Vol. II, 2004
SUMMARY OF THE SCRIPT Treatment for "AI",
by Bryan Adrian,
This Spielberg version of Artificial Intelligence, which Spielberg wrote
[his first time at writing since he was a young man], ...
is a disappointing far cry from Kubrick's 90-page treatment.
[The film is about 2 and 1/2 hours long. Many people at my screening left
after only 45 minutes, and cyclically, every 10 or 15 minutes, throughout the
lengthy presentation; lots of yawning and stretching].
Is Ben Kingsly a sometimes narrator, or a particular character's voice,
or both?
MAIN ROBOTIC FACILITIES:
Cybertronics of
Movie opens with a very fuzzy and out of focus shot of a gray open sea,
with swirling aimless waves, in about as unappealing a photographic view of
water as conceivable, to even an amateur instamatic user.
Narrator drones on about "melted polar caps" in an ostentatious
fashion. The polar caps have already melted 20%, today!
Next we go to a staff meeting at Cybertronics, with Professor Hobby
[William Hurt] lecturing his troops. He is demonstrating his female model
android, at a staff meeting, and her lack of shame [over public nudity], and
her incapability for love for all to witness.
He commands her to "undress". She unbuttons her blouse, and
gets ready to remove her jacket, and Hobby says "That's enough" in
Spielberg's puritanical edification of Stanley Kubrick's 90-page treatment he
left behind at the time of his sudden death. Spielberg acquired Kubrick's
treatment within days of the suggestive conditions of
Prof. Hobby goes on about a "robot boy who dreams and has self-motivated
impulses."
A very clichéd black woman, a staff member, poses an ethical question to
Hobby, asking if it is not a "conundrum", to expect a human to love
an affectionate robot back?
Hobby gives her a short biblical metaphor in reply, that was so inane,
this reviewer forgot to write it into his notes, but is had something to do
with Adam [it may have been Adam West, the original Batman].
20-MONTHS LATER --->>
David's mother, Monica, played by the Frances McDormand look-alike,
Frances O'Connor, is never given a chance by Spielberg, nor Spielberg's script,
to wriggle out of her clichéd role, that kept her forever restrained, like a
mummy's linen wrappings spun around a preserved body.
Effective dramatic timing of dialogue and delivery,
is nearly non-existent in nearly all Spielberg scenes in each of his genuine
movies, and this one is no exception.
Example of bad dialogue:
Monica, fretting over whether she should use the 8-word sequence to
program her new robot boy to love her inexorably, forever, as long as his
hardware and his chips exist.
"Of course I'm not sure!", she fumes.
David's first night at home, getting ready for bed in a house full of
only humans, "I can never go to sleep but I can lie awake and never make a
peep." [this line had me crying in sheer poetic
ecstasy].
Monica, the mother, looks like she is suffering through terminal cancer
throughout the entire film, i.e., tired, withdrawn, and with a bloodless face.
Scene of the century for outstanding
"Is this a game" asks David, being placed in the closet like a
vacuum cleaner, for later usage, by his orga mother.
"Yes," replies Monica, "I found you". [alleging she had been playing hide-and-seek when she stored
him in the closet, like a vacuum cleaner, for hours, to get rid of him]
Later, in his first indication that he likes much better a world of
vindictive, violent, and vengeful androids, than a quiet world of humans living
in harmony, Spielberg shows the mother sitting on the toilet, shitting, with
her panties down around her ankles.
David springs in on her, embarrassing her deeply, and shouts, "I
found you!"
Shortly afterwards, Spielberg makes fun of human eating habits, via the
tricky art of negotiating long spaghetti noodles into the mouth and swallowing
them. Close up of Monica sliding a few long noodles via upward suction
technique, making her look like a bird slithering worms down its throat. In
another roughly directed dramatic scene, David laughs, in a demonic laugh, at
his new mother's vulgar eating behavior, lampooning her humanness. David
abruptly shuts off his laughter, like a light switch, leaving his father,
called "Henry" throughout the film and never "daddy,"
laughing far longer than the other characters in the scene, for reasons not
apparent to me, nor to the hundreds of other filmgoers
sitting near me in the cinema. Spielberg's private joke was lost in the trees.
"IMPRINTING PROTOCOL MANUAL" [Monica is reading from it]
"Are we going to play a game
Monica?" asks David, very sternly for a boy.
The eight code words to activate the robot's love program are: SIRUS,
SOCRATES, PARTICLE, DECIBAL, HURRICANE, DOLPHIN, TULIP, and lastly MONICA.
"What were those words for mommy?" are David's first words
after being encrypted to execute his affective-sentient software programs.
