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Steven Spielberg takes the story of Pinocchio, gives it a daring twist and decks it out with terrific special effects in this ambitious, dark-toned fable for the new millennium. Haley Joel Osment (The Sixth Sense) plays an android child, programmed to love and allocated to a couple whose own critically ill son has been cryogenically frozen. When the real son recovers, the robot boy is cast out into a brutal world that doesn’t want him. In a difficult role, Osment proves once again what a fine young actor he is, while Jude Law gives a showy performance as his guide-cum-protector in the dangerous land of mechanised outcasts. The Brian W Aldiss story on which the film is based caught Stanley Kubrick’s imagination more than 20 years ago, yet even before his death he had commented that Spielberg would be the ideal director for the project. There’s a nod to Spielbergian cuteness in the shape of a talking teddy bear who accompanies the robot, but this is no feel-good romp in the ET vein — it is one of the director’s bleakest works and Osment’s desperate quest to become a “real” boy and win back the love of his human mother is a disturbing one.
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