Stanley Kubrick spent years building A.I. Artificial Intelligence, and the result still feels unfinished. The movie runs two hours and twenty minutes, and its ambition regularly outpaces its execution. It wants to be a children’s fable, a cautionary tale about artificial intelligence, and a love story all at once. Mostly it settles for being a strange one.
Trailer, via Amblin Entertainment.
Pinocchio And The Robot
The setup borrows heavily from Pinocchio. A boy robot named David, built by scientists to simulate love, is abandoned by his creators when his parents die in a flood. He is left with a teddy bear that can grant wishes, and he spends the rest of the film trying to become a real boy. The premise is simple, and the film never quite gets around to making it complicated enough to justify its length.
Roy Batty And Haley Joel Osment
Roy Batty, a scientist who created David, hires a company called Cybertronics to build him a robot child. Haley Joel Osment plays David, and he carries most of the emotional weight. Jude Law plays Gigolo Joe, a robot prostitute who becomes David’s unlikely ally. Martin Scorsese directs the middle portion of the film, and his hand is visible in the sharper, more focused storytelling there.
Steven Spielberg Finishes It
Steven Spielberg takes over for the final hour. He adds warmth and humor, but the tone shifts abruptly from Kubrick’s cold, mechanical world to a warmer, more human one. The transition works better than it has any right to, but it leaves the film feeling split down the middle.
The Ending That Doesn’t Land
The ending, set in a flooded future city, is meant to be poignant. Instead it feels rushed, as though the filmmakers realized they had run out of time and decided to wrap everything up anyway. The themes of longing, identity, and what it means to be alive are raised but rarely resolved.
What Works
The performances hold the film together. Haley Joel Osment’s wide-eyed sincerity grounds David’s journey, and Jude Law brings unexpected depth to Gigolo Joe. The visual effects, particularly the flooded city, are stunning. The score, composed by John Williams, is appropriately grand without overwhelming the scene.
What Doesn’t Work
The pacing drags in the first half. Kubrick’s scenes are deliberate, sometimes to a fault, and the film loses momentum before Scorsese arrives to tighten things up. The story also relies too heavily on exposition, delivered through voiceovers and dialogue that explain what the audience should be able to see.
Comparing The Directors
| Director | Portion Of Film | Style |
|---|---|---|
| Stanley Kubrick | First half | Mechanical, deliberate |
| Martin Scorsese | Middle portion | Sharper, more focused |
| Steven Spielberg | Final hour | Warmer, more human |
Ranking The Three Parts
- The middle portion, directed by Scorsese, is the sharpest and most tightly constructed.
- The final hour, directed by Spielberg, is warm and engaging but tonally inconsistent.
- The first half, directed by Kubrick, is visually impressive but weighed down by slow pacing.
The Verdict
A.I. Artificial Intelligence is a film of remarkable ambition and uneven results. Its best moments — the performances, the flooded city finale — are genuinely moving. Its worst moments — the slow pacing, the rushed ending — undercut that goodwill. It is a flawed masterpiece, a film that reaches for greatness and only occasionally finds it.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
