Dreams of Stardom (Hollywood SI)

Benji Cooper was sick of his school. He was always the odd one out, and the last person to be selected in any event, be it sports, academic projects, or something artsy. He just didn’t get along with kids his age. Not to mention, his school had a little bullying problem that he found himself on the wrong end of sometimes.

But all that could be easily forgotten when he did what he loved: watching movies. It was an escape from reality for him, living in the world of movies that took him anywhere from different planets to magical fantasy lands. Heck, earlier this year, he had even enrolled in a dance class after watching [Billy Elliot] five times. In his mind, if Troy Armitage could do that, why couldn’t he? They were the same age, after all.

That turned out to be a blessing in disguise for him because he made some good friends in his class, and he wasn’t that alone anymore. He gave all the credit to Troy for that. If it hadn’t been for him, he wouldn’t have gone to see [Billy Elliot] and wouldn’t have considered a dance class at all. A movie that changed his life made him more eager to watch more films in the theater with his parents. So from then on, every Saturday, he and his parents would go to the movies.

He was a little disappointed that he could not see Troy at the films every week, but his mother explained to him how long it took to make one movie. So he did what he could. He waited.

And after months on end, finally, it was time for Troy’s next film to be released: [A.I. Artificial Intelligence]. No one could be more excited than Benji. Whenever the trailer came on the TV during the ad break, he watched it without exception. The concept was very cool because Troy was playing a robot in a future world where global warming had changed society a lot.

Benji’s father said that the film would not be as good as [Billy Elliot] or even [Harry Potter] because the reviews of the film weren’t that good, but he didn’t care. He just wanted to see the film.

So that’s exactly what he did. As soon as the film opened in June, Benji went to see it with his parents.

The film opens with a scientist explaining how global warming has caused a huge rise in sea levels and wiped out coastal cities all over the world. Governments across the world have implemented licensed pregnancies to fight overpopulation. To compensate for this, scientists create a series of robots known as “mecha,” who don’t require as many resources to survive as humans do.

David (Troy) is one such mecha, but he is unique for he is the only robot child programmed to love his parents. Then Henry and his wife Monica are introduced, whose son Martin is in a coma until a cure is found for him.

To cope with his wife’s grief, Henry applies to Cybertronics' beta-testing and gets chosen by Hobby to test his latest invention, a child mecha named David. This robot is a prototype mecha child programmed to experience love.

Benji was fascinated to see how the dystopian world of the movie unfolded. Troy was fantastic in the film as usual, and Benji felt bad for the robot who wanted nothing but acceptance and unconditional love from his family. But the harsh reality was that he would always be second to the ‘real’ son, Martin, who had woken up from his coma.

Feeling jealous of David, Martin manipulated him into doing things that he knew would get David in trouble, like cutting Monica’s hair. One thing led to another, culminating in Martin being dragged to the bottom of the pool when David felt threatened by Martin’s friends. Eventually, Monica and Henry decided to abandon David, but at the last moment, Monica changed her mind and left him in the forest.

Only then the grim reality of the world is revealed as David finds out the deplorable condition of abandoned robots. He is almost ‘killed’ in a flesh fair, where robots are destroyed publicly as a spectacle, but he is saved only because he looks and acts like a kid, and people can’t bring themselves to destroy a little boy.

He goes to Rouge City to find the Blue Fairy with a clown called Gigolo Joe. (When Benji asked his mother what a gigolo is, that’s what she said it was: a clown.) David had learned about the story of [Pinocchio] and the Blue Fairy from Martin, and he also wanted to become a real boy so Monica would accept him. In Rouge City, using some money Monica gave him, David learns from a program that the Blue Fairy is at the end of the world, which just happens to be Manhattan, New York.

David and Joe reach the wasteland that was previously Manhattan in a stolen helicopter. After the trouble with the sea levels rising, the remaining pieces of the city are left in ruins and underwater.

Finding the place they were meant to go, David is shocked to find a child who looks exactly like him. The other David simply smiles and invites him to read with him, saying that he’s real, but the first David thinks this guy is going to replace him. Furious, David grabs a lamp and smashes it against the table and the other David's head, revealing that it's also a mecha.

