A.I. doesn’t work. It can; it could. For reasons I can’t quite put my finger on, I very much wanted it to. But in the end, it just doesn’t. Why not?

Let’s look at the accusations most frequently leveled at the film so far. Reviewers seem to like the film, generally — or, at least, it’s baffled them into submitting the “brilliant, but deeply flawed” sound bites we keep hearing in the ads — but much of the movie-going public has returned indictments of “too long” and “too boring.” Well…yes. And yet…not quite. It’s not too long, exactly. A.I. lasts about two and a half hours, a not unreasonable running time compared with the histrionic foot-dragging of, say, Pearl Harbor, and I didn’t check my watch once. I can think of a few places where I might have cut it tighter (Jude Law’s first scene comes to mind), but everything that’s in the film belongs in the film. The problem isn’t the length per se. The problem is the film itself, and with every frame, that fact becomes more obvious.

I’d address the same comment to “too boring.” It’s not a dull movie. It’s every bit as visually captivating as we’ve come to expect, both from the previews and from Steven Spielberg’s previous work. The plot moves along without getting mired down; in fact, it moves along too fast at times, but that’s refreshing coming from Spielberg, who tends to do too much of the work for us. So, “boring” isn’t accurate, quite, and yet, on a lot of levels, it’s a tedious film to get through. But it’s not that it’s boring. It’s that the film asks us to invest in emotions and reactions that the very premise of the film disallows — must disallow — a priori. A.I.‘s relationship to the audience is a tautology, a feedback loop. The film doesn’t fail because it’s overlong or uninteresting. It fails because it refuses to admit its own pointlessness, and the failure is bred into its DNA. It has “flaws,” yes, but not fixable ones; tinkering wouldn’t save it. It’s like when the robots (or aliens, or whatever) reconstitute Monica from the lock of her hair that Teddy has saved — it’s her, no question, but she’s not built to last. Spielberg, the emperor in his new clothes, just decides for us that we buy what he’s selling, but we don’t. We can’t.

Haley Joel Osment doesn’t help. He’s a competent young actor, but he’s creepy; ironically in the context of A.I., he looks like a Hollywood executive’s idea of Everyboy, with the just-a-little-too-long hair and the weirdly prominent big-boy teeth. He’s thirteen, but he looks nine, and he’s got a sinister sheen to his skin that’s just not quite “right” — he’s eerie, plain and simple. In The Sixth Sense, that worked. Osment functioned as that geeky kid you want to like but can’t, because he won’t help himself by acting “normal,” and because the role demanded that, Osment fit it perfectly. Here, Osment works against the movie where he’s supposed to work with it. Spielberg wants us to sympathize with David, to invest in him emotionally, to cheer him in his quest to become a real boy, but he doesn’t factor in Osment’s creepiness. It’s creepy enough to bring home a boy-bot as a substitute for your cryogenically frozen son, but it’s even creepier when the boy looks and behaves like Haley Joel Osment. Even Monica gets creeped out. How on earth does Spielberg expect us to identify with David when the other characters can’t seem to decide how to react to him?

Because that’s the real problem. We can’t identify with David. As soon as Monica imprints him upon herself, David takes on a stalkerish aspect; at best, he’s annoying, but really, he’s just a robot, and the film can’t seem to accept that. David takes on the “real” son by eating spinach and breaks down, and during the repair sequence, he clutches his “mother’s” hand; Spielberg wants it both ways, and it’s not possible. The by-now-famous tagline “his love is real, but he is not” doesn’t tell the whole story, because David’s love isn’t real — it’s programmed. Spielberg has adopted an if-I-build-it-they-will-come approach here — if we carry on as though David’s a person, they’ll go with it — and it doesn’t work. And it’s not as though we haven’t seen the motif executed successfully in film and literature, and in our lives, before. We identify with non-humans; we identify with inanimate objects. My parents sold our family car, which we’d had all my life, when I was ten, and I cried real tears to see it go. We all read The Velveteen Rabbit, and we all carried our blankies around until they fell apart, and we all got the sledgehammer “symbolism” of the Pinocchio thing in the movie. But if he wants us to connect with David as a human being, why does Spielberg open the picture with an exposition-heavy scene that only serves to emphasize the opposite — that David is a machine?

