cuts
a lock of his Mom's hair while she's sleeping she'll love him more. He tries to go do
this, and
predictably they think he was trying to kill her. They find out that he really
wasn't later on and talk
about it while they're setting up for the other kid's (Martin or Henry, I forget) birthday.
So they're
at the pool, and all the other kids gather around David to look at him. Now this one
fat kid wants to
see if David can feel pain, and says "Duh, I'm going to stab you in the arm and you
tell me if it hurts
ok?" So he does it, and before he does any real damage David gets scared and grabs
onto the other kid,
henceforth known as Menry since I can't remember if it's Henry or Martin. Well he backs
into the pool,
and since David doesn't need to breath he doesn't go back to the surface or let go.
The adults rescue
Menry (or was it Hartin?) and leave David at the bottom of the pool.
Now the parents don't want anybody drowning or getting stabbed with scissors or imploding
because of the
robot boy, so they decide to take him back. Now for some ludicrous reason the manufacturers
made it so
the imprint is permanent, so they'll have to destroy him if he's taken back. So she
takes him to the
plant place where he was made to be destroyed. But mommy loves her boy! So instead of
going there she
drops him and they go into some nearby woods where she tells David that she has to
leave him,
and to go any way but towards the factory. This is actually a very emotional scene,
and I'm not going
to make fun of it because it is very heart-wrenching. If I were a woman I probably
would have cried.
Now it cuts to a hotel room with a sharp dressed man and an average looking woman.
It turns out that
the man is actually a mecha designed to pleasure people (yes, that way). So that's what he
does. Yeah.
We find out his name is Joe. So he goes into another woman's room, but finds out
she's dead. Then her
lover comes in (Who is actually Elliot from Just Shoot Me) and confesses that he
killed her. Joe gets
blamed though, so he runs into the woods. Now it goes back to David and Teddy (the bear)
wandering
through the woods. They see a truck, which dumps a bunch of old robot parts. Understandably,
David is
horrified. Then, a bunch of other robots come and pick through the junk and fuse the parts
with their
bodies. That right there is a little disturbing, kind of like the thing in the first
Toy Story where
Woody is in Sid's house. Joe shows up and mingles with the other robots now. Then for
some reason, a
giant hot air balloon that looks EXACTLY like the moon comes over the horizon and all the
robots run.
David, Teddy, and Joe all end up holding on to each other, as they have a net thrown over
them by guys
on weird motorcycles. The net is hauled up to the balloon and Joe and David are taken up,
but Teddy
falls to the ground. They are taken to a 'Flesh Fest', where stray robots are destroyed
for human
entertainment. One of the female robots who helped David is destroyed by having acid poured
on her. Also
very disturbing. Now Teddy followed the balloon and ends up the stadium's lost and found.
He crawls out
and finds David, and a little girl sees the bear. She also see's David and thinks he's
real, but her dad
(Who sort of runs the show) figures out he's not. He's still a little hesitant about
killing him though.
Anyway, a fat guy makes him die. So it's him and Joe's turn to be killed. Some stuff
happens and the
audience starts rioting because he's a little boy. Joe, David, and Teddy escape.
I'm getting tired of typing so I'll summarize the next part shortly because it's not too
important. They
go to Rogue City and ask a computer program that supposedly knows everything where the
Blue Fairy is.
I had better explain that because I completely neglected that part. In the beginning,
they read David
Snow White, and from then on David thinks if he can find the Blue Fairy and become a
real boy, his mom
will love him. So they deduce that they need to get to Manhattan, and find some
crying lions or
something. The police find Joe and they steal a police helicopter, then fly to
Manhattan which is now
a ruined city because half of it is underwater. They see some crying lions (or
something) and land in
that building. David goes in and sees another David exactly like him, and goes
insane and smacks his
head off with a lamp. Now this professor guy who apparently made him, comes and
tells David how much of
a success he is and that the team would like to meet him. So he leaves. David
wanders around the office,
and comes to the library thing that was shown at the beginning of the movie.
Except one difference. There
are dozens of lifeless, expressionless Davids hanging on the walls. It's actually very unsettling. He then
sees the logo of the company that his mom told him not to go towards,
so he climbs out the window and
sits on the ledge. Joe is hovering from the helicopter watching.
Then David falls off the building (on
purpose) and into the water. Now at this point I thought
"Whoa, that's a great ending. Really makes you
think."
So overall I thought this movie was pretty good. It examined all the
fundamental ills of society and NO.
You'd think that wouldn't you? But the movie's not over yet, children. It shows David
floating in the
water, then some fish swim around, then he sinks. Then a claw comes out and drags
him out of the water.
IT IS JOE! Turns out this spiffy little chopper can go underwater too. David
explains how he saw the
Blue Fairy and needs to go back down. BUT OH NO there is another Police helicopter
that has a magical
magnet or something and it starts to pull Joe up. Joe says goodbye and hits the
submerge button on the
chopper thing. So David goes down. He maneuvers through the sunken Coney Island to the
Pinocchio display
and finds the Blue Fairy. He stops the chopper in front of her and starts to ask her
to make him a real
boy. The ferris wheel breaks and falls on top of his chopper, and one of the beams
hits straight on the
cockpit with David and Teddy inside.
This was actually a very well done movie. The complexity of the SHIT! It's not over?
Dammit! Ok. Now
Teddy says something about how they're ok, and David keeps praying. The narrator
says that he kept
praying until his mouth mechanism atrophied, as did his joints. But his eyes were
still open, and he
could still see the Blue Fairy even after the lights on his copter dimmed.
And so he prayed...
*Applause* One of the things I really liked about this movie was that WHAT THE HELL?!
There's more? Yep,
There's more. Now it fast forwards 2000 years, and everything is frozen. There are
vehicles in the sky
and weird looking creatures excavating the ice that I thought at first were aliens.
One vehicle in
particular goes down to the place where David and his chopper is, and reactivates him.
He walks up to
the Blue Fairy and she crumbles into pieces.
It turns out these strange beings are actually robots, and there are no more humans
around.They go
through David's memory and create a house exactly like his. He is happy to be home.
After all that crap
that fooled me into thinking the movie was over, I thought this was good.
It would have been good even
without the other crap too. There's one problem though. IT'S NOT THE END.
David wants his Mom. But the robot people can't bring her back without a DNA sample.
Well good old Teddy
happens to have the hair from when David cut it from his mom. So they make her from that.
But for some
reason she will only live for one day, but David has fun with her anyway. Her husband and
kid aren't
there, just the two of them. So she is about to go to sleep, and David tucks her in and
gets in the bed
with her.
THE END
No, it really is the end this time. Besides the last 30 minutes, this movie was great.
The only problem
(besides the ending) was that people are way too stupid to understand this. There were
about 3 points
in this movie where it was supposed to be funny. The audience laughed about 20
times. They were
laughing at things that weren't even remotely funny, and they weren't laughing at the
things that were.
That's usually how it goes in a serious movie anyway. One thing that the writer people
did very well was
create the part of the bear. It could have easily been the comic relief, cracking jokes
every 30 seconds
to put a little levity in the movie. But this is a serious movie, and putting something
like that in
would have completely screwed it up.
God damn I wrote too much. And I spoiled this whole thing by being serious about it.
There just wasn't
much to make fun of here, I guess. So was it worth my $7.50? Probably. Except for the
fact that the
theater was so cramped that I had to sit in between two fat ladies, and the one on the
right kept
farting (I am not kidding) and spilling her butter-laden popcorn all over my arm.
I also put my hand in
something sticky on the railing on the way out. It smelled like apples.
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