At that moment, Professor Hobby shows up to stop him and assures David that he's a real boy, claiming that he is his own Blue Fairy. Everything was orchestrated explicitly by the older man to lead David to Professor Hobby.

Afterward, David enters another room, where he finds several more mechas that look like him, including one that is still open. Several boxes are laid out as David and his female counterpart are mass-produced to be sold.

Realizing that he was never unique, David heads outside and drops into the water as Joe watches from the helicopter.

Benji felt like crying for poor David. His entire life was fabricated by someone else. He didn’t even know what was real and what was not anymore. Should he consider himself real and unique, or just a product to be sold in supermarkets like a toy?

Thankfully, Gigolo Joe finds him and saves him using the helicopter's extended arm. Once he’s out, David realizes that he found the Blue Fairy underwater. Unfortunately, before they can go further, Joe is suddenly magnetized by a police helicopter hovering above them. Then David activates the helicopter's submarine mode before floating away.

Determined to find the Blue Fairy, David pilots the transformed helicopter into an abandoned submerged carnival. They watch all the attractions representing fairy tales and eventually discover [Pinocchio], which he follows until he finally finds the Blue Fairy statue. At that moment, the Ferris wheel collapses on top of the helicopter, trapping them. David doesn’t care though; he only has eyes for the Blue Fairy and begs her to make him a real boy. However, the Fairy doesn’t respond, and years pass with David still stuck in there, never losing hope even when the lights begin to die off.

Two thousand years later, the world is enveloped in ice and snow, and humans have been extinct for a while. One day, an alien spacecraft shows up and flies around Manhattan as they colonize the planet. They move David's helicopter, finding him on the ice.

They quickly reactivate him. Upon waking up, David notices the Blue Fairy in front of him. He immediately gets out of the helicopter and approaches the frozen statue while the alien creatures watch him, then he touches the Blue Fairy, causing it to crack and break in front of him.

The aliens use this chance to scan David's memory to understand the planet better, and suddenly David finds himself sitting at the table in Monica's house. The home looks exactly the way he remembers it, and David eagerly searches for Monica, but it’s a different voice that replies. David is surprised to find the Blue Fairy alive and talking and asks her to turn him into a real boy, but she admits that she can’t do that. The aliens use the Blue Fairy to speak to David, informing him that Monica is gone and the Fairy can’t revive her either because her remains are long gone too.

While David mourns, Teddy, a toy bear that had been accompanying him from the start and had survived the passage of time, approaches him to remind David of the time he cut Monica's hair and reveals that he kept that same lock of hair, meaning the aliens could now bring back his mother. David goes to his old bedroom and fondly remembers his friend Joe while Teddy repairs himself.

At that moment, they see a figure at the door and think it's Monica, but it’s actually an alien that confesses to being fascinated by humans. He wishes to bring humanity back by using organic traces to clone them, but unfortunately, all his tries have failed so far because the clones only live for one day. This will also happen if they bring Monica back. David still holds on to the hope that Monica will be special like him and last forever like he did while trapped in the helicopter, so he goes looking for her.

He finds her in her bedroom and begins to cry while brushing hair from her face. At that moment, Monica wakes up and greets David with a warm smile. Now for this one day, David and Monica can spend some time together. David happily shows Monica paintings of his journey, they play hide and seek, and they celebrate his birthday too. When the lights outside grow dim, David tucks Monica into bed, worried that she won’t wake up.

Suddenly Monica tells him she loves him, which makes David smile in a mix of grief and joy. Then he decides to sleep next to her, reaching his dreams for the first time in his life.

As the closing credits rolled, Benji couldn’t help but wipe away the tears that had fallen during the last few minutes of the film. He didn’t know why he was crying, as some parts of the climax were a little unclear to him, but he knew that what David felt for Monica wouldn’t be any less than what Benji felt for his own mother. So did it matter if he was a robot? In his opinion, David was as real as real could be. He felt angry on behalf of David that he had to go through so much and even then he couldn’t live with his mother forever.

“Hey champ,” someone raked a hand through his hair. “Are you alright?”

“Yes, Mom,” he smiled through his tears. “I am now.” Then he surprised his mother by hugging her. “Don’t ever leave me.”

