Starring Haley Joel Osment, Jude Law, Frances O’Connor, Brendan Gleeson and William Hurt. Rated The story is set 50 years or so in the future, after the polar icecaps have melted, inundating all the world’s lowlands and driving people inland to higher ground. Machines and computers have become more prevalent with artificially intelligent robots influencing every facet of human life – but one.

Although machines can be programmed to simulate emotion they cannot develop or display true feelings such as love – until now.

David is an 11-year-old boy designed and built specifically to learn and display true love.

A few programming glitches cause some strife in his adopted family and his new mum abandons him in the woods to fend for himself.

This sets David on a fairytale quest to find Pinocchio’s Blue Fairy so that he too can become a real boy and thus regain the love of his estranged mother.

A.I. is a very far-fetched cross between a futuristic sci-fi and a classic fairytale. It relies heavily on both its special effects and the myriad Hollywood heavies tucked away in cameo roles which, although I had fun spotting them, the numerous passages of "Oh! Oh! That’s, that’s whatshisname???" were very distracting.

The special effects, on the other hand, were its big save. I especially loved the Manhattan sequences with the skyscrapers sticking eerily from the rolling sea. However, even at this early juncture, the twin towers of the World Trade Centre looked strangely out of place.

It would seem effects in the movies are advancing at an exponential rate to processing power in your average PC. This fact alone makes the premise of A.I. and the proliferation of robots in just 50 years quite plausible.

But the storyline was just of such immensity that even the more than two hours dedicated to its telling were insufficient to do it justice. I get the feeling that a book version (about 1000 pages perhaps) might capture it.

A.I. deserves to be a flop at the box office. The story was too complicated for my youngest to understand and its narration too stupid for my oldest, my wife and myself to believe in.

Check out the official A.I. website