A.I. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (2001) AND MINORITY REPORT (2002)
— RANKING: 82 (TIE) —
A.I. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (2001)
SCIENCE FICTION/TRAGEDY: Sophocles asked the critical question: are our lives ruled by fate or free will? Over two millennia later, this issue remains at the heart of intellectual genre pieces, particularly those derived from the work of Philip K. Dick. Tom Cruise stars in this Steven Spielberg–directed dystopian future, neo-noir, sci-fi epic. Courtesy: Dreamworks/20th Century Fox.
CREDITS
DreamWorks SKG/Warner Bros./Amblin Entertainment; Steven Spielberg, dir.; Brian Aldiss, story; Spielberg, Ian Watson, scr.; Spielberg, Bonnie Curtis, Jan Harlan, Kathleen Kennedy, Walter F. Parkes, pro.; John Williams, mus.; Janusz Kaminski, cin.; Michael Kahn, ed.; Rick Carter, prod. design; Richard L. Johnson, William James Teegarden, Thomas Valentine, art dir.; Bob Ringwood, costumes; Richard Alonzo, Bill Corso, Kenny Myers, makeup effects; Stan Winston, special robot F/X; Tim Wilcox, digital illustrator; Christian Beckman, animatronics; Jim Rollins, F/X; Dugan Beach/ILM, CGI creature developer: Julie Creighton/ILM, visual effects; 146 min.; Color; 1.85:1.
CAST
Haley Joel Osment (David); Jude Law (Gigolo Joe); Frances O’Connor (Monica Swinton); Sam Robards (Henry Swinton); Jake Thomas (Martin Swinton); William Hurt (Prof. Hobby); Ken Leung (Syatyoo-Sama); Robin Williams (Dr. Know, voice); Ben Kingsley (Specialist, voice); Meryl Streep (Blue Mecha, voice); Chris Rock (Comedian, voice).
MOST MEMORABLE LINE
To create an artificial man has been the dream of mankind since the birth of science.
PROFESSOR HOBBY
BACKGROUND
Stanley Kubrick became fascinated with Brian Aldiss’s short story “Super-Toys Last All Summer Long” and hired Ian Watson to develop a full narrative. The project bogged down due to Kubrick’s inability to decide whether he would employ a child actor or CGI-F/X for the part of David. Apparently, as early as 1995, Kubrick had suggested to Spielberg that the latter might be better suited to this material. No further development occurred until after Kubrick died in 1999, when Spielberg forged ahead to make Kubrick’s dream come true.
THE PLOT
Professor Hobby takes the concept of a cyborg to a new level. In addition to creating an artificial intelligence, he endows an android with the ability to give love. This is accompanied by a human-like need to receive in kind. As a test, Monica and Henry Swinton—an ordinary couple who believe they have lost their child—adopt a boy model robot, David, who in time is allowed to play with Teddy, the favorite toy of their “late” biological son. Everything alters when Martin, long held in suspended animation, is cured and sent home. Monica must now choose between her two “boys.”
THE FILM
A.I. might be considered Spielberg’s joint remake of Walt Disney’s Pinocchio (1940) and MGM’s The Wizard of Oz (1939). Spielberg even references himself: Teddy embodies a futuristic version of the simple teddy bear that flew out a car window in his first theatrical feature, The Sugarland Express (1974). When a gentle alien reaches out and touches the boy, A.I. visually echoes the end of Close Encounters (1977).
THEME
A.I. features another unique variation on the Frankenstein myth as a doctor who hopes to improve the lot of humankind by creating a perfect person instead brings about tragedy for all. Like many sci-fi characters, the doctor invokes religion, asking fellow scientists, “In the beginning, didn’t God create Adam to love him?” As in The Wizard of Oz, the ultimate “message” here is beautiful in its simplicity: there’s no place like home, no experience better than going back there again, if only, in this film’s case, for a single perfect day.
