A.I. Artificial Intelligence

In the 22nd century, rising sea levels from global warming have wiped out coastal cities, reducing the world's population. Mecha humanoid robots, seemingly capable of complex thought but lacking in emotions, have been created.

In Madison, New Jersey, David, a prototype Mecha child capable of experiencing love, is given to Henry Swinton and his wife Monica, whose son Martin contracted a rare disease and has been placed in suspended animation. Monica initially feels uneasy with David, but eventually warms to him and activates his imprinting protocol, causing him to have an enduring, childlike love for her. David seeks to have Monica express the same love towards him, and also befriends Teddy, Martin's robotic teddy bear. Martin is unexpectedly cured of his disease and brought home. Martin becomes jealous of David and goads him to perform worrisome acts, such as cutting off the locks of Monica's hair while she is sleeping. At a pool party, one of Martin's friends pokes David with a knife, triggering his self-protection programming. David grabs onto Martin, and they both fall to the bottom of the pool, with David holding Martin tightly. Others jump in and save Martin before he drowns, and David is accused of being a danger to living people. Henry convinces Monica to return David to his creators to be destroyed, thinking that if David can love, he also can hate. On the way there, Monica has a change of heart and spares David from destruction by leaving him in the woods. With Teddy as his only companion, David recalls The Adventures of Pinocchio and decides to find the Blue Fairy so that she may turn him into a real boy, which he believes will win back Monica's love.

David and Teddy are captured by a "Flesh Fair", a traveling circus-like event where obsolete Mecha are destroyed before jeering crowds who hate Mecha, believing them to be both dangerous and a cause of human unemployment. About to be destroyed himself, David pleads for his life, and the audience, deceived by David's realistic nature, revolts and allows David to escape alongside Gigolo Joe, a male prostitute Mecha on the run from authorities after being framed for murder. David, Teddy, and Joe go to the decadent resort town of Rouge City, where "Dr. Know", a holographic answer engine, directs them to the top of Rockefeller Center in the flooded ruins of Manhattan and also provides fairy tale information interpreted by David as suggesting that a Blue Fairy has the power to help him. Above the ruins of Manhattan, David meets Professor Hobby, his creator, who tells him that their meeting demonstrates David's ability to love and desire. David finds many copies of himself, including female variants called "Darlene", boxed and ready to be shipped. Disheartened by his lost sense of individuality, David attempts suicide by falling from a skyscraper into the ocean. While underwater, David catches sight of a figure resembling the Blue Fairy before Joe rescues him in an amphibious aircraft. Before David can explain, Joe is captured via electromagnet by authorities. David and Teddy take control of the aircraft to see the Fairy, which turns out to be a statue from an attraction on Coney Island. The two become trapped when the Wonder Wheel falls on their vehicle. Believing the Blue Fairy to be real, David asks the statue to turn him into a real boy and repeats this request until his internal power source is depleted.

Two thousand years later, humanity has become extinct and Manhattan is now buried under glacial ice. The Mecha have evolved into an advanced form, and a group of them called the Specialists have become interested in learning about humanity. They find and revive David and Teddy. David walks to the frozen Blue Fairy statue, which collapses when he touches it. The Specialists reconstruct the Swinton family home from David's memories and explain to him, via an interactive image of the Blue Fairy, that it is impossible to make David a real boy. However, at David's insistence, they use their scientific knowledge to recreate Monica through genetic material from the strand of hair that Teddy kept. This Monica can live for only one day, and the process cannot be repeated. David spends his happiest day with Monica, and as she falls asleep in the evening, she tells David that she has always loved him: "the everlasting moment he had been waiting for", the narrator says; "David falls asleep as well and goes to that place 'where dreams are born.'"

The film's soundtrack was released by Warner Sunset Records in 2001. The original score was composed and conducted by John Williams and featured singers Lara Fabian on two songs and Josh Groban on one. The film's score also had a limited release as an official "For your consideration Academy Promo", as well as a complete score issue by La-La Land Records in 2015.[32] The band Ministry appears in the film playing the song "What About Us?" but the song does not appear on the official soundtrack album.

On Rotten Tomatoes, A.I. Artificial Intelligence holds an approval rating of 75% based on reviews from 197 critics, with an average rating of 6.60/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "A curious, not always seamless, amalgamation of Kubrick's chilly bleakness and Spielberg's warm-hearted optimism. A.I. is, in a word, fascinating."[40] On Metacritic, it has a weighted average score of 65 out of 100 based on reviews from 32 critics, which indicates "generally favorable reviews".[41] Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "C+" on an A+ to F scale.[42]

Producer Jan Harlan stated that Kubrick "would have applauded" the final film, while Kubrick's widow Christiane also enjoyed A.I.[43] Brian Aldiss admired the film as well: "I thought what an inventive, intriguing, ingenious, involving film this was. There are flaws in it and I suppose I might have a personal quibble but it's so long since I wrote it." Of the film's ending, he wondered how it might have been had Kubrick directed the film: "That is one of the 'ifs' of film history—at least the ending indicates Spielberg adding some sugar to Kubrick's wine. The actual ending is overly sympathetic and moreover rather overtly engineered by a plot device that does not really bear credence. But it's a brilliant piece of film and of course it's a phenomenon because it contains the energies and talents of two brilliant filmmakers."[44] Richard Corliss heavily praised Spielberg's direction, as well as the cast and visual effects.[45]

