Product Description

A highly advanced robotic boy longs to become real so that he can regain the love of his human mother. Studio: Paramount Home Video Release Date: 02/13/2007 Starring: Haley Joel Osment Jude Law Run time: 145 minutes Rating: Pg13 Director: Stephen Speilberg

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5253 in DVD
• Brand: Paramount
• Released on: 2002-03-05
• Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DTS Surround Sound, DVD-Video, Special Edition, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English, Spanish
• Number of discs: 2
• Running time: 146 minutes

Amazon.com
History will place an asterisk next to A.I. as the film Stanley Kubrick might have directed. But let the record also show that Kubrick--after developing this project for some 15 years--wanted Steven Spielberg to helm this astonishing sci-fi rendition of Pinocchio, claiming (with good reason) that it veered closer to Spielberg's kinder, gentler sensibilities. Spielberg inherited the project (based on the Brian Aldiss short story "Supertoys Last All Summer Long") after Kubrick's death in 1999, and the result is an astounding directorial hybrid. A flawed masterpiece of sorts, in which Spielberg's gift for wondrous enchantment often clashes (and sometimes melds) with Kubrick's harsher vision of humanity, the film spans near and distant futures with the fairy-tale adventures of an artificial boy named David (Haley Joel Osment), a marvel of cybernetic progress who wants only 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, shunned by his trial parents and tossed into an unfriendly world, is joined by fellow "mecha" Gigolo Joe (played with a dancer's agility by Jude Law) in his quest for a mother-and-child reunion. Parallels to Pinocchio intensify as David reaches "the end of the world" (a Manhattan flooded by melted polar ice caps), and a far-future epilogue propels A.I. into even deeper realms of wonder, even as it pulls Spielberg back to his comfort zone of sweetness and soothing sentiment. Some may lament 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. --Jeff Shannon

Additional features
A perfect movie for the digital age, A.I. finds a natural home on DVD. The purity of the picture, its carefully composed color schemes, and the multifarious sound effects are accorded the pinpoint sharpness they deserve with the anamorphic 1.85:1 picture and DTS and Dolby Digital 5.1 sound, as is John Williams's thoughtful music score. On the first disc there's a short (12 minutes) yet revealing documentary, "Creating A.I.," but the meat of the extras appears on disc 2. Here there are interesting, well-made featurettes on acting, set design, costumes, lighting, sound design, music, and various aspects of the special effects: Stan Winston's remarkable robots (including Teddy, of course) and ILM's flawless CGI work. In addition, there are storyboards, photographs, and trailers. Finally, Steven Spielberg provides some rather sententious closing remarks ("I think that we have to be very careful about how we as a species use our genius"), but no director's commentary. --Mark Walker

From The New Yorker
An extraordinarily accomplished movie, but a failure. After dithering with this project for years, Stanley Kubrick bequeathed it to Steven Spielberg, who wrote his own screenplay after Kubrick's death. In the bleak world that remains after the polar ice cap has melted, David (Haley Joel Osment), a perfect-child robot programmed to love, so disturbs his neurotic mother (Frances O'Connor) that she turns him loose in the woods. There he hooks up with a friendly stud-gigolo robot (Jude Law, who is certainly more beautiful than anything human). At that point, the movie should have taken off as the story of a science-fiction Pinocchio-a toy who wants to be human-but "A.I." is surprisingly bitter. The robots are preyed upon by humans, who destroy them at disgusting W.W.F.-type revels called Flesh Fairs. One senses a Kubrickian joke: the humans are empty and cruel, the robots sensitive and noble. Yet it's a nonfunctioning irony, and perhaps the last example of Kubrick's famous misanthropy. Despite many touching and uncanny moments, and some extraordinary visual invention (the robots searching for new limbs and faces might have been created by Salvador Dalí), "A.I.," which appears to celebrate the end of human existence, leaves one in a depressed stupor. With Sam Robards and William Hurt. Cinematography by Janusz Kaminski. -David Denby
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

A great fairy tale - except robots and good special effects.
I love this movie...it tells a great story.

I like the fact that it is a quiet movie that speaks more on a personal level than just action and blowing things up. A good drama.

I can watch this over and over. I LOVE sci-fi.

Moving
The story is completely unfeasible, but is still a good one and very moving in parts.

The artificial child David is created to have human emotion, in particular the ability to love. But it is an unrealistic and programmed love directed only at one person and not of the human kind. No real boy would have this everlasting and overpowering love for a miserable mother that abandoned him in the woods to die or fend for himself.

David's unrequited love is moving and pathetic. In the tear-jerking ending where David's "mother" spends one glorious last day with him and tells him that she has always loved him, she and her words are just the fabrication of the beings that recreated her for him. His mother did not love him.

One of the best... ever
This movie was supposed to be done by Stanley Kubrick but he died before it was complete. As a Kubrick film, one should know what to expect, but add in Steven Spielberg and the effect is warmer and still unsettling.
Just a side issue: I would have preferred a wide-screen version, but this is still a fine addition to my Kubrick collection. I pair it with other robot movies like "I Robot" (I know... Asimov) and "Space Odyssey:2001" or "Bicentennial Man" for a fun popcorn night. What more could we want for a post-apocalyptic- dystopia night?