 SEPTEMBER, 2001 |
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A.I.: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
(2001, 140 minutes, PG-13)
Its setting is the future and the main characters are robots, but A.I.: Artificial Intelligence focuses on an old-fashioned, time-honored, Spirit-powered human emotion: love.
Written and directed by Steven Spielberg and based on ideas from the late director Stanley Kubrick and short stories by Brian Aldiss, this science fiction opus tells the Pinocchio-like story of a mechanical boy, David (Haley Joel Osment), who wants to be a real boy.
David has been created by a scientist (William Hurt) at Cybertronics Manufacturing in the future, after the melting of the polar icecaps have drastically affected human civilization and population numbers. Robots are in common use, but David is unique: the first robot capable of true human emotion and the first able to love. The scientist describes David as "a robot child who can love . . . with a love that will never end" and as "always loving, never ill, never changing."
When asked if it is possible for humans to return love to a robot, the scientist replies, "In the beginning, didn't God create Adam to love him?"
With humans, however, the give-and-take of love gets more complicated, as David's situation illustrates. He is "adopted" into a family and is soon imprinted with a permanently bonding love for his human mother.
In true human ("orga" for organic) fashion, though, complications arise in the mother's feelings for her "mecha" (mechanical) son. David's love, however, is "forever" and cannot be altered.
In this scenario, the film raises serious questions about the nature and boundaries of love. Never mind the robots and the futuristic setting; we're really examining ourselves -- here and now -- with such questions as these:
- What constitutes true love?
- How and why do we turn love on and off?
- Is it necessary for love to be returned to be valid?
- Can we really love something that is mechanical or not alive? (People say they "love" their new car, boat, house, toy, or shoes. Why not a mechanical child?)
- What responsibility do we owe children we create or are responsible for? The question applies to humans, and maybe someday to robots. And what about animals for which we are responsible?
- Is love dependent solely upon the actions or character of the beloved?
- Why do we so desperately want to love and be loved?
- Why is a mother's love so important to a child?
- Is there an eternal, spiritual element to love?
- Why are humans so frequently frustrated and traumatized in their pursuit of love?
- Where and how do we usually look for love?
The last two questions are raised especially with Gigolo Joe (Jude Law), a robot specifically designed to pleasure human women. Joe helps David during a quest.
Besides being the first robot to love, David also is the first robot who dreams, which means that he can actively pursue his dreams. David, throughout much of the film, pursues one dream: to become a real boy so he can come home to his mother's love.
David experiences what many humans have before him -- finding out that dreams can be as difficult to obtain as true love. Profound psychological overtones concerning love and dreams run throughout the story.
This beguiling artificial child with a winning smile personifies many a human child and adult as he "buys into" fairy tales about love and dreams. For David, the fairy tale is Pinocchio, in which the Blue Fairy turns a wooden boy into a real boy "in return for your good heart."
What does David's "good heart" gain him? In his own journey leading to the Blue Fairy, David gets wide-eyed views of the "real world" of human emotions such as greed, callousness, anger, fear, jealousy, and hate. David becomes apparently mired in a fairy tale of love and dreams -- and like so many before him seeking love, eventually settles for what he can get. The view isn't necessarily a completely satisfying or reassuring one.
"I'm sorry I didn't tell you about the world," David's mother says to him. But what could he have done with the knowledge anyway? Experience is what really teaches.
A.I., which contains outstanding visual effects and artistic designs, also raises questions about the future of humankind:
- Will there be drastic changes in geography, population, and life because of temperature shifts?
- What will be advances in science over the next century?
- How will intelligent life on this planet or elsewhere years from now look upon human history and humans?
- Will artificial intelligence be a reality in the not-so-distant future?
Hans Moravec, director of the Mobile Robot Lab at Carnegie MellonUniversity, sees a bright future for robots. He says, "Within the next century they will mature into entities as complex as ourselves and eventually into something transcending everything we know -- in whom we can take pride when they refer to themselves as our descendants. Unleashed from the plodding pace of biological evolution, the children of our minds will be free to grow to confront immense and fundamental challenges in the larger universe. We humans will benefit for a time from their labors, but sooner or later, like natural children, they will seek their own fortunes while we, their aged parents, silently fade away. Very little need be lost in this passing of the torch -- it will be in our artificial offspring's power, and to their benefit, to remember almost everything about us, even, perhaps, the detailed workings of individual human minds."
As a depiction of one of these early "children of our minds," David perhaps gives us a preview of what lies ahead in Moravec's vision.
A.I. is certainly a questioning film -- with inherent questions about love, dreams, science, robots, and the future.
"Is it a game?" David asks about activities he doesn't understand.
A. I. is indeed like a question-and-answer game. Your turn.
MOULIN ROUGE
(2001, 123 minutes, PG-13)
It's pretty much a given that any love story, on some level, is a Reel Spirit movie.
After all, love is that most spiritual of energies and emotions, and the attribute most often associated with God. Scriptures and sages tell us that loving one another is loving God.
Not all movies about love are equal, of course. Some have more to say -- that is, tell us more about finding and understanding true love -- than others. Some have one main theme about love, and that theme opens hearts and minds a little more.
Moulin Rouge is primarily a one-love-theme film, and there's no mistaking or overlooking that important message. It is wisely and memorably repeated in the movie. This is the theme:
"The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return."
