spielberg's Crossed wirew; AI combines the cold vision of Stanley

THERE'S a small, little-noticed scene in ET that could stand as a symbol for Steven Spielberg's career. Just after ET has apparently died, we see Elliot's teenage brother hiding in his bedroom cupboard, weeping. It's the boy's first encounter with the adult feelings of grief and his instinct is to retreat to a place where he's surrounded by the toys and clothes that are the comforting artefacts of childhood.

Metaphorically speaking, Spielberg has been trying to emerge from that same cupboard for the last 16 years. First with The Color Purple and Empire Of The Sun and then with Schindler's List, Amistad and Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg has been determined to prove himself a grown-up who has left childish things behind.

Watching an entertaining but essentially soulless enterprise such as Jurassic Park, this seemed like a good thing. But, with the exception of Schindler's List, the first 45 minutes of Empire Of The Sun and the opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan, his "adult" work has been stiff and unconvincing. Watching the failed seriousness of Amistad or most of the rest of Saving Private Ryan, you began to wonder if we would ever again see the director who, at his best, is one of cinema's most emotionally direct entertainers.

AI is Spielberg's attempt to unite those two strains - the showman and the adult film-maker. It is a wildly problematic movie: ambitious on a scale that few filmmakers can even contemplate, daring in its attempt to make a break with its director's past work (even as it extends the themes of that work) and gutsy in its willingness to alienate audiences. It is also a mess of jarring impulses. Spielberg clearly wants to bring a new element of darkness and pessimism to his work but he is also wary of losing his audience. AI certainly contains scenes darker than any he has put on screen but, in the end, Spielberg reverts to what has worked for him in the past, and the film winds up pulling our heartstrings in a manner that requires us to ignore what has come before. The result is some sort of anti- achievement: a cold fairy tale, a procession of wonders from which we have been deliberately, even ruthlessly, distanced.

Part of that distance comes from Spielberg's wish to stay true to the director who initiated the project. By now, there is nobody who doesn't know that AI began in the 1980s as a Stanley Kubrick project. Kubrick, who died two years ago, had been intrigued by the prospect of turning Brian Aldiss's short story Supertoys Last All Summer Long into a film. But one of the obstacles was that the technology simply did not exist for the movie that Kubrick envisioned. He eventually moved on to other projects. But then, reportedly intrigued by advances in computer-generated imagery - in Spielberg's Jurassic Park - he let Warner Bros announce that AI would be his next movie. Two years later, however, the studio said Kubrick would direct AI after he had completed Eyes Wide Shut - which proved to be his last film.

During this time, Kubrick had begun a friendship with Spielberg, whom he consulted about the project. After Kubrick's death, it passed to Spielberg, who wrote a new screenplay, his first since Poltergeist in 1982.

At 2000 words, the Aldiss story is a sci-fi take on Pinocchio, a dark parable about the melding of human and machine. It concerns a boy desperate to obtain his mother's love, a love she is unable to give. That the child is a robot is withheld until Aldiss's sting in the tail and it's easy to see why that subject would attract the director of 2001 and A Clockwork Orange.

But what of Spielberg? More than any other film-maker, he has presented childhood as an almost-sacred concept, a province of innocence and imagination that he has devoted his considerable technological, narrative and emotional gifts to celebrating. The shock of AI is that Spielberg, at least in the first section, has chosen to make a film about the monstrousness of childhood or, specifically, about the monstrousness of children's emotional dependence on adults. The second part - a journey through a dark future world that bears more than a passing resemblance to A Clockwork Orange, and the final sci-fi storybook coda - feel like a different movie altogether.

In the dystopia of AI, the polar ice caps have melted, flooding coastal cities and killing millions. Pregnancy is licensed by the government and, to fill the human void, robots have been designed to take the place of everything from servant to lover to child. That's where Haley Joel Osment's character David comes in - he's a prototype created by a scientist who envisions robots that feel human emotion. Henry, an employee with the scientist's company, brings David home to his wife Monica. Their own child has been cryogenically frozen until a cure can be found for his terminal disease.

Many of the scenes in this first part wouldn't work if it weren't for Osment. It was obvious he was talented from his performance in The Sixth Sense but he shows a complexity and subtlety here that would be astonishing in a far more experienced actor. He isn't just a cute kid. He's an actor projecting an idealised and artificial image of what a cute child is supposed to be.

But it's here that the tensions that finally undo the movie begin. Spielberg directs these early scenes as a black-humoured parody of child-rearing and of the loving family life he has always exalted. He is not working so much from the point of view of the child as from the point of view of the beleaguered adult. Just like a real child, David has been created to give love but that love constantly threatens to become a burden to his parents. Monica doesn't have the love or energy or attention to answer his incessant need. It becomes even harder after her real son is awakened from his frozen sleep.

Spielberg shoots these scenes in cold blues and greys. The small pockets of visual warmth - such as David's snug little bedroom - are made to look as artificial as the robot child's love. Some viewers may think that Spielberg is falling back on cosy, heart-warming imagery but the emotional distance he maintains encourages us to see the imagery as artificial.

That distance is clearly what Spielberg intends but it keeps us outside the film. Part of the problem is Spielberg's screenplay. Oddly for such a visual director, he lays out the themes in clumsy, expository dialogue instead of just showing us.

Clearly, this would not have been a problem for Kubrick, who was at home with coldness. And yet you may feel grateful that we were spared Stanley Kubrick's AI. How, after all, could he even begin to address the mixed emotions arising from the intermingling of human and machine?

In film after film, Kubrick's misanthropy - the magisterial technique that reduced the actors in his films to stick figures carrying out his bidding - represented the triumph of the mechanical over the human. What do you remember most from 2001? Keir Dullea or the voice of Douglas Rain as HAL? With the exception of Malcolm McDowell's Alex and Vinessa Shaw in a bit part as a prostitute in Eyes Wide Shut, they were all clockwork oranges.

But how can a film-maker as openly emotional as Spielberg be at home in a world where emotion has become entirely synthetic? A more introspective film-maker might have related that world to the dilemma facing movie-makers who, like the robot technicians here, attempt to make created beings indistinguishable from real ones.

But the real drama is the one taking place in Spielberg's head. Essentially, he is trying to meld Kubrick's misanthropic vision of a technologically dominated future with his own vision about the transformative power of emotion. He is trying to be true to his idol and be true to himself but he can't do one without going against the grain of the other. Moreover, something in Spielberg baulks when he tries to address the darker aspects of childhood. AI is as audacious and technologically breathtaking as was Empire Of The Sun but, emotionally, it's just as muddled, just as heavy-spirited, just as off-putting. Had Spielberg ended AI 20 minutes earlier, during an eerie undersea sequence, he might have given it the narratively satisfying shape of a tragic fairy tale. But there's a coda, set an additional 2000 years in the future, in which his worst heartwarming instincts again take over.

But AI is too richly imagined, too accomplished to be dismissed. Even as he botches the emotions and the issues he raises, Spielberg goes headlong into them. It's the kind of screw-up you get only from a master film-maker. It may be that Kubrick acolytes will point to the film's sentimental passages as proof that Spielberg was unworthy of taking over from the master. Or it may be that AI becomes one of those failed Hollywood films whose faults are overlooked by champions who claim that audiences weren't prepared for the chances it took.

Whatever its fate, the question is where Spielberg goes now. He is caught between the wish to evolve and the impulse to cancel out the warmth and desires to please that made him a wonderful film-maker in the first place. AI is in a sense, also the story of a film-maker who wants to be accepted as a real live adult.

AI is released on September 21

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