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A.I. Is the Best Film of the 21st CenturyBy Armond White
Spielberg's prescient epic of faith remains miraculous.It's the 20th anniversary of the best film of the 21st century, Steven Spielberg's A.I. Artificial Intelligence, which opened June 29, 2001. The title suggests the opposite of mindfulness. It points to soul, the spirit - an unexpected theme for a movie that gestated from Spielberg's collaboration with Stanley Kubrick, popularly considered the most cerebral of all filmmakers. Each man exchanges his sentiments and alarms. It's the toymaker's and the intellectual's private joke made public.
No other millennial movie went so deep as A.I. into universal experience - the secret needs of childhood that are forgotten in adulthood. Although based on the short story "Supertoys Last All Summer Long," by Brian Aldiss, it most significantly re-creates the 1883 Carlo Collodi classic Pinocchio. Walt Disney's 1940 animated version is a touchstone for Spielberg and his special regard for childhood innocence. He updates the story of a puppet who longs to be a real boy into a modern tale about sensitivity-equipped robot David (perfectly acted by The Sixth Sense's Haley Joel Osment), who desires to achieve human fulfillment. It combines dark sci-fi futuristic fantasy with the emotional amplitude of classic fairy tales. Spielberg-Kubrick's conceit confronts pop nihilism and resolves it, which is why stupid reviewers castigated a film that demands reconsideration today.
Ian Simmons and I, on his Kicking the Seat podcast, recently discussed A.I.'s prophetic aspects - specifically the story's class divide, according to which rich citizens of the post-diluvian world enjoy the profligate luxuries of technological human simulation (robot David is used as substitute for the ailing child of a wealthy couple, Monica and Henry), while the unrefined working class objects to the upper class's inhumane domination. (Simmons made a Silicon Valley association that helps reveal A.I.'s sociological prescience.)
Spielberg's Flesh Fair sequence shows the rowdy class waving American flags and cheering crude heavy-metal music during a Luddite demolition derby against the fiber-optic, cybertronic metallic toys - artifacts of leisure-class decadence. The carnival uncannily resembles the "Save America" rallies that today's corporate media either mock or ignore.
When A.I. debuted just three months before
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