The SH Reviewing Staff loves summertime. We run out on the beach and read long, trashy novels, then we come back inside to watch movies. Summertime is, after all, the season of reviews, of grade-b science fiction, and of the action thrillers that so often manhandle brilliant short-stories.
This year, we ran off to see A.I.: Artificial Intelligence and Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within in quick succession. They were released only a week or two apart, and both strive to be solid, dramatic entries in the summer's science fiction lineup. The former is the strange collaboration of Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg; the latter is the work of SquareSoft, long known for the "Final Fantasy" series of games.
Both movies feature plastic people in beautiful sets. Final Fantasy creates both with a rendering budget -- the entire film is computer animated. A small squad of brave compatriots march their way through the future, trying to save the world from menacing "phantoms," strange creatures that suck energy and, in the case of any unfortunate humans who touch them, souls. The phantoms apparently hit the earth thirty-four years back, and since then, they have devastated the planet, wiping out almost all life.
The film stars Aki (voiced by Ming-Na, who may be best known as Disney's Mulan), a doctor of the distant future. She is an adept of joystick-based surgery technology, a reasonable pilot, and a fair hand with a gun. She is rendered with smooth skin, cute freckles, and long legs. (Maxim did a spread of her bathing-suited virtual body recently). Aki is an acolyte of the ancient, wise Dr. Sid (voiced by Donald Sutherland), who has invented virtually every important future technology: the barriers that keep the phantoms out of the few remaining cities1, the guns that can defeat the dark creatures, and the organic energy packs that power everything on the planet.
Unfortunately, Sid is a heretic. He believes in "Spirit," a sort of future religion based around "Gaia," the Earth's central essence. He sees the planet as alive, and wants to use its strength to hold back the phantoms. He quests with Aki, then, to collect the eight essences which can combine to defeat the phantoms -- there is some scientific-sounding discussion of opposite waveforms cancelling out, but it can be safely ignored. Mere moments after he explains to Aki that she must never mention this philosophy and should destroy any notes where she talks of it, he stands up before the human council and explains his beliefs.
It goes without saying that he is shouted down. The opposite perspective is that of General Hein. Dressed in a long, leather trench-coat, he wants to destroy all phantoms with the Zeus space-based cannon. The brutal blast of energy will wipe out the phantoms at their center, leaving the planet secure.
Needless to say, the film will follow its genre's formula. The two perspectives will come head-to-head repeatedly. The General will take extreme -- and evil -- measures to ensure that his perspective wins, doing his part to save humanity through massive destruction. The rough-and-ready gang of fighters, led by the love interest, Grey (voice of Alec Baldwin), who join Aki and Sid will do their level best to save the planet. Everyone wearing a red shirt (in this case, battle armor) will be cannon fodder for the various scenes in which the aliens come dangerously close to killing Our Heroes. When all seems to be going well, someone will go out on a seemingly routine mission, foolishly speculate about a happier future, and promptly die.
You already know if you're going to see this film. For some of you, a movie that makes a fair shot at offering photorealistic CGI will be worth your eight bucks regardless of details like acting and plot. For others, the draw of a mainstream movie with an anime-style story is irresistible -- though this is hardly the best anime plot we've seen; Nausicaä is a much better story on the same theme. Fans of the "Final Fantasy" series itself will want to see the translation of the games' ideas and visuals onto the big screen. (And they won't be disappointed -- many scenes are reminiscent of the games. The Zeus cannon space station strongly resembles the orbiting prison in "Final Fantasy VIII.")
For everyone else -- well, it's not worth it. It looks like a really nicely-rendered game. Everything is semi-metallic, and the weapons blast little jolts of light. The script was written by someone who speaks in cliché. But it looks pretty. The synthetic actors are close to realistic, and even though the movements are a touch too smooth, a few scenes -- especially those in which the characters' faces convincingly express human emotions -- are good enough to cause a double-take. Sure, they may not be great actors -- but they're good enough to replace mediocre2 thespians completely.
I'm somehow reminded of one of the early animation greats. The short "Nestor Sextone for President" (1988) was created by KWCC, a digital film company. In it, Sextone declared, "Some people have been putting on rubber masks and parading around, pretending to be synthetic. When I'm elected, synthetic parts will go to synthetic actors!"
Those people in rubber masks have all appeared in A.I.3 For a movie with real, live actors, the emotions are distressingly synthetic and jarring: this movie seems to have taken Brecht's alienation effect to heart. This alienation is especially problematic in a film that attempts to blur the boundaries between machine and human. The center of the film is the robot a grieving family adopts to replace their dead son (reproduction laws prevent them from having another child), but we never really agree with this freakish little boy (Haley Joel Osment, from Sixth Sense) and are scared that he'll turn unpredictably monstrous or violent. We never understand his bizarre family, by turns obsessive and detached. Despite the warning against it, the mother reads the words of imprinting that turn a robot into a boy. Despite various danger signs, they keep the kid around before the movie jarringly jumps to Act II.
In the second act, the cast -- except the main character -- is completely new. The boy is obsessed with the story of Pinocchio and wants to be real so he can be home. Jude Law is a sexbot (Frank Sinatra, but with the sex on screen) on the lam, who joins the boy in his search for the key to transformation. They run from "Flesh Fairs," the future equivalent of redneck auto rallies, where old robots are destroyed. And they visit a futuristic city of sin, where women are to be had for the taking.
In the end, the movie gives us an enigmatic, troubling ending because Kubrick wrote it, and a warm, meaningful voice over4 with a touching ending, because Spielberg directed it. If we've begun to empathize with the main character, the ending is the last in a series of very disturbing images.
After discussing A.I. with me for about five minutes, one of my friends said, "But you know, I really want the Teddy Bear" (the robot child's prized toy). And we discussed that notion, and decided it was true. The rest of the movie was pretty dippy, but we wanted the talking bear. Apparently this movie, though it aspires to be thoughtful, doesn't really challenge.
And so this summer's science fiction crop seems to have collapsed. Both movies are beautiful, but ultimately empty. One wants to rework a genre, and ends up repeating it; the other wants to challenge us to think, but ultimately is creepy without being smart.
Danyel Fisher is a graduate student, and writes reviews in order to not do his thesis.
R Michael Harman is New Media Reviews Editor for Strange Horizons
Notes:
And yet, in the last few years, there are signs that this may be changing. The Fifth Element places its end-of-days in New York, and now both these summer movies are set in a future New York City. AI is placed in New Jersey suburbs; we see the New York skyline toward the end. Final Fantasy starts off in an exploration of a devastated New York City, and, of course, Planet of the Apes is famous for the Statue of Liberty.
2. Memo to Leo: Your job's in jeopardy!
3. Note that A.I. the movie has little, in form or content, to do with "A.I.," the game, which is discussed at http://www.cloudmakers.org/news/. The game is a tremendously complex thing, spanning many weeks, and causing many of us to reconsider our understanding of the Internet and of network collaboration.