What is it about?

Steven Spielberg inherited this movie project after Stanley Kubrick's death in 1999, and the result is an astounding directorial hybrid. You have a bargain of Spielberg's gift for wondrous enchantment often clashes (and sometimes melds) with Kubrick's harsher vision of humanity as the film spans near and distant futures with the fairy-tale adventures of an artificial boy named David (Haley Joel Osment). This is a story of the progress in the science of control and communications in animals and machines. David only wants to be a real boy, loved by his mother in that happy place called home. Echoes of Spielberg's Empire of the Sun are clearly heard as young David, abandoned by his trial parents and thrown into an unfriendly world, is joined by fellow "mecha" Gigolo Joe (played by Jude Law) in his quest for a mother-and-child reunion. The story reminds of Pinocchio as David reaches "the end of the world" (a Manhattan flooded by melted polar ice caps), and a far-future ending brings A.I. into even deeper realms of wonder. Some may feel grief for the diffusion of Kubrick's original vision, but this is Spielberg's A.I. (complete with one of John Williams's finest scores), a film of astonishing technical wizardry that spans the spectrum of human emotions and offers just enough Kubrick to suggest that humanity's future is anything but guaranteed.

What did other people say?

"A.I. exhilarates, frustrates and provokes: it's the most ambitious Hollywood movie in sight."
-- NEWSWEEK

"At best it's brilliant, but lukewarm -- lacking Spielberg's emotional heat and Kubrick's icy intellect."
-- CNN

"It bumps and thumps a bit, more simulated than real, but this odd blending of "Moulin Rouge" and "Bicentennial Man" eventually makes a spectacle of itself."
-- HOLLYWOOD REPORT CARD