A.I. Artificial Intelligence

Originally published on 04/09/2023 on Letterboxd

A totemic text about, amongst many subjects, the colossal failure of cinema to live up to Griffith’s conception of it as a universal language that might eliminate the very kind of violent, corrosive prejudice that his own work often lent itself to. The image is simulacra of the most facile kind, one that an often blinkered humanist such as Spielberg has (sometimes unwittingly) time and time again used to seduce audiences into a kind of childish naivety (see: his war pictures). Perhaps it is why this film, the most baroque of these experiments with the hollowness of the image- one that finds in the director’s usual sources of sweeping catharsis a source of primal horror- is his greatest work as not just an artist but as an ideologue. The confrontation with the lies inherent to the image here is staged with such unwavering brutality that it often seems as if the embodiment of innocence that is Haley Joel Osment (who delivers probably the most moving performance of the 21st century here) is genuinely losing his illusions of a just world in real-time.