a.i. versus super-toys
Tuesday, June 19, 2001

It's just sad, really. I've been watching as the previews and commercials for A.I: Artificial Intelligence get more and more detailed. (Quicktime required to see the preview at the site.) And it's to the point where all you can do is wonder whether or not it's got anything at all to do with"Super-Toys Last All Summer Long", purportedly the source for the movie.

As far as I can tell, all the story can possibly have to do with it is providing a source of inspiration; after all, they give away the key point of the story in the damn commercials! To be sure, I was wondering how you could make a full feature of this story. It's not that it's bad -- in fact, it's a very interesting story -- but there's simply not enough there there to make a full length film; it would have been best suited to an episode of SciFi's "Outer Limits" series.

To be sure, the film looks stunning. The special effects sequences are clearly Oscar-bound, or at least bound for nominations. And it may be a perfectly decent film in and of itself -- although, as it looks rather like a retread of the adaptation of Asimov's Bicentennial Man (without either the extended time scale or Robin Williams, neither of which can hurt, and which came out shortly after "The Outer Limits" had done a much better job with a similar premise with another Asimov story, "I, Robot"), I really rather doubt it. I mean, how many retreads of a single story or story-theme do you need coming out within six years of each other? (Interesting side note: Leonard Nimoy, who played the prosecutor in the update of "I, Robot", was also in the original episode as a newspaper reporter.)

It just seems like this is going to be another trademark Spielberg saccharine storyline wrapped around awesome special effects. And it's an utter waste of that story, which really doesn't need special effects. If you actually wrote a script based on "Super-Toys...", all you would really need is good actors to play the child and the wife.

That story really deserves better than it seems to be getting.

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