A review of a movie, by its nature, can't fail. No matter whom it's by and what it's about the review is going to reveal some true information to you about the experience that a person had when they saw a movie and about the way they saw it. Bad reviews feed you stars and thumbs to which you can apply the Consumer Calculus and determine how good a culture-consumptive experience can be had with the thing, but even they have to be written from a perspective and reveal something of the mind of a person. Because of that any review, good or bad, by any reviewer, good or bad, might lead me to go see a movie that I'd otherwise have skipped just so I can see what it means for a reviewer to have thought that thing.
That's why this is not a movie review: its subject is the Disney product called Bicentennial Man, and I have come to tell you that there is no way to see it—it's perspective-free. The world is full of movies and shows on the TV that are unwatchable but this is my first experience with the Unseeable. Bicentennial Man is a hole two hours long and thirty-five millimeters wide in the space-time continuum, and when I say that PLEASE do NOT get intrigued into going and seeing the stupid thing—you'll be sorry if you do, vaguely. It's not even bad enough to warrant avoiding; just forget you ever saw me here. Two irretrievable hours of my life have been not wasted but anulled. It's as though I had been temporarily dead that afternoon. I couldn't bear it if you died because of something I said.
Bicentennial Man has some jokes, but no comedy; it's a little sad sometimes but has no drama. Some things change; nothing develops. There isn't a climax. There's a resolution at the end which is not preceded by a crisis that required it. A goal is set and eventually achieved, without opposition. There are no characters who are alive at both the beginning and the end of the movie. For a little while there's a dog. It made the top ten at the box office, but hovers around the bottom. It's PG, but has some slightly inappropriate language and mild depiction of juvenile situations. It features Robin Williams.
See? All absences and nons! To describe this cinecipher any further I'll have to lamely resort to the use of a prop: Disney's own Pinocchio, to which I was taken when I was maybe six. I hardly remember it at all; if I did, the comparisons I'm about to draw would probably strike me as forced. You know how Pinocchio goes—lonely old toymaker Geppetto wants a son, so the Good Fairy comes and brings the puppet Pinocchio to life for him. Geppetto is very happy and Pinocchio runs off—he wants to be a Real Boy and gets the idea he should get some real-world experience. He first experiences a bad crowd and then experiences being swallowed by a whale, inside which he meets up with Geppetto again. They exit the whale and go home together, whereupon the Good Fairy comes back and changes the experienced puppet from animated wood into Real Boy material.
Well that all makes sense. If you want something you have to earn it; your first impulse may not be the best decision; always listen to the cricket; never trust a Bohemian; mind the whales, but perhaps your Dad's in there; having worked for something you want, you'll get it. It's not how I understand things but it is a sort of internally consistent view of the world and many people have the idea it's good for their kids to hear this stuff without cease.
The story of Bicentennial Manis similar, only simplified: no whales, no bad crowds, and no experience. An extremely wealthy family wants an au pair, so they buy a robot. They're very happy with it and it stays with them for years and years until the kids are grown, whereupon it journeys out into the world to find others like itself. Years pass. It doesn't find any. More years pass. It still doesn't find any. There are no others like it. It comes home. Years pass. It builds itself a Real Boy body and asks Congress to declare it a human, but Congress won't. Years pass. It asks the World Council to declare it a human, and they do. It dies.
Hm. If you want something you have to ask the Government for it; local authorities may be reactionary so always go to the Feds, who are more likely to give you what you want even if it is too late. You'd never do anything wrong so just follow your heart. Nobody's going to hurt you. You were adopted AND you were an accident.
Now...I mean...I'm as Disney-phobic as the next guy, but Pinocchio I can take—its sweetness-and-light, Davey and Goliath-brand morality strikes me as considerably more salubrious than whatever this is going on here. That old-Disney model may be oversimplified, paternalistic, disingenuous and a good set-up for teen-age disillusionment, but it also has some integrity, isn't completely incorrect and is well-intentioned. Bicentennial Man's "message" doesn't even make SENSE—it isn't intentioned AT ALL; no claim is made; nobody's opinion is presented. It's the message you get if you grab a fistful of Hallmark cards from the "Thinking of You" bin, shuffle them and deal a hand: Congratulations on your promotion, get well soon and Happy Thanksgiving! We've moved! You're my favorite Grandmother, and I'm sorry your dog died. The movie actually feels a lot like that and maybe this is exactly why—it's Deal a Feel. They started the Production Machine running and all went off to the wrap party, and the intern who was supposed to keep an eye on it broke his sunglasses and had to go home.
Touchstone will tell you Bicentennial Man is about "reflections on what it means to be human," only they forgot to put anything in it that says either what "human" might be or what it might mean to be that (or not)—just so much reflecting. When it does finally consider tackling this theme what it comes up with is precisely the non-answer: what the robot seeks is to be declared a human. Is it a human? No. Can it be one? No. Not any way at all? Not any way at all—it's a robot, and even if it's just like a human it's still a robot. But Good Attitude wins the day and eventually that World Council agrees to give up the outmoded idea of "definition" and say that the robot is a human.
Now in the movie's own terms, to the extent that it risks having any, the robot is rilly an' trooly "human" and I don't have any problem with that. Trouble is, that's the wrong question for the issue—what they mean to be asking is, is the robot a person. We're humans; robots are not. When the saucer men come to live among us to such an extent that there get to be legal issues about it they'll have to be declared persons—individuals bearing rights and responsibilities—but can't be declared humans—homo sapiens. Today's Disney can't be bothered with paying enough attention to what they're saying to get ONE WORD RIGHT. In the movie the fleshist white congressman even specifically raises the exact points that mean the robot is not a human: it doesn't come from our genepool, has no relatives living or dead, and however humanlike its mind seems it has developed by other means than how ours do. But the Robbie-hugging, distinction-eschewing World Council, represented of course by a wise old black woman, isn't worried about that reality and generously disregards it in favor of a momentous fiction. The apparent suggestion is that we could've handled that tedious civil rights business a lot more simply if instead of trying to say that we all get the same rights regardless of pigmentation—getting into all sorts of difficulties with that complicated "same" and "regardless" stuff—we had simply declared that from now on all black people are white. I guess we still could. Write your congressman.
The last few years have seen a lot of movies of a creepy "Reality Isn't Real" genre— The Matrix, The Truman Show, and Pleasantville have been the biggest and plainest; their common claim is that the world that bugs you is a trick and you just have to riddle your way out of it. Bicentennial Man achieves a new irreality by covering a span of two hundred years during which no events in the world have any influence on you: reality may or may not be real but mainly it's irrelevant. What's certain is that you for sure aren't real and any fairy that says you are is lying. Wish upon that star.
