Following up an Oscar winner is apparently a difficult task.
Although Scorsese followed up his long overdue win for The Departed with the fine-but-slight Shutter Island, and Inarritu managed to follow Birdman with the small matter of The Revenant, Mr. Spielberg seems to find it harder. Famously originated as a project for Stanley
Kubrick before perceived technical limitations, and then death prevented his
vision find its way to the screen, A.I.
Artificial Intelligence was burdened from birth.
While the two were apparently friends, Spielberg and Kubrick
hardly showed the same worldviews on screen.
Where Spielberg favours classical Hollywood narratives and happy
endings, Kubrick’s world is more ambiguous.
It’s hard to imagine, for example, a Spielberg version of Eyes Wide Shut without Cruise, Kidman,
and child sharing a sexless embrace against a strong white light, reunited as a
family unit. Kubrick’s Jurassic Park might have ended with Hammond
as Dr. Moreau, alone on the island, descending into madness among his creations.
Kubrick’s endings tend to leave the audience hanging, as if there’s more to the
story existing solely in your imagination; Spielberg on the other hand prefers
to present his endings neat packages, normally happy ones tied with a bow. What
Kubrick might have made of Brian Aldiss’ source material ‘Super-Toys Last All
Summer Long’ is anyone’s guess, so I’ll try to put that aside and focus on
what’s on the screen.
It’s probably a bad sign that of his post-Millennium work,
this is one of the films I think of watching the least. On review, it’s not as bad as I remember… for
the most part. And that is quite a
caveat, given that the film’s ending ruins much of the good work before
it. Separating Kubrick’s ghost from
what’s in the film is hard, and has informed many opinions of the film, but the
ending is just inexcusable and feels like concession to a studio putting up a
handsome budget, and wanting a Hollywood ending in return.
For an admirably long time, A.I. is a very dark movie. While his trademark broken family unit
is largely the main thrust of the plot, Spielberg plays against type, making
his obligatory cute kid (Hayley Joes Osment’s android David) both endearing and
creepy as he works his way into a tragedy-stricken family. Over-exposed, grainy photography marks out
the early scenes, highlighting David’s artifice against the very real need for
love from both him and his adoptive mother Monica (Frances O’Connor). Some of these scenes are genuinely moving,
with David an apparently adequate surrogate until the family’s real son
recovers and returns. Things turn dark
as David’s programmed survival mechanism almost results in the son’s drowning,
the look of shock on David’s face as he sinks to the bottom of a pool both
human and completely alien.
Other scenes that are brutally un-Spielberg include Monica
leaving David in the forest; him pleading for mercy from his mother, while she
sees the act as a tearful necessity. The
Ministry-soundtracked Flesh Fair, on one hand full of Steam Punk cliché, on the
other framed like hideous torture porn, our sympathies lying more with the
endangered ‘mechas’ than the baying humans.
Gigolo Joe (Jude Law, doing some of his best work) is an interesting
character to thrown into a film about children but highlights that in this
nightmarish vision of the future, even sex has become artificial. Finally, the scene in which David encounters
rows of boxes containing more Davids is nothing short of horrible for a character
who has at this point gained our sympathies.
But then there’s the ending… Eschewing for a second the
cheating (David is apparently the first Mecha with self-awareness and emotions,
so how come Joe shows an instinct for self-peservation? I normally hate
plot-hole dwellers, but this one bugged me), and how awful the Dr. Know scene
is (not even a fleeting reference to Bad Brains…), the ending of this film is
truly awful. A much more effective
closing would have been David, sitting in a submerged Coney Island, forever
waiting for the Blue Fairy to make him real.
That’s how Kubrick would have
ended it, but Spielberg can’t resist the family reunion. So we are subjected to
the post-human sequence in which the robot inhabitants of Earth find David in
the ice and offer him one day of maternal reunion. A.I. is at once an exploration of the nature of
love, particularly between mother and child, and admirable for steadfastly
refusing to let David lose his innocence), but at the same time it’s horribly
saccharine, and he should have learned by now.
For a second sci-fi adaptation on the bounce, Spielberg
tackled Phillip K Dick’s Minority Report
next. Much like Hitchcock before him,
the populist Spielberg by this stage works with the biggest stars in the
world. The next few years would see him
work with Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hanks (again), and Daniel Craig but first he
would pair up with Hollywood’s then-biggest star, Tom Cruise. An underrated actor in my opinion, Cruise
suits the part of framed cop John Anderton down to the ground.
While not destined to go down as a stone cold Spielberg
classic, Minority Report is a fine
film and does a great many things right. It’s effectively a film noir plot
about a man wrongly (or is he?) accused of a murder, the twist being that it
hasn’t happened yet and the man is in charge of predictive crime
prevention. Phil K Dick’s ‘what if?’
sci-fi often presents moral quandaries, and high-concept ‘Pre-Crime’ (an agency
which uses clairvoyant ‘Precognatives’ to accurately predict murders and stop
them before they happen) is a great one.
Spielberg, however, uses it as a jet-fuelled plot catalyst and from the
moment Anderton is accused, the film barely comes up for air. And we all know
how good Tom Cruise is at running…
Minority Report is
shot in a neo-noir style but structured like an Indiana Jones-like chase film;
detective drama meets electric set pieces.
Rather than the chiaroscuro style that defined noir, it is awash with
over-exposed imagery early on with a focus on shots of eyes and glasses, what
can and can’t be seen; it features the strangest (and probably most literal)
femme fatale in cinema history (Emily Mortimer’s jittery ‘precog’ Agatha); and
it builds to an understated climax, with an accusation rather than a chase or a
fist fight. As blockbusters go, it’s a
strange one; noir-ish, but the theme of predetermined guilt makes it almost
Hitchcockian (often a stylistic influence on Spielberg). The high-concept, CGI-heavy sci-fi with a
human core (Spielberg’s broken family unit, never more broken than here) is
pure Spielberg.
The set pieces are impressive. For example, the scene where Anderton
escapes from his own squad is one of the best in Spielberg’s latter work. He cuts to the family eating dinner before showing
the jetpacks crashing through their floor.
He sells the Lexus factory escape without the usual physics-defying jumping
and punching. It’s exciting and just the right side of funny.
Yes, there are problems: Anderton’s drug habit is a little
trite and doesn’t quite fit the story; Agatha’s psychic abilities seem to
suddenly switch on when a (admittedly pretty cool) set piece requires them; and
the ending is ever so slightly on the too-happy side, although he does have the
good grace not to oversell it.
He’s yet to venture back into pure sc-fi (and I’d much
rather he did than fuck about with animation) and on the strength of these
films, he’s still got the visual flair to make it interesting but he’s arguably
a bit too optimistic, and not quite cynical enough, to pull it off in a post-Blade Runner and The Matrix world. Bloody
optimist…
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