2001 Saturn SF – AI: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

I have been looking forward to rewatching this film since I added the Saturns to my reviews – not because I enjoyed it so much the first time…in fact, I hated it.  I just really wanted to make sure that I hated it.

This film has as good a science fiction pedigree as you can get.  It began as a project by Stanley Kubrick, and Steven Spielberg decided to complete it himself after Kubrick’s death; it’s based on a short story by British sf legend Brian Aldiss called “Super-Toys Last All Summer Long;” and, it concerns the very Asimovian question of whether a robot artificial intelligence can love, and, more importantly in this case, would he be loved back?

In a catastrophic future caused by global warming, there are strict population controls.  Some people choose to fill the gap left by not having children with robotic “mecha” children.  David (Haley Joel Osment) is a prototype with the aforementioned lovin’ upgrade.  He is placed with a couple whose real son is on deep freeze, and they come to like him.  They allow David to imprint on them, but when their real son comes back, David is a fourth wheel (cars in this future have three wheels, get it?), and the mother leaves him in the woods with his robotic teddy bear.  Inspired by his mother’s dramatic readings of Pinocchio, David goes off to find the Blue Fairy and become a real boy.  He meets sex-bot Gigolo Joe (Jude Law), who joins him on his quest.

The visuals are pretty fantastic, and there’s a few human-face-on-robotic-chassis effects that were pretty cutting edge ten years ago.  That’s really the nicest thing I can say about the film.  Yep, I still didn’t like it.

I have several problems with it.  Haley Joel Osment’s performance is impressive, but in a creepy way.  Watching him in this film is just plain unsettling, as you suspect he may actually be a robot (the Child-Actortron 3000).  An even bigger problem is the pacing.  Kubrick hadn’t gotten past the story stage, so this is mostly Spielberg, but he tried hard to do a Kubrick impression. That’s where the film starts to fail, I think.  He begins with a much more deliberate pace and imbues every scene with a weighty sense of suspense or dread.  These are old Kubrickian tricks, but I think only Kubrick can pull them off.    

The movie suffocates under this weightiness, it’s slow, depressing, and dull, and it doesn’t have nearly as much to say as it seems to think it does.  What is the message?  What do we learn?  People are mean to robots?  Spielberg is good at sentimentality?  People will wear glow sticks in the future?  The future will look like Las Vegas meets a State Fair?  I don’t know. The movie actually feels very New Wavey, which makes sense with the Brian Aldiss roots, but it’s the worst of New Wave misanthropy and pretension.

After meandering for two hours, the film does take a crazy left turn in the last half hour, that’s…well, at least it’s interesting.  There are a lot of contrivances to get the film to an awkward sense of closure that only barely mitigates the slow-burn creepiness that bogs down most of its running time.

Grade: C-

1972 Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation – A CLOCKWORK ORANGE

Ah, no better way to celebrate New Year's than with a bit of the old ultra-violence.

Kubrick directed three of the first four films to win Hugos, and three of his films in a row have racked up wins.

This is shocking and disturbing film. The first third follows a mod gang as they fight, rob, rape, and murder their way through a dystopian future. Kubrick doesn’t shy away from showing us some fairly extreme sexual violence (the film was rated X in the US and banned in Britain for decades). The film is narrated by one of the thugs, Alex (Malcolm McDowell), who is bloodthirsty and nihilistic. Alex is arrested and sentenced to a long prison sentence. He eventually signs up for a Pavlovian experiment that will make him averse to violence. He is forced to watch hours of ultraviolence while he’s given drugs to make him ill.

It’s a bit hard to sympathize with Alex, which I’d say is the biggest stumbling block of the film (though certainly an intentional and well-executed one). Alex's awfulness provides the viewer with an interesting ethical dilemma. Is it right to basically neuter Alex with aversion therapy? Is Alex good if he only behaves because he has to? These are interesting and challenging questions.

The film’s biggest achievement is probably visual, which is not surprising for a Kubrick film. There are some amazing shots, and Kubrick creates a vibrant stylized world. It does look a bit like a futuristic vision from the sixties (which it basically is) – everything is colorful, sexualized, and very mod. But it is a compelling and believable vision.

