Rating: 
Summary: Finding One's Identity
Review: As one who was adopted 53 years ago I found this film to be very emotional. I found myself in the place of the boy looking for his origins. Many times I felt tearful there was obviously something connecting to my inner feelings. My companion wanted to leave early in the film-thank goodness she changed her mind. She was bored by the film. This is one of the best movies I have ever seen. I cannot wait to get it on VHS.
Rating: 
Summary: Depressing, Boring and very long!!!
Review: I was really looking forward to watching this film, and maybe I was simply expecting too much, or maybe I was expecting a different type of film... in either case, I didn't get what I was expecting.I'm not going to say the film was a total waste of time, because I did like some things about it. I loved Haley Joel Osmont's acting, he is brilliant!! He immediatly makes you believe he is a robot, and all through the film his acting made his character believable. I also really liked Teddy, and I am looking forward to owning one (well, if they ever exist!) he is funny, sweet, intelligent and extremelly loyal, and you can't help but like him. The special effects are also brilliant, but I won't go into them. As for the story... I loved the first part, life in the future, how comfortable it could become, the relationships between humans and robots, the substitution of a real child by a robot child, the adaptation of a new "articial" member into a family and so on... that was good! But then, the movie made a 180° turn, and it became depressing, sad, meaningless, boring and over all cruel. As soon as David gets thrown out from the house, it looked like someone had changed the movie we were watching. I didn't like the plot, I hated the vision of the future and I thought the ending was lame and sad.
I consider myself a Spielberg fan, but in this case I have to say that whatever Kubric was doing, Spielberg couldn't pull it off and it just turned out as an hybrid, depressing and boring story.
Rating: 
Summary: Beyond his reach.......
Review: AI is the kind of movie that leaves you desparately wanting it to be better. Perhaps if you think about it hard enough, it is
possible to convince yourself that its as good as you wanted it to be. I suspect this is what American critics were doing when hailing the film as a masterpiece, a fantastic Spielbergian fusion - the imagination and magic of ET with maturity of Schindler, with a touch of Kubrickian objectivity thrown in for good measure. Unfortunately, if one is looking for AIs precedents in the Spielberg canon one need look no further back than Hook, or going right back, his 1978 flop
1941. These are very different movies from AI it is true, but they are also examples of an unrestrained and out of control Spielberg, whose presence is felt very early on in AI, and who proceeds to gradually to rip the premise beyonds the bounds of credulity. It would be wrong to label this Speilberg's worst film, but it certainly his most desperately uneven. The plot, ostenibly a curious whismy to have come from Kubrick (although mans co-existence with technology is a strand running throughout his output), is set in a not too distant future, in a world where humanoid robots are commonplace. Here, a robot scientist sets out to make a hummanoid boy who is capable of both giving and recieving love. Here, the boy, David (Haley Joel Osment) is adopted by a couple whose own son is in a coma, essentially to fulfil their emotional needs. Its a fascinating concept, but right from the start, the emotional dynamics of it are ambiguous. Are we suppossed to feel happy when Monica, the mother figure, begins to "love" David because the implication is that parental "love" is little more than a superficial need which can be filled by any bowl-haired cutie with cow-like eyes and a need for cuddles. In a strange way, there is misogynistic vain running throughout AI. Ostenibly, the most important aspect in the films is its examination of the mother/child bond. But what does AI say about that bond? Monica falls in love with David, not a selfless, maternal love but a love based on how David is programmed to make her feel about herself - needed and loved. Then when her own son returns, she dumps David in the woodlands, having outlasted his usefulness. This is a cynical and deeply unfeeling portrait of the maternal bond and one senses it has far more Kubrick than Speiberg in it. However emotionally barbed they maybe, these are actually the best scenes in the film. They are Kubrickian in vein - shot in cool, stone-washed colours and alarming us with the emotional
seductiveness of David, a creation Speilberg never lets us forget is artificial, and therefore perhaps making us question our own precept of what love is. It is unsettling and provocative, not at all pleasant, but it has its own voice and logic. The next two acts of the film, which concern Davids misguided quest to find his mother after she dumps him in the woods, dispense completely with both of these. The main problem with the remainder of the film is that there is virtually no interaction between humans and robots. Therefore the principle strand of tension and interest in abandoned, and Spielberg chooses to underline the artificiality of the premise by having virtually all the interaction take place between David and Gigolo Joe(Jude Law), a sort of robotic prostitute. Because it is a relationship between robot and robot, there is no gravity here, and the film becomes increasingly emotionally and stylistically unhinged, with every weird odessey seeming stranger and more out of place than the next. It feels, and there is no better word, artificial. The ending, a cloying and manipulative retreat in to Spielbergian sentimentalism, underlines the innocence of the child's love, but also the naivety of the director himself. Spielberg has always dealt in moral and emotional certainies - and even in his most mature works, those polarities are crystal clear. AI is ambiguous, even paradoxical in terms of its moral and emotional tenure and rather than acknowldege this with a thoughtful, somewhat inconclusive ending, Spielberg simply reverses the tone of the entire film for its third act which is almost jaw-droppingly miscalculated. Kubick passed Spielberg the mantle on AI becuase he thought it to be closer to the young director's sensibilities. The problem with AI as it turned out is that there is no prevailing sensibility, just an ultimately incoherent hash -a director trying to tell a story whose ambiguities he does not acknowledge and whose need for restraint he does not recognise. Whatever else AI maybe, on its own terms it is ulimately a faliure.
