In this film, which is the first and only collaboration between two of the giants of film history, Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick, we get a sometimes uncomfortable, often brilliant and visionary blending of their two vastly different styles. It is the story of a robotic boy who yearns to be real so that his human mother will love him.

The film is divided into four parts (well, I divide it into four parts). The first is pure Kubrick: the robotic child, David (Haley Joel Osment), is brought home to a couple whose son is cryogenically frozen until a cure is found for whatever ails him. The couple are Monica and Henry (Frances O'Connor and Sam Robards). Monica is having a hard time dealing with her real son's illness, and doesn't react very well to the too-perfect David. David has a tendency to be underfoot, silently creeping up on her. At one point, she locks him in a closet for several hours, knowing that he won't mind. "Is this a game?" he asks her. Monica is informed that David can be programmed to love her: he will turn into a realistic simulation of a real child and will be hopelessly devoted to her. When she gets used to having him around, she flips the proverbial switch.

There are two conflicting elements to this section. First is the basic problem of programming something to love. Whatever way you look at it, it is still a program. Free will does not enter into the equation. The creators packed him full of a set of behaviors that, in our culture, mean Love. But he doesn't have a choice. Monica could lop off all his fingers, break all his toys, and kick him out into the forest (well...) and he will still love her, because the alternative is not in his circuits. Therefore, all of the mumbo-jumbo of the movie about him loving her is just that.

The second element is the eerie transformation that David, played by the brilliant child actor Haley Joel Osment, undergoes at this point. That kid can act. I could see them tossing another Oscar nomination at him for this role. He is going to be very, very good for a long time. He was the perfect Kubrick character: he seemed real enough, but there was enough of an edge to make you unsure of his motivations and unable to predict his behavior. I cannot believe that Kubrick would have cast anyone else in the role.

Anyway, the Moncia and Henry's son (Jake Thomas) wakes up, comes home, and proceeds to play Jealous Son. He torments David and attempts to get him to do things that will get him in trouble with his parents. Eventually, it works, and Monica drives David out to be returned to the factory. She has a crisis of conscience, though, and turns him loose in the forest, leading to the second part of the film.

He wanders into a Kubrickian nightmare world that exists on the edge of the seas that rose after the polar icecaps melted. It is like Las Vegas on acid. "Mecha" pleasure machines and tacky brothels fill the streets. Meanwhile, "orgas" (organic humans) have taken to staging WWF-like "Flesh Fairs" where they destroy robots in an attempt to maintain their supremacy. At one of these, in which David is nearly destroyed, he meets Gigolo Joe, a pleasure machine played as such by Jude Law, who enjoys chewing up the scenery and deserves another Best Supporting Actor nomination. David has it in his head that the Pinocchio story is real; that he can find the Blue Fairy and she will turn him into a real boy who his mother can love. Joe leads him on his journey to find this mythical figure, partly out of affection (which is mystifying because it is outside what he was programmed to do), and partly because he is being hunted for the murder of one of his clients. (Apparently, Spielberg is not familiar with Asimov's Three Rules of Robots, which would program robots so they could not become threats to humans).

From this, the story enters its third part, an uneasy blending of Kubrick's cynicism and Spielberg's humanism, and the execrable fourth part, which is pure Spielberg. There was a spot in this film that would have been a perfect, fitting, enigmatic ending for a nearly perfect, enigmatic film. Then it kept going. Have you ever had a dream where something bad was going to happen, and you found yourself moving in slow motion, unable to avert the disaster? It reminded me of this one time when my sister and I were wrestling when we were kids. We bumped into my mom's favorite lamp, and I could see it falling, but I couldn't reach it in time. It smashed on the floor. I felt the same way about 25 minutes before the actual ending of this movie. I found myself stuck in my chair, silently shouting "Nooo-oooo-ooo" but unable to stop Spielberg from grafting a happier ending on, much like an extra limb on Frankenstein's monster. I swear you could see the stitch marks on the film stock. For the last 25 minutes of the film, Spielberg was sitting behind me, his hand on the back of my neck. He was pinching it really hard, dear readers, much like Spock's Vulcan Neck Pinch. He was shouting "Cry, dammit, cry!!!" I said no, because I refuse to be manipulated so obviously.

Despite this criminal ending, I still give it four out of five goats, because I would so much rather watch a really good movie mess up trying to be great than sit through an average movie that is perfectly happy being average.