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This movie gives ACADEMIC films a bad name. The last 20 minutes are the gotcha, if you stayed it's your fault.
The embarassed and harassed looking people exiting the theatre with me were paging Dr. Freud and saying "what a BAD MOVIE. " Why is this movie so bad?
1. Bring a checklist from every sci fi movie you ever liked. there is something here all of it. The alienation of THX-1128, the polarity of social classes from Zardoz, the Blade Runner "do Robots Have Dreams in Color" mysticism, the Electric Dreams goshness how the AI likes to be funny thing. That eerie E.T. uneasiness is here too, but the kid never seems to have his own "number", so he can't phone home. Even a Star Trek dialogic ripoff runs underneath. There is a car thru the forest that directly riffs the opening car sequence from batman, music and matte both.
2. This movie is a like an unevenly produced Outer Limits. The vision doesn't match what the visual text outlays. You see a techno marvel that can't figure out he's not human, although he processes everything else. The visuals say "blockbuster action-adventure", the dialogue says "The Twilight Zone." The killer effects say originality, but the plot goes nowhere. It's an often indigestible hybrid.
3. They don't tell the kid he ain't human. This is like Microsoft or Sun forgetting to make the Mac version. I kept waiting for some cool internet jokes, but the web apparently does not exist(as we would assume a bot would be connected to". He should have had Dr. know in his brain.
4. The kid robot never outmaneuvers his sibling. even siblings in Deliverance have mastered this. he "senses" the kid is bad but does whatever he says altho it gets him ejected from the family. No dysfunctional relationship programming was available to the kid?
5. The Fairy Tales references come at the plot's convenience. except as framed in mommy-to-son in context no other adult follows or references these fables. This family throws a pool party while discussing a potential homicide attempt. You wonder why after the kids have been provided, the parents fall into a coma of ingnorance. (Irony).
6. The Nabokovian sidelight for the boy robot is hinted at, but not explored. For a while I thought this film was the daring messenger of a dynamic and explosive socio-cultural phenomenon of abused and neglected kids, but nah. That was just a hope-rising hook planted to lure us in.
7. The peasants in this roman circus are possessed of a blue-collar fantasy moral compass that points to Spielberg, veering 360 degres from Kubrick. Kubrick would have explored why the kid "turned" on the humans and supplanted the organic race, the mystery justification for which is made really dark "powered" in the Matrix. This would have logically been the "programming" of a biblical epoch in AI dominance, historically suggested at the end of the film.
8. There is a weird anticlimactic text at the end of the film where the beings have nothing to show David(biblical jewish heroes for $200, Johnny). Funny, he doesn't look it. David exists in a bubble of conclusion, Freudishly concluded. The end is a snicker-inducing devolve of the director's and writer's night-table fantasy reading.
You leave the movie wanting to wash your hands, did mr. Spielberg just really want his mom to himself, or what?
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