Parents, next seen dressed in formal evening attire.
"Do I smell lovely?" David asks.
[broken bottle of perfume shown on-screen].
"Mommy, will you die?" he asks as the smell of perfume
permeates and overpowers the bedroom [David has not been programmed to smell.
The toilet scene with his mother was the first indication of this].
[sepulchral lighting now, a la Joel Schumacher]
Monica gives David the super-toy Teddy bear now.
David picks up phone like a boy-unit terminator-cell phone now, and
simulates the operator and his by now irate father (Henry tells her that Martin
their son is out of his coma now!).
Martin [David's organic ("orga") brother, out of his coma and
at home now]: "David, can you walk on the walls and ceiling like a fly, like one of the
high tech models? You don't look special,
you look like any ordinary little boy".
[Martin asks this wearing hi-tech leg braces, electronic, to help him
walk after such a long coma, making him quite mecha now himself]
Martin: "When is your birthday?"
David replies that he has no
birthday.
"Well then, what is your build day?" questions Martin.
An unlikely compassion and bonding from Martin towards David is
inexplicably displayed now -- no character development was used to preface this
scene ... then suddenly Martin becomes mercurial and malicious and says
"peacock, can you say peacock? Good, now David, say "pea" two
times very quickly". [after so much toilet humor,
Spielberg might get a cameo appearance on "Ally McBeal"]
NEXT SCENE: Monica reading Pinocchio to David in a row boat, and next,
David in bed, snuggled with mom for more storytelling -- so trite I again
wanted to run home and forfeit my ten bucks.
THUS-- ATE --DAVID: While the corporate techs at Cybertronics are
removing spinach from David's stomach, and cleaning his circuitry ["smells
of garlic" they pun], David looks his mother in the face and says, "don't worry mommy, it doesn't hurt," while his
electrical "entrails" are exposed. [David had broken the number one
android taboo, and swallowed his food and water, rather than just pretend, out
of competitive rivalry with his brother Martin, who had been goading him on to
eat and swallow like everyone else].
Martin to David: "go into mommy's room and chop it off!" [referring to a locket of hair].
"Henry, I wanted mommy to love me." [David explains to his
father after getting caught].
Mommy says to her husband, "oh my god! My eye is bleeding." [due to David's stealthy clipping].
A bleeding eye here had no basis in fact or in development; the scissors never
ever close to Monica's eyes or face.
At poolside, next scene:
"Happy birthday Martin, I have a gift for you." says David to
his brother.
When the boys in Martin's crowd gang up on David at the poolside, he
cowers behind his brother Martin, clutching tightly, and says:
"Keep me safe Martin, keep me safe." David then plunges into
the pool, sinking to the bottom, with a death grip seized around his brother Martin's arms and shoulders.
David seems to be a very low-tech and dumb robot, to have not been programmed
to know that drowning is lethal to "orgas", even though he has been
waterproofed like a wristwatch, and doesn't need air to breathe.
Next follows a very schmaltzy scene of David showing his mother maudlin
drawings the next morning, of his deep love and attachment to her.
She says: "David, I thought we could go for a drive tomorrow, in the
country, just you and me."
In the forest, next day:
"David, I have to leave you here."
"Is this a game mommy?"
She now maternally warns him, tears in her eyes, to stay away from the
Flesh Fairs, even though we in the audience have not yet had one hint the
entire film, what in the hell a Flesh Fair might be. ["Close
Encounters" visuals for this "abandoned-by-my-mother" scene.]
ACT TWO:
GIGGOLO JOE to a new client:
"Once you've had a mecha-lover, you'll never want a real man
again."
"You wind me up inside" he says to her, playing "I Only
Have Eyes For You" by tilting his head 90 degrees and clicking on a 1950s
45-rpm rendition of the song via a cable in his neck that plays tunes out of
his concealed speakers.
The breasty and panting woman then asks Joe fatuously, "do you hear
some music?"
Now we have a scene with BLADE RUNNER blue-wash light, in a street scene,
that same night.
Joe goes to service another orga female, but she is already dead in bed,
all wet with blood for him, and not vaginal lubrication. Her name is Sam. There
is no rationale, nor explanation, nor motive given, for her to be dead, and no
logic whatsoever to Joe being set up by her killer, in an irreversible
frame-up. The killer himself, an "orga," comes out of the shadows and
asks Joe, "how many seconds since you last saw her, Joe?"
He answers, "255,133 seconds". [which
would be about three days].
The killer gets close to the dead woman in bed and says in her
inattentive ears, "Remember Sam, you killed me first." [I guess he
meant her humor]
Moon Rising robo-roundup balloon --
[announcements via bullhorns]
"Expel your Mecha. Purge yourselves of all artificiality."
