PhantomKnight Goes Spielbergian

It's no Shakespeare in Love but it has a lot going for it.

Lots of people these days are trying to claim it as a misunderstood masterpiece. I guess that was foreseeable.

Bought the Blu-Ray recently, actually.

We'll see. It's a mess but a visually breathtaking one which mixes Kubrickian despair with Spielbergian sentiment in a way which makes the material even more upsetting.

I've only seen it once and my big note I think is pretty widely shared; the movie should have ended well before it actually did.

To be fair, though, I don’t hate this movie. I know it’s one that has earned the ire of more than a couple of people, but while I agree with many of the criticisms (as we’ll get to), I still think this movie has way too much ambition and artistic integrity to call it awful or a complete failure. It’s just...miscalculated. You can clearly tell that the end product is a combination of two distinct directorial voices, but those voices become garbled because they’re both trying to speak at the same time. Again, A.I. certainly cannot be faulted for its lack of ambition, but the movie is ultimately such a jumbled mess that it just leaves you feeling frustrated. Out of all of Steven Spielberg’s films, this is the one I think I feel the most conflicted about because it’s trying to do so many things, and doing them more than competently...yet the film as a whole never really adds up.

It all starts with the First Act, specifically how the film tries to establish its characters and emotional anchors. Obviously, it’s about a robotic child, or A.I., named David (Haley Joel Osment) who’s “adopted” by a couple in the future who are struggling with having their biological son in a coma due to some rare disease. With that set up, naturally, the conflict is centered on David’s attempts at acclimating to the intricacies of real life and establishing emotional connections, particularly when it comes to the wife/mother (Frances O’ Connor). A solid and expected premise, to be sure, and one that you’d think in Steven Spielberg’s hands, would be ripe with his trademark, yet effective sentimentality. Well...think again. Yes, that is the approach the film attempts to take with it, yet the charm and warmness that Spielberg is going for here just doesn’t come across at all. I think that’s mainly because he’s trying to replicate the same cold and detached style that Stanley Kubrick was often known for in his own movies, and that severely interferes with the intended tone here. Now, I will never pretend to be any kind of expert on the filmography of Stanley Kubrick, but watching A.I. again, it clearly felt like Steven Spielberg was doing his best to mimic Kubrick’s style -- to the film’s detriment, ultimately. Because whereas this First Act is supposed to feel all warm and nice and really pull you in, it instead feels like the beginning of a horror film with the way so many shots frame David as he does things like stare longingly at his new mother or suddenly burst out in laughter at a joke during dinner. Everything just feels...off, like you’re waiting for David to go against his programming and kill the couple rather than love them.

Haley Joel Osment’s performance, unfortunately, has a lot to do with this. We know from The Sixth Sense that he can be a very good actor, but here, I don’t know… Either he was given the wrong kind of direction, or he just made the wrong choices, because one of the main purposes of this First Act is clearly to establish empathy for David...yet that never happens. The First Act has all the hallmarks of Spielberg sentimentality and whimsy -- despite adopting the same cold lighting/filming style that every movie of his since Saving Private Ryan seems to have had -- probably as a primer/intentional contrast to the darkness and dreariness the film transitions into in its second half, but because that sentimentality and whimsy doesn’t work and because we don’t establish a genuine connection with David, the rest of the film loses whatever punch it may have had.

On the plus side, the various aspects of this future are brought to life very impressively on a visual level and certain aspects of it are intriguing...but also, when you really start to dig into some of the ways in which this future works and the rules it operates by, a lot of holes (of both the plot and logic variety) start to pop up that eventually become too numerous to ignore. Now, other reviews have very succinctly elaborated on and delved into those holes and issues -- much better than I could even attempt to -- so, I won’t really. But suffice it to say, there are many things about this plot and world that just become intensely problematic the more you think about them. It just further emphasizes how this movie has so many ideas, yet because of that, they all start to contradict each other, and it just makes for a very confused and contradictory experience. And do I need to go into the ending set 2,000 years in the future and all the problems that has? Again, that’s been covered ad nauseum by so many others by this point -- entire essays can and probably have been written on all the problems, inconsistencies and contradictions it presents -- so I’ll just say this ending really doesn’t work and leave it at that. But if I had more time...boy oh boy.

You know, I actually used your super in-depth review from years ago as a sort of reference as I was (finally) doing mine.  I fully acknowledge I didn't go as deep or detailed as you did, but obviously...I agree with a lot (if not everything) of what you laid out.

I kinda get that feeling from you already.

I have very similar thoughts on Osment, which ultimately is why I don't champion this movie.

I like A.I. and the scope of what it's attempting to pull off is very admirable.

But I also think the movie can't successfully oscillate between its tones and while some moments are wondrous others feel off. A very interesting project nonetheless.