Father Geek reporting with a review of AI from the Japanese preview screening... I just got home from seeing this flick myself... I found it enjoyable, but somehow empty. After the film several of us stood around discussing it afterwards (2 girls and 3 guys). The telling thing I think is that we were all bringing up little problems instead of little triumphs. Why? Why weren't we excitedly babbling about how great it was? Well, it was beautiful. The effects were near flawless, buuuuut something just didn't sit right. Greatness has somehow escaped the film, I'm not real sure how, but it just felt flat somehow. Beautiful, but hardly exciting. Awesome, but not awe inspiring. It just failed to capture our screening audience. I'll see it again, its great eye candy if nothing else, and maybe a second viewing will hit me different... Buuuuut for now here's our agent behind the lines in Japan...
Hi. Your old Englishman in Tokyo is here again. Quick review of A.I for you from the first wave of previews to hit Japan tonight. I was in attendance, along with several DreamWorks and Warner reps, and some lucky members of the general public.
This will be a summary review with only minor spoilers that won`t detract from the movie.
A.I. - ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (2001)
THE GOOD
- A.I. is fascinating. Your attention will be held throughout the movie. Why?
- Because it`s one of the most unpredictable movies ever. At some point you will probably just surrender and give up trying to comfort-guess how a scene is playing out, because something entirely mad happens every five minutes to throw the story in a new direction. And the point you surrender yourself to the movie is fantastic, because you become aware that you entirely in the hands of one of the world's greatest visual story tellers. This movie will defeat your pre-conceptions with it`s weirdness and thoroughly offbeat rhythm. And coming from a summer of Pearl Harbours and Mummy sequels, That`s a real thrill.
- Haley Joel Osment is a revelation. Jude Law is hilarious in his role, the supporting cast is excellent, and Teddy, the child's bear who sounds like a stoned PC talk program steals every scene he's in. In other words, solid and interesting characterization.
- The film stretches your credibility at a sensible pace. You start off in the real world. In the realm of science-fact. Soon you're in a very strange, surreal place... but the reality is still there. Hardly with time to breath, you're being hurtled along towards a truly Close Encounters style climax that is really quite transcendent and moving. And you realise that you have come a long, long way from the start of the movie. This is a good thing. You feel you have invested time in something worthwhile.
- Hitchcock shots a-plenty. There are classic images in this film. Many of them. They will haunt you.
- This is nothing like any Spielberg film you have ever seen -- despite some saying it has scenes knocked off from earlier Spielberg movies. There is a dark, quite nasty edge to a lot of the film.
THE BAD
- The flesh fair sequence, which, bizarrely, is like something ripped out of Mad Max, and feels out of place. Why?
- The voice overs suck. All of them. Every time John Hurt opens his mouth you are pulled out of the movie. It`s meant to sound reassuring, like a wise man narrating you a fairy tale. It does not work at all. It is contrived.
- The film did not know when to end. There are about four moments where you are sure the film is about to close -- and worse, they all start coming about two hours into the movie. The camera holds on a killer, film defining shot, we start pulling back, the screen starts fading, the music dies.... and then we cut to something completely different. "2000 years later." Uh.
- By the third time it`s like, damn, that would been have a great ending moment. The fourth time it`s jeez, end already. There is no sense of rhythm or structure or build or release to the ending 30 minutes. It just gets weird, then really weird. Then cheesy. Then weird. Then fizzles to the credits.
- As much as I can dig weirdness, Kubrick surrealism has raw intelligence and ambiguous behind it. We should be shown wonderful things and left to fill in the gaps with our own experiences. Here we are taken to stunning places, and then the voice over appears and rapes any semblance of depth by explaining everything that just happened, in terms Homer Simpson could understand. I`m no film snob, but the lack of narrative sophistication is hugely jarring with the sophistication of the imagery, specially when things starts to get really desolate and awe-inspiring at the end.
- Ashley Scott appears for exactly five seconds in the movie, looking 10 times hotter than she did in her pre-release promotional shot. And if you saw that, you'll know what a crime that five mere seconds is.
That`s it. But highly recommended, and as a fan of the 70s/80s Spielberg, I rate this higher than Saving Private Ryan, or Amistad, or any of Spielberg's other recent letters to America.
I do not blame Moriarty for dissecting the film into it`s component pieces and scenes, but if you're doing that you're probably missing how the movie is best enjoyed. It`s not perfect, and the ending makes some tonal mistakes. But A.I. is not a logical film, because it`s food for the soul, and souls aren't logical. It`s fragments of brilliant imagery painting an impressionistic emotional picture, that is more than the sum of it`s parts. That`s why, five hours and one party and many drinks later, in the quiet and the darkness of my home, the film returns to me vividly. The film lives in an area of your brain rarely touched by movies. For that alone, it`s head and shoulders above any other mainstream film released this year.
Judge for yourself, and don't read a single word more about the film before you do. Me? I loved it.
-Aibo Tokyo