And why does Spielberg never investigate the implications of that? If we see one reaction shot of Monica nervously chewing her fingers and not knowing what to make of David, we see a hundred, but what does it mean? How did a society of both “orgas” and “mechas” come to exist? And David exists not to love himself, but to make others feel loved, and yet the logical extension of what that might mean to human interaction is never explored, or even acknowledged. And that’s the least of the logic sinkholes that the film refuses to recognize. Why, in the woods, do the mechas flee from the flesh-fair round-up? Why would they feel (programmed) fear? And why would the older, and presumably more primitive, models seem to feel that “fear” more intensely? Why does Gigolo Joe take on a protective aspect when he’s not programmed for that? And if the humans haven’t programmed the mechas to model human emotions properly, why on earth would the humans revel so gleefully in their destruction? It’s analogous to a monster-truck rally, I suppose, but Spielberg asks us to accept the crowd’s bloodlust, and it’s not credible. If we cared about David as a character, perhaps we could dismiss these inconsistencies, but again, we can’t truly care about him. He’s a machine. He’s only supposed to love, not to want love in return. “His love is real, but he is not.” No, he is not. But Spielberg made the movie backwards, basing it on the conceit that David is real, and it’s his love that’s not.

So A.I. goes on and on, proceeding on the assumption that the central idea has succeeded, when in fact it hasn’t, and can’t. The deeper Spielberg gets into the story — David’s return to Manhattan and his “real” “father,” the underwater sequence — and the closer he thinks he’s getting to reinventing David as a person, the farther the film strays from believability, the initial mistake compounded with every passing minute. In truth, Spielberg has made the very best movie he possibly could have, given the angle from which he chose to approach it. He just chose the wrong angle.

A.I. could have burned the house down. Spielberg could have made the best film in twenty years, but Spielberg has certain obsessions and weaknesses, and they got in his way. Spielberg films don’t do well for no reason; as a society, we seem to need stories about the long, sad search for the key that will unlock the door to the chamber of secrets, that will in turn offer up a map for the journey home. I don’t like his films, usually — he went on autopilot after E.T., I suspect — but they fill a certain need. I don’t think he’s out of his depth here, and I don’t agree with the reviewers who have said that he and Kubrick make a poor match, because Kubrick addressed so many of the same issues of homecoming in his movies. Spielberg seems to believe that home — finding home, getting home — is always the answer, while Kubrick approaches home as the question, but it’s exactly that high-road/low-road split that could have turned A.I. into a powerful exploration of what drives us as human beings. That’s not what A.I. became, though. A.I. is an unusually dark Spielberg movie, with Kubrickian elements tacked onto it because Spielberg panicked and went on the defensive (the entire last act is lifted from 2001: A Space Odyssey, except for the part where 2001 didn’t hit us in the head with the short iron of exposition). It’s easy to say that A.I. could never have worked because Spielberg loves people and Kubrick hates them, and it’s not entirely unfounded, either, but it’s not the end of the argument.

Ah, the story. The story told here isn’t the story that would really captivate us. We really want to see how society works as an orga-mecha hybrid, how “love-bots” like Gigolo Joe have come not only to exist but to gain widespread acceptance. We really want to see how the family — the microcosm of society — functions once it too becomes an orga-mecha hybrid. We want to follow the arc of Martin’s return from cryogenic suspension. I mean, when and how did human endeavor finally get cryogenics to work? Martin could function as both prodigal son and Christ figure — future science literally resurrected him. But it’s never referred to explicitly, much less followed, except through Martin’s role as David’s antagonist. Which story has more potential? Hint: it’s not David’s.

I saw the film in a fairly rowdy crowd, and afterwards, as I waited in line for the ladies’ room, the most heated discussion involved whether Sir Anthony Hopkins had done the voice-over (and for the last time, people, it’s Ben Kingsley). Nobody seemed terribly concerned with the continuity errors and logic loopholes, save the two girls behind me, one of whom pointed out that two thousand years in salt water would surely have compromised David’s functioning and appearance somewhat. We amused ourselves with Teddy Ruxpin jokes during the endless wait for a stall, but I couldn’t stop running the film back in my mind, trying to find the moment where the wheels loosened and then came off. That’s the thing, though — the wheels stay on. The movie is put together well, and it tells its story well. But it’s not a plausible story, or an engaging story, and worse, when the movie lets its guard down, you can see that Spielberg doesn’t genuinely believe in it either. He just doesn’t know how else to deal with it. There’s a reason Kubrick let A.I. gestate for so long, and to my mind, it needed more time in the womb. We still don’t know whether androids dream of electric sheep, and Spielberg isn’t willing to speculate, at least not in any kind of provocative way.

If you haven’t seen A.I., you should; in its own way, it’s an important movie. But prepare yourself for the reality that the film can’t bring itself to face — his love is not real, because his love is not “love.” It’s a binary sequence, and ones and zeroes in the hands of Steven Spielberg do not a recipe for movie magic make.

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