Emotion is the last, controversial frontier in robot evolution. Robots are seen as sophisticated appliances; they’re not supposed to have feelings. But with so many parents not yet approved to have children, the possibilities abound.

Cybertronics Manufacturing has created a solution. His name is David (Haley Joel Osment), a robotic boy, the first programmed to love. David is adopted as a test case by Cybertronics employee Henry Swinton (Sam Robards) and his wife Monica (Frances O’Conner) whose own terminally ill son Martin (Jake Thomas) has been cryogenically frozen until a cure can be found. But when Martin re-appears there is sibling rivalry and life becomes impossible for David.

Without final acceptance by humans or machines ("orga" and "mecha" as they are called) and armed with his supertoy teddy bear and protector David embarks on a journey to find out where he truly belongs, uncovering a world in which the line between robot and machine is both terrifyingly vast and profoundly thin.

The film begins impressively with Prof Hobby (William Hurt) demonstrating the advances science has made with robots. Then comes the experiment. David is loaned to Henry and Monica. "I can’t accept this, there is no substitute for your own child," says Monica and though she tries her best to adapt to the cherubic but precocious child, it is not easy. The return of Martin further complicates things. The inevitable answer is to give up little David.

How will he take it? Since he is as close to a human as any robot can be, he is able to feel love and rejection. Straying into a sort of limbo, David is made to see things as only he can. It is a world where humans are in the minority. In fact mankind has begun to rely a lot more on "mechas" to take over very simple jobs. There are robots for pleasure-seeking. Gigolo Joe (Jude Law) is the male version of the sex mecha who accidentally runs into David. Together they embark into a strange new world in an attempt to find their true place in the society that created them. This is typically Kubrick visually opulent a razzle-dazzle rollercoaster ride. But the bottom line is! "Can David find acceptance?"

Spielberg’s screenplay (his first since "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" is imaginative enough but quite expectedly he loses himself in the "netherworld." In the first place, the mother is quite undeserving of David’s love and may be that makes it more pathetic. There are some cute asides like the Blue Fairy and Dr Know. Rouge City is well conceptualised, but somewhere in the latter half form tends to drown content.

Another shortcoming of Spielberg in recent times is he can no longer make anything normal. It has to be large than life, full of grandeur, colossal, and 146 minutes too can be somewhat stretched out. Remember his first film, "Duel," about a trucker trying to kill a motorist one the highway. Simple but brilliant. Today, that is not just possible. Haley Joel Osment is brilliant but otherwise there is little histrionic talent on display. May be Frances O’Connor in flashes. But despite its flaws, A.I Artificial Intelligence is worth watching, you don’t get sublime subjects like this every other day.