Rating:
Summary: Fails To Shed Real Light On Its Questions
Review: A consciously atmospheric film if there ever was one puts us in a world in which the heights of human intellectual, creative prowess has created a world devoid of honorable human warmth in all the sets and the cruel plot. One cannot help rooting for our little robot since all the humans seem, in the final analysis, as selfish, manipulative, exploitative and inhuman as the alienating technological world they've created for themselves at the border of natural chaos. You want to see him satiated in his quest for love, since he, and maybe his jiggilo robot friend, seems the only one capable of true love in this world. But the problem comes in whether you buy his "love" as real. For me, he remained just a robot and so did his "love." Whether or not you can make the leap to seeing him otherwise will probably hinge the effect of this film for you. I felt little compassion for the robots destroyed by the "flesh fair" that championed its love of life by destroying all non-organic life in a festival celebrating life and denouncing artificiality. That was fine with me, because they were killing MACHINES. Not people. It strikes me as funny that Speilberg is nonetheless "pro-choice" (or so I assume, carefully, from his seemingly doting support of the Clinton administration as exemplified by his studio's "The Contender" and its shameless villification of the "pro-life") and would encourage us not to feel passionate about protecting the lives of unborn humans, but here tells us it would be cruel to destroy robot "life." How warped are these values? In the end that's just what this little robot boy was to me, a robot. If you can buy that his consciousness is awakening enough to be a distinctly self generating personality then maybe you can feel with him and accept the film emotionally. I, however, was unable to see that they answered, or at least significantly illuminated, the difficult questions of what it means to be alive or conscious enough to have made me accept our little robot as one to be empathized with more than my microwave. That said; the eating of the spinach and the ending with its ideas about the role of receiving love in successful emotional development and in the capability of generating dreams, are intriguing sequences. The notion that his following the pinoccio story was evidence that he was able to follow a dream, as his inventor proposes, (one can only guess if he speaks on behalf of the writer here) is unconvincing, since the little robot driven by logic simply seemed to have trouble understanding an "irrationality" such that a story he was told could very well not be a true one. Though the film adds a notion or two to our contemplation of the nature of mind it fails abysmally to say much that captivates the mind, challenges the intellect or wins the emotions in the final analysis. Instead it is a monument to our confusion about the issue that is emotionally confusing in a way that betrays cinematic failure, not the successful transmission of an ambiguity. Or so I think. It is grand design-wise, effectively and unnervingly transplanting us to an eerie and ugly post-apocolyptic technological future landscape. Much of it keeps one intrigued from a plot standpoint, the end successfully communicates a feeling of an oppressively long time, so it may be commended for much of its execution despite its fundamental failures. And any failures of the film are certainly not the fault of the brilliant actor carrying the film, in fact he probably single handedly earns this film 2 of its 3 stars...
Rating:
Summary: Not for Kids
Review: Ive seen this film twice already and enough has already been said about it as far as im concerned. Is it a masterpiece?...probably not.Is it a complete dud?.....definitely not. The only thing Im sure about is that it is NOT a film for the family or kids. My enjoyment of this film has been tempered somewhat by noisy teenaged morons in the theatres who are obviously bored out of their tiny undeveloped brains and dont mind sharing that fact with the rest of us, who ARE HAVING TO THINK whilst watching this. One for DVD for sure....then I'll know how good it is! Like 2001: A Space Odyssey, I suspect it will grow on us all over the years and the hostile reaction to it now will be somewhat watered down in the future.
Rating:
Summary: the best Spielberg!
Review: The movie is totally captivating from start to finish. Great Performances, this is an excellent movie, the visual FX are stunning, Steven Spielberg MAKES YOU THINK A LOT! For me it's the best Spielberg. Even if totally dislike SF and utopian stories, you will love Steven Spielberg' A.I.. You can feel all the emotions of all the characters. I'm not sure if younger kids would enjoy it, though; because they might not completely understand what's going on.
Rating:
Summary: AN EXCELENT MOVIE!!!
Review: This movie just confirmed my ideas and raised new questions about us as a race (humans). Will we ever be ready for an AI that is as human as we are or "more".
I think not! Not for many thousands of years.
The problems will start when AI will be used for our benifit, and that is ok as long as the tasks are simple and the AI is at a very basic level. But what will we be able to demand from an AI when the level of ineligence is equal to ours or higher, when it starts to ask questions or when it starts to question how things are? To be honest, when ever I think of AI I think of slave labour. And mark my words, when our technology alows us to build a machine the likes of the one in the movie we are in big trouble!
