|
Perhaps it's an illusion, but I like to think I could cut along the Spielberg/Kubrick boundaries in this movie with a pair of blunt scissors. It oozes Spielberg from every pore, but while Haley Joel
Osment is credible as a new Henry Thomas, this is no E.T. I found it unbelievably long and extremely muddled to the extent that it could, without further editing, have ended credibly (if incomprehensibly) at two or
three different places. Things started rather slowly with very Kubrick-esque exposition, and initially it looked like it was going to be quite intelligent. HJO was at first impressive as the weirdo kid (shades of Jeff
Bridges in 'Starman'), but things soon degenerated and he spent the rest of the film demonstrating that being huggable and crying on cue aren't really enough. Jude Law's character was one of the more thoughtful
additions to the film, perhaps because his endearing blend of naivety and sophistication rang true for a robot that was engineered essentially as a consumer appliance. Mostly though, the film was drab and slow, and
the whole 'Thunderdome' sub-story was just silly and patronising. In fact there were too many silly contrivances and coincidences to take the plot seriously, and perhaps the blatant silliness of the science suggests
that we're not to interpret this as a simple adventure movie. My only thought was that we're supposed to view it as a fable, in which case it's quite deep in a 'GCSE humanities' sort of way. |
|