Christian (Ewan McGregor), an idealistic young English writer, pens these words as he remembers his adventures at the Moulin Rouge, the fabled nightclub in the artistic, bohemian section of Paris at the turn of the twentieth century. In this frantic, mesmerizing, creative film from director Baz Luhrmann, Christian stumbles into a job writing a spectacular show for the Moulin Rouge. There he falls in love with the club's star, the beautiful but frail Satine ((Nicole Kidman).
Luhrmann, who co-wrote the script with Craig Pearce, said the film is based on the Orphean myth about a young poet who searches for perfect love in the underworld.
Christian is the symbol and personification of innocence and innocent love. He values the noble ideals of truth, beauty and freedom, but mostly love, and is earnestly looking for love. Satine represents experience and world-weary love. He is naive; she is jaded. He isn't wise in the ways of love; she is too wise. Neither has ever truly loved before -- and so are learning their greatest lesson.
Their relationship is full of obstacles, but no matter; the obstacles more clearly elaborate the love theme. What is paramount is not the situation, not the outcome, but the emotion of love itself, the giving and receiving of genuine, soul-connecting love. When all is said and sung and done, the energy and emotion of love that once excited, in whatever form, remains; it can never be dissipated.
"The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return."
Christian mentions "love overcoming all obstacles" and sings that "love lifts us up where we belong." Satine says, "He loves me and that is worth everything." The highest understanding is that the energy of love satisfies and endures beyond the human stories.
In the continuous flow of innocence and experience in our earthly love stories, in the clash of love with other emotions and forces such as jealousy and power, love itself transcends time and place, and is the greatest thing we ever need to learn.
THE PRINCESS AND THE WARRIOR
(2001, 130 minutes, German, R)
After being mesmerized by this fast-paced, inventive film about connections, interrelationships and fate, I made a connection of my own. The words of the physicist in the movie Mindwalk came to me: "The essential nature of matter lies not in objects but in interconnections . . . Ultimately, whether we like or not, we are all part of one inseparable web of relationships."
The Princess and the Warrior, written and directed by German filmmaker Tom Tykwer, explores life's connections with verve, originality and much intelligence, while telling a strange but compelling love story.
If you saw Run Lola Run, Tykwer's 1999 offering, you'll feel at home in this similarly frenetic film that explores the nature of reality. In Lola, Franka Potente plays a woman engaged in a literal race against "time" in various time lines and parallel lives. In different scenarios of Lola running to save her boyfriend, the viewer sees how even the smallest of actions lead to other actions and outcomes.
In Tykwer's latest, Potente again stars, this time as Sissi, an employee in an insane asylum who is saved by a mysterious man, Bodo (Benno Furmann), after an accident that Bodo helped cause. Sissi becomes obsessed with locating Bodo and finding out if there is more to their connection, if indeed Bodo is to be the instrument of significant change in her life. Lola, with its concern with the causes and effects of actions, is a sort of primer for The Princess and the Warrior, which plays even more with the effects of individuals on each other, looks more at the issues of synchronicity and fate in life, and also suggests the profound importance of the choices we make.
As the lives of Sissi and Bodo again overlap during a bank heist that Bodo and his brother have planned, Tykwer has ample opportunity to explore his themes. Sissi and Bodo initially are at the opposite ends of the spectrum as far as thinking about the meaning of life, actions, and relationships. Bodo, a simple, rough-living man with painful memories, is not the questioning sort. His opinion about life is, "It's all meaningless anyway." The sensitive, reflective and intuitive Sissi, however, counters, "Nothing's meaningless."
Pursued by Sissi and seemingly thwarted by fate, Bodo also eventually begins to question. "Why the two of us?" he wonders.
Sissi's sense of their connection is at the soul level. She recounts a dream in which she saw herself and Bodo playing various life roles with each other, including brother and sister, husband and wife, mother and father. "Both of us were both," she says. "I thought it was happiness." Obviously, Sissi is connecting with the "big picture" of life's expanded movie. The amazing intricacy of the "big picture" is vividly depicted in the film with a clarity that real life often does not afford.
Expanding in spiritual consciousness, Sissi has one fear: that everything will be the same as before. She desires a major change and shift in her life. Sissi's desire for change and her grasp of the importance of connecting events and personalities also bring new realizations to Bodo. They both become more aware of their own choices and connections. Sissi seems to even have a sense that there is a divine plan at work. When complications arise during the bank heist, she says, "This isn't the plan." It's clear that she isn't talking about the robbery (which she did not help plan), but about the direction and purpose of her life. Of course, it's also evident from what transpires that even those events that don't appear related actually are related, again, in that "big picture."
A doctor says several times in the film that "everyone is very tense" and refers to "endangered patients." There is a sense that the doctor, too, is talking about the "big picture" and those interconnections of life -- the general tenseness in modern society that comes from people not recognizing the meaningful "web of relationships" and interconnecting people and events in their lives.
As Sissi realizes, "Nothing's meaningless." As Sissi demonstrates, when we make those connections, the meanings become clear. In traditional fairy tales, connections frequently become clearer and situations resolve when a handsome warrior or prince rescues a beautiful princess.
In this film, there is a reverse when the princess (Sissi), with her spiritual insight, rescues the warrior (Bodo) from the angst and frustration of being an "endangered patient" lost in the mundane. In her book My Grandfather's Blessings, Rachel Naomi Remen recites a prayer that begins, "Days pass and the years vanish and we walk sightless among miracles." Among those often overlooked miracles are our interconnecting relationships and the meaning that they give our lives.
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