A.I. (Artificial Intelligence), film score
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A.I. (Artificial Intelligence), film score
- Date: 2001
- Composer: John Williams
- Period: Contemporary (1950- )
Review
This richly textured music is one of the most beautiful and diverse film scores from John Williams. The sharp contrasts of mood among the three sections of the film gave Williams an opportunity to write music with an uncommon variety of textures and developmental opportunities.In some respects these are the result of both the breadth of the vision of the story and certain logical and structural flaws in the story -- or are these actually brilliant unconventionality? Brian W. Aldiss in 1969 wrote the story "Supertoys Last All Summer Long," about a boy who want only to please his mother but always fails because he is not human. Director Stanley Kubrick worked with Aldiss for several years in a futile attempt to turn this vignette into a screen story, which was finally done by Ian Watson.
Kubrick asked his friend Stephen Spielberg to direct. Spielberg turned the offer down, but after Kubrick's death, agreed, and wrote the screenplay himself. His unusual three-part structure has both Kubrick's chilling, visionary view of a brutal mechanized future and Spielberg's warm touch in portraying children who are divorced from normal parental relationships.
David (Haley Joel Osment) is a prototype mecha-boy programmed with the capability for love towards parents. A couple, grieving for their own child who is cryogenically frozen pending a cure for his fatal illness, accept the prototype for a trial and activate the program. Revival of the couple's son leads to David's abandonment. Convinced he will win back his mother's love if he becomes a "real boy," David starts an odyssey through the harsh mecha-hating world in search of Pinocchio's Blue Fairy, and for his maker. After he finds one of these objects, the third part of the film takes him on a journey towards infinity and re-birth, not unlike the conclusion to 2001 A Space Odyssey.
Artificial Intelligence is John Williams' 17th score for a Spielberg film. He is not a composer Kubrick ever used. Hiring Williams is one of the several ways Spielberg brought warmth and humanity to David's story. The story falls into three arcs: The first is the story of David's relationship to the family. Williams succeeds in focusing on the issue of emotion here even as he necessarily lays the groundwork for the thematic treatment of the next two sections.
For the sterile, mechanized future Williams has a rare recourse to the repetitive minimalist textures of John Adams or Philip Glass. The trip through the future society does not, generally, use this texture: This society is highly disordered and irregular, and calls for action music and a surging, swirling string texture as its basis. This gesture evokes Bernard Herrmann's "sea music" from The Ghost and Mrs. Muir and it serves the same purpose: Using the ocean as a symbol for eternal time.
Rising from all this is one of Williams' most beautiful themes, ultimately conferring a resounding "yes" to the question whether a machine-boy can be capable of love and, if so, find genuine happiness. ~ Joseph Stevenson, Rovi
Albums with Complete Performances of the Work
| Title | Date |
| A.I. [Music from the Motion Picture] | 2001 |
| A.I.: Artificial Intelligence [Original Motion Picture Soundtrack] | 2001 |
Albums with Excerpt Performances of the Work
| A.E. Housman: Last Poems, for voice & piano | |
| A.I. Assault, film score |
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