Property Search
Cars Online
Insurance For Women
Free Insurance Quote
Life Insurance
Online Dating
Flights Online
Play the UK Lottery
Compare quotes. Insure.
Place your Bet!
Flight Centre Specials
Spielberg's tribute to Kubrick
Posted Thu, 04 Oct 2001
| Rated | PG 13 |
| Running Time | 144 mins |
| Starring | Haley Joel Osment, Frances O'Connor, Jude Law, William Hurt |
| Screenplay | Steven Spielberg, Ian Watson, based on a short story by Brian Aldiss |
| Director | Steven Spielberg |
| Website | http://aimovie.warnerbros.com |
| Movie Details | The Internet Movie Database |
The much-awaited film by Oscar winner Steven Spielberg, "A.I. Artificial Intelligence" is set in a future that is unlike anything we know today - starting a family is subject to strict governmental restrictions, every aspect of daily life is monitored, and technology has increased to an extent that most normal work is performed by robots.
Emotion is the last, controversial frontier in robot evolution. Robots are sophisticated appliances but do not feelings, until Cybertronics Manufacturing creates a solution – the prototype 'feeling" robot named David.
Haley Joel Osment stars as David, the prototype "feeling" robot, who is adopted by Henry and Monica Swinton (Sam Robards and Frances O’Connor), a Cybertronics employee and his wife, whose own son (Jake Thomas) is so ill that he has been cryogenically frozen until a cure can be found.
Unlike the earlier models, David actually absorbs information and images, and collates them in a way that is very human. He also connects these ideas to his emotions. And he starts to think about his own realness
Though he gradually becomes the Swinton’s child, with all the love and stewardship that entails, a series of unexpected circumstances make this life impossible for David.
Without final acceptance by humans or machines, and armed only with Teddy, his supertoy teddy bear and protector, David embarks on a journey to discover where he truly belongs, uncovering a world in which the line between robot and machine is both terrifyingly vast and profoundly thin.
Based on the short story "Supertoys Last All Summer Long" by Brian Aldiss, "A.I." was an obsession of the late filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, who worked on this material for 15 years before passing it onto long-time friend Steven Spielberg, who ultimately wrote and directed the movie.
"In the 1980s, Stanley Kubrick took me into his creative confidence to tell me an absolutely beautiful story that was impossible to forget," says Spielberg. "I think it was the careful blend of science and humanity that made me anxious for Stanley to tell it, and after he was gone, led me to want to tell it for him."
The movie opens in South Africa on Friday October 5.
Watch this space for our review!
This is what international critics had to say about it:
"Here is one of the most ambitious films of recent years, filled with
wondrous sights and provocative ideas, but it miscalculates in asking us to invest our emotions in a character that is, after all, a machine."
Roger Ebert, Chicago-Sun Times
“A.I. will beguile some viewers, perplex others. Its vision is too capacious, its narrative route too extended, the shift in tone (from suburban domestic to rural nightmare to urban archaeology) too ornery to make the film a flat-out wowser of the E.T. stripe.
A.I. boasts a beautiful central performance — Haley Joel Osment, 13, plays David with a kind of buoyant gravity — and a canny turn by Jude Law as a robo-stud, while other actors are wan.”
Richard Corliss, Times
“Fans of Steven Spielberg will be sorely disappointed if they're expecting "A.I. Artificial Intelligence" to be another warm and gooey "E.T…The only truly satisfied customers may be fans of Haley Joel Osment: this remarkable 13-year-old is absolutely amazing as David…”
"A.I includes the best of both
Spielberg and Kubrick. It also embraces their worst traits as well. The sensibilities of these two filmmaking icons are night and day, black and white. Spielberg wants to reinforce our belief systems, tell us truths we already know. Kubrick wants to disturb us, and show us things we don't want to face.”
Paul Clinton, CNN
“Some people may read it as a simple fable of a robot who learns to love, but what’s on screen is not so cut and dried. It’s a movie that makes us ponder the very nature of love—how it’s hard-wired into us, how it blurs the line between the selfish and the selfless. Is love the ultimate affirmation of free will, or its negation? “A.I.” exhilarates, frustrates and provokes: it’s the most ambitious Hollywood movie in sight.”
David Ansen, Newsweek
“A.I. touches the emotions, but only in individual scenes…The overall story, however, isn't as touching. Both distant and sentimental, it's too cozy for Kubrick and too chilly for Spielberg,
who hasn't fashioned a movie this frustrating since 1987's Empire of the Sun…Like that film, this is a movie to be knocked, chewed and gummed, but not dismissed. It's the first 2001 release I've rushed to see twice.”
Mike Clark, USA Today
