Sci-Fi Channel (2001)

The artificially intelligent fictional movie critic David Manning and I agree that Steven Spielberg's futuristic love story ''A.I.'' is extraordinary, but I'm betting the robo-critic intends the adjective for more blurbable service. What I've got in mind is a way to describe the astonishment, fascination, and excitement of experiencing what happens artistically when one important, influential moviemaker consciously tries to absorb the artistic spirit of another important, influential moviemaker, now dead, in a gesture of homage and not a little idol-busting. The result is by turns unwieldy, fabulous, blurry, intense, adventurous, and stunted, emitting radio waves from E.T., 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, A Clockwork Orange, Disney's classic 1940 Pinocchio, and All of Me, in which the body of Steve Martin, as an idealistic lawyer, is inhabited by the demanding, cantankerous soul of Lily Tomlin as a dead eccentric.

And as a result, ''A.I.'' achieves moments of quickening sci-fi grandeur, fractured by scenes in which golden American boyhood is fetishized with purple Victorian fervor, while a mechanical teddy bear who looks like the Downy fabric softener mascot toddles around speaking in a chain-smoker's rasp.

''A.I.,'' after all, was a pet project never fulfilled by the late Stanley Kubrick, who, according to rabbinic legend explicated by Spielberg, was keen as far back as the 1980s on making a picture about a machine-built boy programmed to feel real love, and his effect on real humans faced with the unnerving implications of loving a machine back. (Kubrick's inspiration: ''Super-Toys Last All Summer Long,'' a science-fiction short story by Brian Aldiss first published in Harper's Bazaar in 1969.) Actually, Spielberg recounts, the older man used to discuss the possibility of the younger man directing -- ''a Stanley Kubrick production of a Steven Spielberg film'' -- and prepared extensive storyboards. And so, presumably, it's those archives and remembered phone-a-friend conversations that inform the content of the screenplay Spielberg eventually wrote himself.

But it's Spielberg, all Spielberg, who chose Haley Joel Osment to embody the proto-robo- boy, David, and to shape our sentimental response based on Osment's famous default expression of sad gravity, a phiz Dickens could love. And it's Spielberg, Hollywood's foremost shaper of baby-boomer nostalgia, who gives Osment lines of dialogue that are utterly Spielbergian in their distillation of boyhood-in- America rootlessness: ''Mommy, will you die?'' ''I want Mommy to love me more.'' ''My brain is falling out.'' (Re that last: Who knew David was familiar with the work of Soupy Sales?)

It's a tribute to Osment's very real talent that he manages to ditch the saintliness forced on him in the execrable Pay It Forward, and it's clear that the young actor is not just playing a variation on the Very Special Boy role that made him a star in The Sixth Sense, either: Osment has a sophisticated understanding of the shifts between the circuitry of ''mecha'' (i.e., me-chanical robot) and ''orga'' (i.e., organic human) responses. It's a tribute to Spielberg, too, that we can practically see the director biting a knuckle, holding back from bursting into the visual equivalent of ''When You Wish Upon a Star.'' In scenes at home with the new mother (Frances O'Conner) who David is imprinted to love, the ambivalent father he calls ''Henry'' (Sam Robards), and the couple's jealous biological son (Jake Thomas), the director and his brilliant longtime cinematographer, Janusz Kaminski, blur, distort, and fade the borders and palette of domesticity, sacrificing the golden American-innocence look and lighting Spielberg adores so much.

Osment's David is Spielberg's stand-in. Kubrick's rep, on the other hand, is the revved-up ''love mecha'' Gigolo Joe, played to hell by Jude Law with glittering hysteria and a sheen by turns clammy and sexy. While David yearns to pedal home to Mommy, Joe knows with inhuman sureness that he's programmed for a cold, vertiginous, Mommy-less world of violent Kubrickian sensation. Joe is the kind of amoral animatron of the future that inspired Kubrick to do some of his most fantastic work; he's a golem, the anti-Spielberg.

And he's the most ravishing invention in all the considerable inventiveness of ''A.I.'' In scenes where Law and Osment work together, everything dead-on and weirdly off about this dense and challenging movie combusts, an enactment of the clashing artistic instincts of two strong-willed filmmakers. ''They made us too smart, too quick, and too many,'' Joe tells David, as the brilliantine-hard hustler and the lamb's-wool-soft boy closely encounter a Flesh Fair (in which mechas are rounded up, tortured, and destroyed), tour the sex-crazed Rouge City, and hit rock bottom in an eerily gorgeous, underwater Manhattan.

There aren't many at all like Spielberg and Kubrick, directors willing to lasso dreams (that's Steven) and nightmares (that's Stanley) or die trying. A.I. is a clash of the titans, a jumble, an oedipal drama, a carny act. I want to see it again.

You Might Also Like

• Review A.I. Artificial Intelligence | Ty Burr
• Video Review A.I. Artificial Intelligence | Ty Burr
• Movie Review A.I. (Jun 29, 2001) | Lisa Schwarzbaum
• All About A.I.
• Movie Commentary (Jun 29, 2001)
• Cover Story Dissecting the F/X of ''A.I. Artificial Intelligence'' (Jun 29, 2001)