Sometime in the near future scientists develop the ultimate replicant - David - a robot child that learns to love its surrogate family. Taken on by parents whose own human child is in a coma the robot child quickly develops a strong emotional bond with his 'mother'. But things start to go terribly wrong when the human child recovers from his coma and the 'mecha' finds himself abandoned. There starts his journey to become a 'real boy' and win back the love of his mother.

For over a decade Stanley Kubrick worked on A.I. as his dream project amassing boxes full of notes which after Kubrick's death Spielberg dutifully and painstakingly went through. The end result is clearly a Spielberg product but with strong Kubrick undertones. In many ways it is an unlikely meeting of styles - Kubrick's cold emotion merged with Spielberg's warmth and vision. The result is a fascinating and thought provoking film.

Undoubtedly, A.I. threw up a challenge for Spielberg - an opportunity to add weight and intellect to the fairy tale world that he had created in many of his past films and for the most part he does not disappoint. The visuals are dazzling - a partially submerged, abandoned Manhattan is a stunning recreation - The Rouge City is an overexposed burst of neon. A.I. is also by far and away Spielberg's darkest non-war film. The mood is overwhelmingly sombre and melancholy and in some scenes downright eerie - as for example the scene where the just abandoned David witnesses 'damaged' robots looking for missing parts of their bodies in a machinery dump. Equally disturbing is the Flesh Fair scene where human's crowd into an auditorium to watch the gratuitous 'killings' of mecha's. Clearly Spielberg has extracted the darkness that lurks in all fairy tales and has conveyed that bleak vision to his script. David's wish to become a 'real boy' revolves around Pinocchio's desire to do the same. His journey to find the one person that can grant him his wish has shades of an extremely dark Wizard of Oz style search. Therein lies both A.I.'s strength and its weakness - strength in that unlike many of his films, Spielberg - at least until the unsatisfactory last 20 minutes - avoids drowning the audience in sentimentality and yet the emotional impact of the film is powerful. The weakness comes from the fact that the film's 'redemption' is in itself couched in further bleakness. The result leaves the viewer with an overwhelming feeling of sadness.

The film is dominated by a stunning performance from child prodigy Haley Joel Osment. Spielberg has stated that were it not for the young actor he would not have made A.I. and one can see why. Joel Osment's flawless performance develops from the simulated emotion of a robot to the heart-rending desire of a child for love. An Oscar nomination would not be undeserved. Osment is well supported by Jude Law as Gigalo Joe - a male prostitute robot. Law is fast drawing up the kind of resume to put him o n top of the A list of serious young actors. Look out also for the mechanised super toy Teddy.

A.I. is a gripping, sombre and occasionally nightmarish vision of the future. At just over two and a half hours the film meanders slightly in the second half and particularly at the end as Spielberg struggles to bring the film to an acceptable conclusion. But for the most part it remains engrossing and utterly involving. In time Spielberg's A.I. may well come to be seen as a classic.