I don’t know how to react to this film. I really, really, genuinely like the movie. I love the style of the thing, I love the tone, and I think the acting is universally great. But I also feel that the film sort of shoots itself in the foot a little once the focus switches explicitly to David. The first forty minutes of the film are largely told from Monica’s perspective, with her as the protagonist and David as an object of tension. David is odd and seen through the eyes of Monica there are about three specific moments in the first act where David is, unwittingly, an object of tension. The sequence where Monica is getting used to David’s presence, or where David is eating spinach, or where David is wanting a lock of hair are all laced with an almost Polanski like terror of the invading other. It’s not David’s fault, but those moments serve to reinforce the specific otherness of David. He’s sympathetic, but it’s easier to understand the revulsion and fear than empathise with David.
As such the shift to David as protagonist, which itself is kind of broken up between the loss of Monica as protagonist and introduction of Gigolo Joe, never really gels for me. Largely because the film has built up David as being essentially non-human in it’s opening forty minutes.
I think the film does a great job of making robots seem genuinely inhuman, with innocence as their primary characterisitic. Gigolo Joe in particular is almost childlike when not engaged in his regular programming. As such there’s a real distinction between hopelessly naïve robots and the more mean-spirited, self-orientated, humans. What I find fascinating is that David is both naïve and childlike and almost completely self-motivated and goal orientated. There’s a sense of self which is both a thing which saves him and a thing which separates him from other mecha. His destructive tantrum upon seeing the other David is his most human moment and it adds, to me at least, to the growing sense of distrust for David. He’s essentially been created with all the wants and needs of a child but with the inability to every truly sate those needs means he’s always going to essentially be fundamentally left wanting.
Even the ‘happy ending’ is almost deliberately melancholic. Now my take on the ending is that the stuff involving his mother and the blue-fairy is largely in his head. Not a hallucination, but an implanted experience by the other robots before they deactivate him. There are a few cutaways which show the Robots watching the scene play out which always made me think they were observing his memory core or something like that. From David’s point of view it’s the happiest moment he could have, but there’s something deeply bittersweet about the entire ending. It sort of makes you realise how cruel the entire IDEA of David actually is.
In terms of production I love elements of the film but I do think there are sequences and moments which don’t quite work. The Flesh Fair feels hilariously like the late 90s transposed to some dystopian future and it feels like Spielberg really doesn’t have a handle on what he’s trying to say. You have one robot who tries to draw parallels between previous human genocides, but I don’t think Spielberg really understands the sequence and so it always comes across as being fairly flat.
The design of the world is amazing though, I love how neon and garish the world can look at times and there are some amazing visual elements and this has got probably one of my favourite John Williams scores (largely because it feels like a deviation for him).
Edited by Spike Marshall - 8/22/11 at 4:05pm