His mother couldn’t help but choke back a sob before hugging him back tightly. “Of course, I won’t, honey.”

(Break)

Across North America, the UK, and Japan, [A.I. Artificial Intelligence] was released in theaters at the end of June 2001. The critics' reviews were on the lower side of the spectrum for a Steven Spielberg movie.

‘The intriguing story draws us in, thanks in part to Armitage’s exceptional performance, but takes several wrong turns; ultimately, it just doesn't work. Spielberg rewrote the adaptation Stanley Kubrick commissioned of the Brian Aldiss short story [Super-Toys Last All Summer Long]; the result is a curious and uncomfortable hybrid of Kubrick and Spielberg sensibilities.’

—Leonard Maltin, [Movie Guide]

‘[A.I.] exhibits all its creators' bad traits and none of the good. So we end up with the structureless, meandering, slow-motion endlessness of Kubrick combined with the fuzzy, cuddly mindlessness of Spielberg. The only saving grace is Troy Armitage’s captivating performance.’

—Mick LaSalle, [San Francisco Chronicle]

‘Spielberg cannot live up to Kubrick's darker side of the future.’

—Peter Travers, [Rolling Stone]

‘Greatness and miscalculation fight for screen space in Steven Spielberg's [A.I. Artificial Intelligence], a movie both wonderful and maddening. Troy Armitage, who is onscreen in almost every scene, is one of the best actors now working. His David is not a cute little boy but a cute little boy mecha; we get not the lovable kid from [The Sixth Sense] but something subtly different.’

—Roger Ebert, [Chicago Sun-Times]

‘[A.I.] will beguile some viewers, perplex others. Its vision is too capacious, its narrative route too extended, the shift in tone (from suburban domestic to rural nightmare to urban archaeology) too ornery to make the film a flat-out wowser of the [E.T.] stripe. [A.I.] boasts a beautiful central performance — Troy Armitage, 12, plays David with a kind of buoyant gravity.’

—Richard Corliss, [Time]

So, while most critics were unsure whether to laud the movie or deride it, one thing they unanimously agreed on was that Troy Armitage gave a wonderful performance as David. Yet, the audience didn’t seem to like the movie even as much as the critics. While kids seemed to like the movie, the adults, who took part in movie surveys, didn’t. Resultantly, it received a CinemaScore of C+ on a scale from A+ to F.

On Rotten Tomatoes, the film scored 76%, with an average rating of 6.60/10, while Metacritic gave the film a score of 65 out of 100.

Despite all the mixed reviews, one couldn’t ignore a major factor in the movie: Troy Armitage. Aside from his terrific performance, no one could deny that in his few short years in the industry, he had developed a dedicated fan following of his own. Not just in the US and the UK, but across the world. The release of films like [The Sixth Sense], [Billy Elliot], and [Harry Potter] had made him a household name. If even that wasn’t enough, his numerous industry awards and the latest controversy about his home life had ensured that everyone at least knew of him. And as they say, no publicity is bad publicity.

People were curious to know why the media was rushing behind a kid as if he was Tom Cruise. So that curiosity turned into a desire to see for themselves what the kid was all about.

The result was that the opening weekend of [A.I.] was a bumper success in all three countries where the film had been released, defying all expert expectations. In the US alone, it minted $15.9 million on the opening day across 3,242 theaters. Followed by $18.3 million and $17.0 million on the remaining days, this gave an opening weekend figure of $51.2 million, almost twice the expected $26-28 million. Similarly, it earned $30 million and $25 million respectively in the opening weekend in the UK and Japan, bringing the worldwide collection to a staggering $106.2 million, against a budget of $100 million.

As weeks passed by, the collection could not be sustained forever because unlike [Billy Elliot], [A.I.] wasn’t a crowd-pleaser film. Resultantly, the North American collections fell to $30 million in the second week, followed by $19 million, $15 million, and $7 million in the following weeks.

In the coming months, the film was released in other countries as well, with its biggest markets being Germany, Spain, France, Brazil, and Mexico.

At the end of three months from its initial release, the film had earned $172 million in North America, $84 million in the UK, $90 million in Japan, and $115 million in the rest of the world, bringing the total box office collection to a staggering $461 million, making the film a resounding success.

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