Rating: 
Summary: Did I see the same movie everyone else did?
Review: I'm amazed by all the bad reviews this movie is getting here. I didn't find this movie boring or stupid at all. And no, the audience I saw it with did not yawn loudly and scream, 'this is stupid' at the screen. If you are the type of person the needs gratuitous nudity and things blowing up every couple minutes to keep your attention then yeah, I can see how you would get bored but I hope that the average film filmgoer is not like that. Some people say that Spielberg messed up the film by giving it a happy ending. I don't think that to be the case at all. I don't want to give it away but I feel that the ending only appears to be happy. The ending is very Kubrick.In the movie, David (Haley Joel Osment) is a child robot that is the first of his kind to be programmed to love. The woman who adopts him, Monica is warned to think about the programming because once she programs David to love her, it is irreversible. If she ever decides that she doesn't want David, she has to send him back to the factory to be destroyed so she is suppose to be 100% sure that she wants him. But guess what? She programs him and she soon decides that she does not want him anymore. She leaves him in the woods to fend for himself with only a teddy bear to keep him company. David thinks that if was a real boy, Monica would accept and love him like she does her real son. Monica read the story of Pinocchio to David. In Pinocchio, the Blue Fairy transforms wooden Pinocchio into a real boy. David soon meets Gigolo Joe (Jude Law) and they set off to find the Blue Fairy. For most movies, the only comments I usually hear are, "I like that movie" or "'so-and-so' did a really good job." Not with this one. I've had many discussions with people about the themes and questions this movie brings. Maybe if Kubrick was alive, this movie would have been better but we'll never know and it doesn't really matter, it's still a great movie.
Rating: 
Summary: One of the most boring films I've ever seen
Review: I normally enjoy scifi films, and have liked most of Spielberg and Kubrick's individual works. But this one had me hoping for more from the first few minutes of overacted melodrama by the parents-to-be. And after waiting and looking for more for over 2 hours, I was rewarded with such a muddled ending that the writer forced his characters (synthetic at that) to overexplain the simplest details. I thought it was much more a monument to self-indulgence and self-centeredness than to any vision of what love and reality are about. My wife put it best when she said "The Velveteen Rabbit" is a much better story. Give me "Blade Runner" any day.
Rating:
Summary: Haley Joel Osmont
Review: His performance as David was stellar! The special effects bracketed his emotional portrayal as the little android brought to life whose only thought was to be loved by his mother, thoroughly enhancing him. There is not enough love in this world. I believe his character personifies that which is in all of us - a desire - a passion to be infused with the love that should be the purest love, which is mother love. There is only one other place that I can think of that presents agape which is where the little android wound up - heaven.
Rating:
Summary: Sci-Fi Pinocchio
Review: Spielberg's "A.I." is a bizarre, futuristic, very long retelling of "Pinocchio". The only redeeming feature was Haley Joel Osment's performance. We were evacuated from the theatre two thirds of the way through the movie due to a false fire alarm. My husband and I were the only patrons to return to view the rest of the movie. 'Nuf said...
Rating: 
Summary: Too Long!
Review: A tedious piece of sci fi. Way too long with little to say. Too many shots of the robot boy gazing upwards wishing for his mother. Was this the point? How did the boy sleep 2000 years underwater a barely have a wrinkle in his clothes?
Rating: 
Summary: AI - Artificial inception
Review: A.I. is worth the matinee price but if you are a Spielburg fan, you probably will be disappointed in the uneven flow which drags periodically and the several false endings. The movie seems much longer than it is. The sense of deja vu creeps in as you realize you're seeing clips of D.A.R.Y.L., Total Recall, Splash, Stepford Wives, 2001, Contact, Neverending Story, etc. I realize that all movies are grounded in what has gone before but the strands of originality in AI are deeply enmeshed in the past. The narrative fairy tale style takes over mid-movie and leaves the viewer with a fairy tale ending. Again, worth the matinee price but I hardly expect to see this offering in the theaters very long.
Rating:
Summary: I'd really give it Zero (0)
Review: It had too many comparisons to Pinochio and didn't "stretch my mind" or anything. It was too far removed from the norm for that. I'd avoid this movie like a nuclear meltdown. It coulda been so much better...
Rating:
Summary: 5 Stars for Making Me Think So Much!
Review: Saw A.I. again! Very strange. The first viewing seemed slow and long, but the second viewing went very fast. Since I knew the plot, my attention was drawn to the film's obvious symbolisms: Flat Facts and Fairy Tales. Our warming planet continues to lose its ecological balance and Spielberg shows us one kind of devastating future...in an entertaining format. Spielberg's dark forest scene was delightfully artificial like the kind you expect to see in a children's fairy tale and David's adventures seeking Pinocchio's Blue Fairy were very endearing. In the first part of the film when Monica reads Pinocchio to her real son in the bed David had slept in just days earler,we see the usurped David, sitting off in a corner, listening intently to Monica's story of Pinocchio, the puppet who finally goes to sleep and when he awakes he is transformed by the Blue Fairy into a real,live boy. Spielberg's ending has David forever going to sleep without any hope of awakening as a real live boy.....but, like the Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales, David is given a trade off: he sleeps, never to awaken, but, for the first time, he dreams like a human... Spielberg is a grand story teller!
Rating:
Summary: Thought Provoking Masterpiece
Review: "A.I", which now ranks as my favorite Stanley Kubrick film, is quite a movie. Although, you must prepare yourself for its entirety in order to fully appreciate and enjoy all it has to offer. Many people have mocked Steven Spielberg for adding his "family-friendly" and "sentimental touches" to an otherwise DARK Stanley Kubrick film, but considering it IS a collaboration between the two directors, it is appropriate that Spielberg added his own touches. Even though there were it's slow points, in the end, you still make it out OK. With it's 2 hours and 23 minutes running time, there's points in "A.I." which seem to be boring; but after seeing the whole film, it makes sense altogether. As with the moving "American Beauty", after you have seen the whole movie, you most absorb for a while to fully understand what the movie is as a whole. It is the same with "A.I.". The people who mocked Spielberg's "unnecessary" added touches just needed to let the movie settle a little longer before they gave their reviews of this excellent movie. Altogether, a dark and moving Kubrick film which forces you to consider the value of human life vs. the advancement of science.
Rating:
Summary: Artificial stupidity
Review: AI begins as science fiction. Decays into sci-fi. Then into fantasy. Steven Spielberg is often considered America's greatest filmmaker but this one should have stayed in his private stash. I've been reading about mature screenwriting with dialogue as subtext for what people really think, as against what they say. AI fails in that regard throughout: all dialogue is surface, "on the nose," as Hollywood calls it. One-dimensional dialogue. Spielberg, if he read this in someone else's script, would call it amateurish. One criticism I read is that the movie sentimentalizes Stanley Kubrick's concept for it. Yet I find it devoid of emotion. Cold. The effects are exceptional but, perhaps, should remain in the mind of science-fiction readers, rather than be concretized as they are here. As to the title, the parents, the scientists, are not intelligent, nor is the robot. And the actors all do a poor job, Haley Joel Osment, the boy, being allowed only to stare and display longing. However, if you must see it, the Flesh Fair is a powerful idea.
| 
