Maybe I should watch that movie again - I saw it in the theater, but all I recall of it at this late date is wishing it had less Haley Joel Osment in it and that it was an hour or so less long.
Definitely worth a rewatch, I feel that it has aged better than many of its contemporaries that did better on the box office (such as Jurassic Park III or Doctor Doolittle 2 or Pearl Harbor). It's definitely got a long, slow third act, but for good narrative reason (it's trying to give a sense of scale of thousands of years passing; "Supertoys Last All Summer Long" was the title of the originating short story and a sense of time passage was important to it) and it is definitely something that feels better in home viewing than in must have felt in a theater. (And compared to the return of 3-hour epics in today's theaters and the 8-to-10-hour TV binges that Netflix has gotten us to see as normal, you find out that it is only a tight 146 minutes, despite how long the third act feels and just under 2 and a half hours today feels relatively fast paced.)
Similarly, too, 2001 was right towards the tail end of Haley Joel Osment's peak in pop culture over-saturation and I can definitely understand being sick of him in the year 2001, but divorced from that context of HJO being in massive blockbusters for nearly every year in 5 years by that point, it is a remarkable performance.
Kubrick and Spielberg both believed that without HJO the film AI would never have been possible because over-hype and over-saturation aside, he really was a remarkably good actor for the ages that he was able to play believably in that span of years. I think it is something that we see and compare/contrast in the current glut of "Live Action" and animated Pinocchio adaptations in the last year or so. Several haven't even tried to find an actual child actor for the titular role. I wouldn't be surprised even that of the ones that did, the child actor wasn't solely responsible for all of the mo-cap work and at least some of the performance was pure CG animation because it is "cheaper" and easier than scheduling around child actor schedules in 2023.
I know that I was one of the people who was at least partially burnt out on HJO "mania" at that time I first rented AI on VHS, but especially now the movie AI does so much to help me appreciate him as a very hard-working actor. (Also, he seems like he'd be a neat person to hang out with today, and interesting self-effacing roles like Hulu's weird Future Man seem to show he's having fun acting again.)