The mecha motorcycle Dobermans have jaws and teeth like vampires, that hunt down renegade robots. They are all on
the loose.
The leader of the Flesh Fair seems to be a lampoon of none other than
Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg's nemesis.
TEDDY WALKING IN THE FLESH FAIR:
"Take him to Lost & Found," says a fair worker.
One robot a little later asks all the other robot prisoners, "Why
are we penned for execution?"
One of them says, in reply:
"History repeats itself. It is the rite of blood versus
electricity."
"They [orgas] want to maintain numerical superiority."
An INSECT-MAN, many legged mecha robot, preparing
himself for final disassembly, asks, "could you
please turn off my pain receptors?"
The Australian accented leader (the spoof of Kubrick) says:
"Don't worry about him [a robot awaiting extermination] ... we are
only destroying artificiality."
NEXT SCENE: More than a dozen table top framed photographs of family
photos are shown, William Hurt with his robot son David, centerpiece.
Enters a lab assistant, "We found him
[David] at a Flesh Fair."
"Is he alive?"
"Yes, he is in one piece".
BACK TO THE SWAMP IN THE FOREST:
Teddy: "I see the moon."
David: "Is it real?"
Teddy: "I don't know, I can't tell yet." [this
dialogue belongs in the Smithsonian Archives, or at least deserves a Pulitzer]
Gig Joe tilts his head 90 degrees again, yet another time, and switches
on his 45 rpm player, ratcheted somewhere in his mainframe, in this moonlit
swamp scene, as he does a little Irish gig in the shallow water in step to his
simple-headed tune.
ANDROID EXPLOITATION OF HUMAN SEXUALITY---
A car load of horny boy teenagers are hosts to David and Joe in their
four-door vehicle to freedom. Joe plays a hologram of a whore who is hungry to
have sex with boys and engineers it to bounce on their willing laps.
"Get in!" they sing out in lusty desire. Now they are all off
to
They find in the arcade a garish hologram named Dr. Know, who appears
much more cartoonish, than knowledgeable. He speaks in Robin William's voice, a
caricature of a Yiddish inflected Einsteinian Brooklyn dialect, "oye vey,
i give ya fast food for ya thoughts." The fast food he offers has even
less calories than NutraSweet.
At end of this scene, Joe tells David --
"In this day and age, nothing costs more than information."
[obviously, wishing they had gotten more for their money -- or perhaps, this
was a mistake in the soundtrack, and we should have heard the theme song from
James Bond revved up to deafening decibels].
PROFESSOR HOBBY'S CLUE, via Dr. Know, that is, slipped to the unwitting
David in Dr. Know's emporium:
"Power which can transform Mecha into Orga, can be found where the
lion's weep at the end of the world."
Joe to David: "They hate us you know [orgas], and they'll kill us,
they'll stop at nothing."
More wisdom from Joe to David:
"When the end comes, there will be only us. They made us too smart,
too quick, and too many [mechas]!"
Ocean shot again, albeit this one much more defined, attractive, and
sunny, than the opening shot of the sea that introduced the film.
David and Joe fly their helicopter up the face of
David accosts another David robot, in
"Are you real, are you me?" he asks
"I am David." replies the replicant David
"So am I."
"Let's be friends." says David II.
"We can't ever!" retorts David I. There is only one David and I
am the only one."
The original David then violently decapitates the new David model, with a
lamp stand, in an ugly rage.
Prof. Hobby approaches him after this murder, and looks with a father's
approval at his robocidal and overachieving "son".
"Until you were born, David, robots didn't dream, or desire. Dr.
Know was the only time we intervened on your behalf, David. Otherwise, you were
all on your own." [referring to the clue left in
Dr. Know's memory nano-tubules about "weeping lions at the end of the
earth".]
"My son who died was one of a kind. David, you are the FIRST of a
kind." adds Prof. Hobby.
David says blankly, "My brain is falling out." [several people fled out of the theatre at this point,
leaving several rows blank and looking like a fall out shelter.]
We were told earlier in the film by the pesky narrator that the first
thing David ever remembered in his existence was a bird with wings
outstretched; not so different from the Blue Fairy woman -----
or his early programmed images
inserted into him in the Cybertronics lab where he was manufactured, behind a
plate of frosted glass, and we in the audience are suddenly much more aware
than David, of what truly was David's first memory in his "life".
No explanation is given in the film for David being justified in his
precept that he is unique from all the other 500 Davids on display or currently
hanging on hooks in the lab.
