Pinocchio Was Here.(Review)

Asked whom he considered the most important French poet, Andre Gide famously replied, "Victor Hugo, alas." Asked who the most important American film director is today, I answer, "Steven Spielberg, alas." He is a great technician, has a terrific eye, and knows how to reach a large audience.

But Spielberg's shortcomings are also considerable. The reason so many of his films deal with children or extraterrestrials-or with sensational topics such as killer sharks, dinosaurs, and the Holocaust- is that these are ways of avoiding adults with their everyday existential problems, at which Spielberg is no good. And then there is his sentimentality, about which more anon.

Spielberg's latest, A.I. (for Artificial Intelligence), is by any standards a lesser, by mine a much lesser, performance. It is a project Stanley Kubrick had been piddling with and talking to Spielberg about, based on a 1969 short story by Brian Aldiss. In Kubrick's hands, it was to have been a black dystopia; bequeathed to Spielberg, who wrote his own screenplay, it becomes an uneasy mix of trauma and treacle.

In a future where global warming has caused coastal cities (including New York) to be flooded, humanity has been decimated, and highly evolved humanoid robots serve numerous functions, from gardening to sexual pleasuring: everything except love, of which they are incapable. Now Prof. Hobby, the head of the Cybertronics lab, has come up with a robot boy, David, programmed to give undying love to his "parents." A Cybertronics employee, Henry Swinton, and his wife, Monica, whose mortally ill child has been cryogenically frozen and awaits a cure, are given David on a trial basis. After a number of contretemps, the wary Monica is won over and decides to make the adoption permanent. For some reason, David's love does not extend to Henry.

Everything is fine until the Swintons' natural son, Martin, is cured and returns home. Intense sibling rivalry ensues-Martin is odious, David angelic-and the Swintons, misled about some incidents, decide to jettison David. His grim "mother" drives him out into the woods and abandons the devastated kid in a scene guaranteed to melt the most robotic human heart. Here ends what is in essence the first movie. The second concerns David's wanderings with Teddy, his speaking and thinking supertoy teddy bear. They encounter a robot junkpile where less-damaged robots scavenge for replacement body parts, and where human robot hunters (threatened by robot proliferation) hunt down with robot dogs any stray mecha. (The robots are mechas, i.e., mechanicals; the humans, orgas, i.e., organics.) David meets up with Gigolo Joe, a cavorting, merry, adult mecha who services orga women better than an orga can. They strike up a friendship as David, yearning to become fully human and loved by Mommy, seeks the miracle-granting Blue Fairy he heard about in the fairy tales Monica read to him.

By now you must realize that this is a retelling of Pinocchio, with the trusty Teddy as Jiminy Cricket, and so on. Joe and David wander into a Flesh Fair, a hideous circus where doomed robots go heroically to their grisly deaths, as ferocious orga crowds watch and even brutally participate: The Roman arena and Nazi death camps are evoked. I spare you sundry adventures-including an encounter with Dr. Know, a hologram that answers questions in Robin Williams's voice-and skip to where we arrive in a semi-submerged New York City. Gigolo Joe has been dragged off to annihilation, and the despairing David dives off Radio City Music Hall into freezing waters and a 2,000-year sleep.

By now, in film No. 3, humans are extinct and the world is inhabited by elongated, benevolent, large but wispy creatures that help David and Teddy find the Blue Fairy, who looks like a primitive Madonna in an Italian ...