A Clockwork Orange is not for the weak-stomached, but it’s certainly a filmmaking achievement. I do like that the WorldCon voters were willing to opt for something like this.

Grade: A-

1969 Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation - 2001

The late 60s were quite the era for game-changing “dramatic presentations;” first Star Trek, now 2001, a fantastic classic. I bought this film on Blu-ray and watched it for this project, and I can attest that it holds up as a brilliant and haunting spectacle. There’s no question that this is one of my favorite films, though its long dialogue-free scenes keep it from being a particularly accessible film (there is no dialogue for the first half-hour).

Based on a short story by sf legend Arthur C. Clarke (and later expanded into a novelization with 3 sequels), 2001 takes place in the distant future year of 2001 AD. There are two main threads. 1) There’s an alien black monolith that seems to have played a role in shaping human evolution. The film begins at the “dawn of man” and shows several apelike creatures learning to use tools after interacting with the monolith. Later, in that futuristic space age future of 2001 AD, humans investigate another monolith that they have uncovered on the lunar surface. 2) the spaceship Discovery makes a long trip to Jupiter to investigate yet another monolith. Along the way, they experience problems with their artificially intelligent shipboard computer, HAL 9000.

2001 is all about visual spectacle. It was originally shown in Cinerama, a giant wraparound format using multiple projectors that was designed to differentiate the theater-going experience from the increasingly dominant television. The use of color is brilliant. The special effects are fantastic and hold-up next to anything produced for at least the next 10 years. I’m usually not a fan of the psychedelic, but the surreal final sequence really is sublime, even if you’re not high. 2001 is also the first real entrance of hard sf onto the silver-screen. Kubrick, Clarke and the producers attempted to remain as accurate as possible in their depiction of near-future space age technology (the vacuum of space is actually silent – an obvious but rarely seen point of accuracy). Obviously, as futurism, the film fails. But it’s still one of the realest visions of the future you’ll see. And, there’s no denying this films influence on everything from the look of the startships of Star Wars to the claustrophobic feeling of Alien, not to mention the dozens of parodies of the opening sequence or HAL that have appeared over the years.

Things do move slowly, and Kurbick’s not afraid to let scenes unfold for minutes and minutes within almost total silence (though usually there’s a relaxed piece of classical music playing on the soundtrack). The film is designed for the viewer to sit back and drink in the spectacle (or feel a maddening sense of tension in some of the later scenes). If you’re not prepared for that, you may very well hate this film. If you are patient though, it’s an amazing experience.

Grade: A

1965 Hugo for Dramatic Presentation – DR STRANGELOVE

There were 4 nominees but no winner in this category in 1963 (apparently, WorldCon attendees were sick of The Twilight Zone by then; it was nominated but did not win). No award was given in 1964. In 1965, however, one of my all time favorite movies won: Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

I never really thought of this film as science fiction. It does, in the end, revolve around an unlikely bit of fictional doomsday technology, but the device is more satirical than speculative. I’ll probably have chances as we go to get into the question of what qualifies as science fiction. Either way, Dr Strangelove is a fantastic and timely comedy worthy of recognition. It’s probably obvious by now how much the Cold War dominated early 60s science fiction – we have the advent of post-apocalyptic fiction like A Canticle for Leibowitz just in time for the world to almost blow up in 1962. Dr. Strangelove takes nuclear war head on. A crazed, paranoid American air force officer launches a nuclear attack on the USSR (provoked by fluoridated water, of course) and the Russian and American governments desperately try to stop him before his actions trigger an unstoppable chain of events ending in nuclear Armageddon. Black comedy rules the day, as the film expertly satirizes the prejudices and self-serving attitudes at the heart of the Cold War mentality. Peter Sellers steals the film with three brilliant performances as a British exchange officer, the American President, and a bizarre Nazi scientist. George C. Scott is also brilliant as a dull-witted, belligerent, and paranoid military adviser. If you haven’t seen this film, go see it now (and keep in mind that it takes about half-an-hour to really get going).

Grade: A