David, depressed by these legions of Davids under production, leaps and
plunges himself into the water below, from the heights of the
ACT THREE
David sits on the ocean floor [i.e. the submerged streets of old
The helicopter he and Joe stole from the police patrols at the Flesh Fair
is now a submergible vehicle [i.e., a submarine].
Narrator, in a Barry Lyndon narrator's voice, "...
and David continued to pray to the Blue Fairy, ... he prayed as the ocean froze
... and he prayed and he prayed and he prayed and he prayed and he prayed ...
thus, 2000 years passed by, like a prayer."
Aliens arrive, and there is finally an element of poetry in the film, for
the first time. The editing and visuals are actually exciting now, hard for
this critic to admit coming from a Dreamworks Studio, but not quite as good as
in the film, "Infinity's Child", made in 1999, about a planet that is
believed to be a shift in consciousness, via a Gateway World of ancient legend, directed
by Jan Nickman. [also in this film, credit is due the
Digital Art Director, Bill Elsworth; Music Director, Paul Haslinger; and
Animation Director, Rodney L'Ongnion, in a film that has set new standards for
"trip films" for all time.
The Spielberg android aliens communicate by microwave transmissions, a
kind of artificial telepathy [AT]. They "reanimate" David, after 2000
years of needing a new battery, by just waving their hand like appendages in
front of his face. Some people in the audience now experienced ASS [Atrophied
Sensory Suppositions].
The Spielberg android aliens next form a circle, like in the game ring
around the rosies, pockets full of posies, and communally download all of
David's memories, in a few soundless seconds.
ON THE ALIEN ANDROIDS INTERGALACTIC OUTPOST
Close up of David's eyes fill the entire screen. David is in his old
Earth bedroom, and has similar eyes to Bowman in 2001, when he was in the alien
WHITE ROOM near Jupiter.
In Kubrick's 2001, the room seemed to be an interface between the aliens
and Bowman, a set up for his transformation from human baby into a more
advanced life form up the evolutionary ladder.
Here, we have a room that is much like Greyhound's waiting area, stalling
until all the toilets have been cleaned.
David hears his mother's piano playing and also an eerie and ghostly
"Daaavvviiiiiidd", like in the Shining.
The blue fairy appears as a hologram, speaking in Meryl Streep's voice.
"David, I will do anything that is possible, but I cannot make you
into a real boy. We read your mind. There is no detail so small that we didn't
find it. We can bring back other people from your past. We need some physical
sample of the person, like a bone or a fingernail."
TEDDY walks towards the Blue Fairy, with a locket of Monica's hair, even
before the Blue Fairy has explained that the aliens need a sample of dna from the past. The line editor must have been on
vacation!
ALIENS: "Give him what he wants!" (i.e.
a resurrected clone mother)
In a voice that could be Ben Kingsley, a wise
alien patriarch explains to David that "Resurrectees" live less than
18-hours, because of the space-time continuum, and the space-time formulas
stipulate that if they bring his mother back, she will vanish completely, after
her body becomes tired and she needs to sleep. Sleep brings on annihilation, so
there is less than a day to share with his cloned mother.
David spends an entire afternoon with his cloned mother and the movie ends
happily. Tears and
cheers.
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SPIELBERG’S GLOBAL WEB
---
· Spielberg produced Men In Black. MIB2 is in production now. MIB-2001, is
it in the works?
· The Irish playwright Conor McPherson of, THE WEIR, from THE CRYPT theatre
of Dublin, soon to be well paid by Spielberg for script writing and doctoring.
Also, Spielberg has given some financial backing for the advancement of Martin
McDonagh, who wrote The Beauty Queen of Leenane and Other Plays, which
premiered in 1996 in
· Spielberg wheels and deals frequently with Kirk Kerkorian, of MGM, Las
Vegas, an Armenian billionaire.
· Dreamworks SKG: Made up of Spielberg; Jeffrey Katzenberg; David Geffen
[music mogul]; in cahoots with MicroSoft’s co-founder Paul Allen; Edgar
Bronfman Jr. is a wannabe that they toy with [his 71 year old father, Edgar
Bronfman, Sr., is President of the World Jewish Congress, and also president of
the World Jewish Holocaust Assets Restitution Organization. Edgar Bronfman Jr.,
owns MCA-Universal Studio, and now also ABC television [which is currently
Disney-ABC]. David Geffen used to be the largest shareholder of MCA Records.
Jeffrey Katzenberg bailed from Disney to work with Dreamworks SKG. “AI” was
produced by Dreamworks SKG and Warner, with a little help from Natural Nylon,
the studio run by Jude Law and his wife near
For a review
of AI, by this same web blogger, go to
https://www.angelfire.com/indie/hollywoodtattler/AI_review_bryan_adrian.htm