TRIVIA
Again, situations are similar to those found in classic Zones—not surprising as Rod Serling was one of Spielberg’s early mentors. The similarities include: the lead character caged as if subhuman (“People Are Alike All Over”); mannequins surrounding a seeming person (“The After Hours”); the hideous outcast appearing to be normal when returned to his or her own kind (“Eye of the Beholder”); a character coming face to face with a double (“Mirror Image”); an isolated person’s attempt to find affection with a robot (“The Lonely”); a cyborg being used to round out a fractured family (“I Sing the Body Electric”); the value that a brief reunion with a lost parent might have on a child (“In Praise of Pip”); and the addictive power of a game designed to ambiguously project the future (“Nick of Time”).
MINORITY REPORT (2002)
ADDITIONAL CREDITS
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation/Cruise/Wagner Productions; Philip K. Dick, story; Scott Frank, Jon Cohen, scr.; Jan de Bont, Gerald R. Molen, Ronald Shusett, pro.; Alex McDowell, prod. design; Chris Gorak, art dir.; Deborah Lynn Scott, costumes; Michael Lantieri, Tom Pahk, Chiz Hasegawa, F/X; Mark Russell, Marc Varisco/Asylum, Blondel Aidoo/Asylum, visual effects; Barry Armour/ILM, computer graphics; 145 min.; Color; 2.25:1.
CAST
Tom Cruise (John Anderton); Colin Farrell (Danny Witwer); Max von Sydow (Lamar Burgess); Steve Harris (Jad); Neal McDonough (Fletcher); Patrick Kilpatrick (Knott); Jessica Capshaw (Evanna); Lois Smith (Dr. Iris Hineman); Jessica Harper (Anne Lively).
MOST MEMORABLE LINE
You still have a choice.
THE ORACLE
BACKGROUND
If A.I. recalls the sweetly melancholic E.T. (1982), Minority Report resembles Poltergeist (1982) with its neo-noir ambience. The color scheme in Minority Report features such dark hues of blue that the onscreen image often appears black. Even as, in previous films, Spielberg alternated between mothers and fathers attempting to be responsible to their children, the mother-driven A.I. is here complemented by a father-driven tale.
THE PLOT
The forces that run America in 2054 employ PreCrime, a private commercial venture, for national police work. A genius, Lamar Burgess has developed a system by which three psychics, the “precogs,” predict crimes before they occur. Agents such as John Anderton rush to the scene and apprehend the criminal before violence occurs. Anderton has a deeply disturbing reason to involve himself in such a process: years earlier, his beloved six-year-old son was abducted from a public swimming pool. He hopes to keep such a horrific incident from ever happening to any other parent. Then a psychic predicts that Anderton will murder a man he has never heard of. Convinced he’s being framed, he goes on the run, only to realize that, by trying to avoid his fate, he may ensure just such a destiny.
Minority Report is based on a short story by Philip K. Dick, whose angst-ridden worldview inspired Blade Runner. Here, Spielberg follows a pattern similar to that of Ridley Scott: create an epic filled with the thrills expected for contemporary science fiction while remaining true to the essence of what Dick attempted to say. The darkness of the film makes sense considering the tragic nature of the story. An emphasis on human eyes from the beginning recalls not only Abre los ojos (1997) and Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) but also the central theme of Shakespeare’s King Lear and Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, both of which present physical blindness as a realistic correlative for an inability to perceive obvious truths around us.
THEME
Minority Report illustrates the most basic of all tragic themes: the desire of man to grasp whether predetermination or free will directs his life. The tragic hero always in the end learns that a combination of those forces creates the end result. It makes sense then that the precogs are kept in what appears to be a dolphin pool; in ancient times, such conduits between the fates and humankind (oracles) inhabited a place called Delphi, or Dolphin.
TRIVIA
Minority Report owes much to Spielberg’s fascination with Alfred Hitchcock thrillers. The image of Cruise becoming “the wrong man,” then finding himself in vertigo-inducing situations recalls North by Northwest (1959); the sequence in which Spielberg’s camera searches the living spaces of ordinary people owes much to Rear Window (1954); and the scene in which an upscale villain inadvertently reveals his guilt to the heroine recalls the near-identical scene between Leo G. Carroll and Ingrid Bergman in Spellbound (1945).