The summer of 2001 has been pretty disappointing so far, at least cinematically (although that story about the monster who drowned her kids should satisfy our tabloid cravings for several months).  Sure, the box office numbers are at an all-time high, but each blockbuster has been as empty as the Bush administration's commitment to the environment.  How strange it is that the season's best (and most cerebral) film is about a world in which Bush and his cronies have melted the polar icecaps and buried most coastal cities under hundreds of feet of water.  And that this world restricts its citizens when it comes to pregnancy because there just isn't enough food to feed everybody.  And that the leading scientific minds are able to create robotic "child substitutes" who can actually be programmed to love parents that are unable to have kids of their own.  It makes you wonder how many years you get for drowning five robo-kids.

The film, of course, is A.I. (for Artificial Intelligence), the long-awaited collaboration between Steven Spielberg (Saving Private Ryan) and the late Stanley Kubrick (Eyes Wide Shut), who have a combined 22 Oscar nominations (but just three trophies) between them.  Kubrick bought the rights to Brian Aldiss' 1969 short story Supertoys Last All Summer, the inspiration for A.I., about 20 years ago but lacked both the technology and the pace to direct the film himself (think about it – the young actor playing Kubrick's robo-boy would be 28 when he finally finished filming)  He tapped Spielberg to direct, gave him thousands of storyboards, and had planned to stay on as a producer before his untimely demise. 

So what is a collaboration between Kubrick and Spielberg like?  Well, it's very dark and probably isn't suitable for young kids (the Kubrick part), but still manages to be cute and button-pushing (the Spielberg part)  A.I.'s first section (there are three) is defiantly the most Kubrickian.  It focuses on a young couple (Bedazzled's Frances O'Connor and Bounce's Sam Robards) whose young son, Martin (Jake Thomas, The Cell), is dying from a fatal illness. Henry, the father, is an employee of Cybertronics, one of the world's leading robot manufacturers.  The company makes their money with lifelike sexbots, robo-butlers and the like, but their leader (William Hurt, Sunshine) wants to try something new – making a robotic child capable of loving its parents. After all, "Didn't God create Adam to love Him?" 

The first model, named David (Haley Joel Osment, Pay It Forward), is given to Henry, who brings it home to his horrified wife, still grieving over the potential loss of her only son.  She eventually grows to love David, but when Martin miraculously recovers, the faux son falls out of favor with his parents.  The film's two biggest themes - jealousy and aspiration - come into play when David hears the story of Pinocchio and longs to become a real boy so that his mommy will love him as much as Martin.  His desire to become flesh begins to cloud his mind, leading him to believe he is real and nothing like the robot supertoy Teddy, a walking, talking bear that serves as David's sidekick (and sounds a whole lot like Douglas Rain's HAL 9000). 

Without giving too much of the story away (they did well to keep much of it under wraps), David and Teddy go on an incredible journey in which they encounter people who hate robots (led by The Tailor of Panama's Brendan Gleeson), a gigolo (Jude Law, Enemy at the Gates), and a Ministry concert (!?) in their search for The Blue Fairy that David believes will make him a real boy.  Parts of the film get Phantom-Menaced down a bit, especially in one scene that features the voice of Robin Williams, but for the most part, it's all good. 

Best of all is the chirpy Osment, who not only proves the whole Sixth Sense thing wasn't a fluke, but logs in the year's best acting performance to date. A.I. also features a handful of surprising cameo voices, like Chris Rock, Meryl Streep and Ben Kingsley, who narrates the opening and closing scenes. Spielberg, who has won Oscars for direction each of the last two times he's tackled dramas (Ryan, Schindler's List), penned the script himself (his first since Close Encounters of the Third Kind).  His band of merry men do a great job with the technical stuff, highlighted by creepy production design courtesy of Rick Carter (What Lies Beneath) and Ryan/Schindler's Oscar winners Janusz Kaminski (cinematography) and Michael Kahn (editing).  And the John Williams score, which lately have been nauseatingly repetitious, is warm, effective and bolstered by the Los Angeles Master Chorale. 

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for some sexual content and violent images