Personally I think AI, if created as a superior "being" to the humans, will be the next generation of "humans". Thins might sound very sience fiction and far fetched but this is what I predict for the future.
AI won't be an evolution of the "homo-sapiens", but a race, created by the homo-sapiens to carry with them the thoughts and ideas and hopefully everything else that makes humans what they are after were gone as a race.
This won't be by our choice, but it will be the end result. It will be a truly mechanical "human" with out many of the limitations of an organic human, obvously.
The pinnacle of our evolution will probalby never be reached before we manage to kill our selves due to the lack of respect for our own lives and the lives of others, which is why I think things will turn out the way i described.
I know I left out ALOT, but hopefully most of You reading this review can fill in the blanks and make some sence out of it! =)
The future is not ours, but the things we create can last for ever and keep the memory of us alive! Maybe in the distant future we will be refered to as "the elders" who created the people of the future, and thus, making us immortal in THEIR history books. This must sound like alot of preaching, but look me up in a dosen lifetimes and tell me I was wrong! Personally I think I'm right on target! =)
Anyway, as for the movie I stronlgly recommend it! It's with out doubt the best movie i've seen in a long time. They could have tied up some of the loose ends, and maybe made the movie 3-4h longer! Thats what I would have done. =)
I think that sometimes films, books and other forms of media can give us a glimpse into the future and show us some of the things that are to come. Just think of all the scientists who are wathing the same movies and reading the same books as you are, and then in the future when they make their mark and invent someting after being inspired by a movie they saw 30 years earlier. Who knows (except for me), this movie might just describe a scenario which is just around the corner from where we are today! If anyone feels they would like to discuss this further plz drop me a line on m_montana@yahoo.com PS. SEE THE MOVIE DS.
Rating: 
Summary: Quite simply, boring!
Review: I will not write a long review or analyze the film or the two directors involved. I just say it was so boring, I kept waiting for it to end. It was so depressing. This movie is not for kids. When Osment's character prayed to the Blue Fairy for 2000 years, I thought that was the ending. But no. These aliens came out of nowhere and made the story longer. Besides Teddy, none of the characters were lovable-not Osment, not the mom. Are we supposed to believe in the end the mom would be happy to live in a world with a robot kid and a bunch of aliens?
Rating:
Summary: I loved this film!
Review: I'm not sure why so many people dis-liked this film. Sure it drags on and ends when it feels like it but still that hardly ruins it. Haley Joel Osment still gives another oscar worthy performance and it's still a very moving and well imagined film. Artificial Intelligence is one of the years best and deserves a second chance for those of you that didn't like it.
Rating:
Summary: All over the place...and a sledgehammer
Review: The problem with this film is that it does not seem to know what it is--i.e., exactly what to do or where to go. The beginning is very promising--a couple in the near future whose young son is quite ill adopts a robot son to replace him, fearing their own child may not make it. The initial scenes of the robot boy, played by Haley Joel Osment in another great performance, are awe-inspiring, showing him trying to adapt to his new family. And the scenes immediately following, after the real boy has recovered and returns home to find the interloper, are equally compelling. If the film had developed the complexity of relationships between these four--the wife, the husband, the real boy, and the robot boy--it might have been a really intriguing movie. There is much to be said and gained by delving into the subtleties of relationships, especially when there is man and intelligent machine duality involved. This could have been the definitive film--up to this point--on this subject. But instead of doing this, Spielberg decided that he needed to make this a silly adventure film. The level of intelligence on display descends rapidly after the robot boy is thrown out of the family and meets up with another older robot, a playboy type played by Jude Law. While Law himself turns in a good performance as well, the story by now has veered very far from what could have been a real masterpiece--and then continues to take wild twists and turns that left this viewer, at least, scratching his head and wondering what had happened to the Spielberg of Close Encounters and E.T., among others. The sledgehammer? Better to have phrased that, The Pinocchio Sledgehammer. Spielberg decided that he needed to turn this into a Pinocchio story and so has the Osment character, with his Law sidekick, visit a computer "seer" named Dr. Know whose cartoon face looks suspiciously like a cross between Albert Einstein and Gepetto. In addition to which, the tale of Pinocchio is brought up a few times, just to make sure the audience KNOWS that this IS, after all, a Pinocchio story. Throw in a trip into the far future, the slaughter of domestic robots by anti-machine lowlifes, a visit to a benevolent robot creator (sympathetically played by William Hurt), and various other sidetrips, all designed to wow us and "pull us in" to the story of our much beset-upon hero, and you have a melange that ultimately cancels out whatever interest might have been initially generated. The whole is decidedly less than the sum of its parts here; one definitely gets the feeling that Spielberg himself could have done with a shot of artificial intelligence to make the film he should have made.
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