Roger Ebert gave the film three stars out of a possible four, saying that it is "wonderful and maddening".[46] Ebert later gave the film a full four stars and added it to his "Great Movies" list in 2011.[47] Leonard Maltin, on the other hand, gives the film two stars out of four in his Movie Guide, writing: "[The] intriguing story draws us in, thanks in part to Osment's exceptional performance, but takes several wrong turns; ultimately, it just doesn't work. Spielberg rewrote the adaptation Stanley Kubrick commissioned of the Brian Aldiss short story 'Super Toys Last All Summer Long'; [the] result is a curious and uncomfortable hybrid of Kubrick and Spielberg sensibilities." However, he calls John Williams' music score "striking". Jonathan Rosenbaum compared A.I. to Solaris (1972), and praised both "Kubrick for proposing that Spielberg direct the project and Spielberg for doing his utmost to respect Kubrick's intentions while making it a profoundly personal work."[48] Film critic Armond White, of the New York Press, praised the film noting that "each part of David's journey through carnal and sexual universes into the final eschatological devastation becomes as profoundly philosophical and contemplative as anything by cinema's most thoughtful, speculative artists – Borzage, Ozu, Demy, Tarkovsky."[49] Filmmaker Billy Wilder hailed A.I. as "the most underrated film of the past few years."[50] When British filmmaker Ken Russell saw the film, he wept during the ending.[51]

Screenwriter Ian Watson has speculated, "Worldwide, A.I. was very successful (and the 4th-highest earner of the year) but it didn't do quite so well in America, because the film, so I'm told, was too poetical and intellectual in general for American tastes. Plus, quite a few critics in America misunderstood the film, thinking for instance that the Giacometti-style beings in the final 20 minutes were aliens (whereas they were robots of the future who had evolved themselves from the robots in the earlier part of the film) and also thinking that the final 20 minutes were a sentimental addition by Spielberg, whereas those scenes were exactly what I wrote for Stanley and exactly what he wanted, filmed faithfully by Spielberg."[52][note 1]

Mick LaSalle gave a largely negative review. "A.I. exhibits all its creators' bad traits and none of the good. So we end up with the structureless, meandering, slow-motion endlessness of Kubrick combined with the fuzzy, cuddly mindlessness of Spielberg." Dubbing it Spielberg's "first boring movie", LaSalle also believed the robots at the end of the film were aliens, and compared Gigolo Joe to the "useless" Jar Jar Binks, yet praised Robin Williams for his portrayal of a futuristic Albert Einstein.[54] Peter Travers gave a mixed review, concluding "Spielberg cannot live up to Kubrick's darker side of the future.", but still put the film on his top ten list that year.[55] David Denby in The New Yorker criticized A.I. for not adhering closely to his concept of the Pinocchio character. Spielberg responded to some of the criticisms of the film, stating that many of the "so called sentimental" elements of A.I., including the ending, were in fact Kubrick's and the darker elements were his own.[56] However, Sara Maitland, who worked on the project with Kubrick in the 1990s, claimed that one of the reasons Kubrick never started production on A.I. was because he had a hard time making the ending work.[57] James Berardinelli found the film "consistently involving, with moments of near-brilliance, but far from a masterpiece. In fact, as the long-awaited 'collaboration' of Kubrick and Spielberg, it ranks as something of a disappointment." Of the film's highly debated finale, he claimed, "There is no doubt that the concluding 30 minutes are all Spielberg; the outstanding question is where Kubrick's vision left off and Spielberg's began."[58] John Simon of the National Review described A.I. "as an uneasy mix of trauma and treacle".[59]

In 2002, Spielberg told film critic Joe Leydon that "People pretend to think they know Stanley Kubrick, and think they know me, when most of them don't know either of us". "And what's really funny about that is, all the parts of A.I. that people assume were Stanley's were mine. And all the parts of A.I. that people accuse me of sweetening and softening and sentimentalizing were all Stanley's. The teddy bear was Stanley's. The whole last 20 minutes of the movie was completely Stanley's. The whole first 35, 40 minutes of the film—all the stuff in the house—was word for word, from Stanley's screenplay. This was Stanley's vision." "Eighty percent of the critics got it all mixed up. But I could see why. Because, obviously, I've done a lot of movies where people have cried and have been sentimental. And I've been accused of sentimentalizing hard-core material. But in fact it was Stanley who did the sweetest parts of A.I., not me. I'm the guy who did the dark center of the movie, with the Flesh Fair and everything else. That's why he wanted me to make the movie in the first place. He said, 'This is much closer to your sensibilities than my own.'"[60] He also added: "While there was divisiveness when A.I. came out, I felt that I had achieved Stanley's wishes, or goals."[61]

Upon re-watching the film many years after its release, BBC film critic Mark Kermode apologized to Spielberg in an interview in January 2013 for "getting it wrong" on the film when he first viewed it in 2001. He now believes the film to be Spielberg's "enduring masterpiece".[62]

• Harlan, Jan; Struthers, Jane M. (2009). A.I. Artificial Intelligence: From Stanley Kubrick to Steven Spielberg: The Vision Behind the Film. London: Thames & Hudson. ISBN 9780500514894.
• Rice, Julian (2017). Kubrick's Story: Spielberg's Film: A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 9781442278189.

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