It was classic Alex Garland, I thought. A magpie's nest of a movie, full of shiny things - ideas, images, gloss - but not adding up even to the sum of its parts, let alone more.
"We all have flaws, and mine is being wicked." James Thurber, The Thirteen Clocks 1951
That's what I thought too. It was a well-told story in a rather contrived kind of way, but very slight. I'm tired of critics confusing style with depth and telling us that a film is "cerebral" when it plain isn't. It may be interesting to debate whether AI sheds any light on our understanding of intelligence and humanity etc. but anybody hoping that this film even looks at the issue is going to be disappointed. It just uses standard sci-fi tropes in a pretty wrapper.
Oh, and it has a bunch of young actresses wandering around without their vests because cerebral folks like staring at young actresses without their vests just as much as lads. Of course, there's slick CGI to show us that we aren't really sharing the same exploitative gaze as that nasty villain character. Also some unpleasant confusion over how some of the exploited androids are actually naked Asian actresses which may or may not tell us more about the director than anything else.
But maybe it's actually looking at male/female relationships and subverting male notions of the role of women in society, as the camera lingers with 2001-style sharp focus on the robotic totty. Yeah right.
OK apart from that.
never trust a man in a blue trench coat, never drive a car when you're dead