Artificial Intelligence: A.I. (29 June 2001)
directed by Steven Spielberg
starring Haley Joel Osment, Frances O'Connor, Sam Robards, Jake Thomas, Jude Law, William Hurt, Ken Leung, Eugene Osment, Enrico Colantoni, Brendan Gleeson, Robin Williams, Ben Kingsley, Meryl Streep, Chris Rock, Adrian Grenier
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MPAA rating: Studio: Warner Brothers, DreamWorks SKG, Amblin Entertainment, Stanley Kubrick Productions Script: Steven Spielberg, Ian Watson Based on the book by: Brian Aldiss Music: John Williams Running time: 146 minutes Tags: Adventure; aliens; Drama; global warming; love; robots; Science Fiction; short story adaptation Tactical strength: [7/10]
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for some sexual content and violent images
I remember coming out of the theater disappointed the first time I saw Artificial Intelligence: A.I.. Five years later, I decided to watch the DVD to see if I still had the same reaction. Although I still think the movie has slow pacing, I think I see what Spielberg wanted to accomplish. He does bring up some interesting moral questions in a visually appealing film, but the movie still drags.
A.I. tells the story of David (Haley Joel Osment), the robot. He looks like an eleven-year-old boy, and his creator Professor Hobby (William Hurt) has preprogrammed him to love his parents. Monica and Henry Swinton (Frances O'Connor and Sam Robards) have a son, Martin (Jake Thomas), held in suspended animation for over five years, waiting for science to find a cure for his disease. Fearing that Martin will never recover, Henry brings home David to try to fill the void in their home. Monica has just started to love David back when Martin is cured and can come home. David doesn't have the programming to deal with a little brother, and after several incidents, Monica decides she cannot keep David and Martin in the same house. So she drops David off in the woods.
A.I. thus first asks what moral obligation do humans have to an object they create that loves the creator implicitly. David clearly "feels" agony at the prospect of abandonment by his mother. Monica feels emotional at the situation, but feels she has an obligation to her biological son. David reasons that if he can find the blue fairy from the Pinocchio story, the fairy will turn him into a real boy, and Monica will love him again. A.I. doesn't provide a clear answer to this moral question, but clearly gives a sympathetic view to the plight of unwanted robots. We see several scenes of robot junk discarded, the hunting of "unlicensed" robots, and the violent destruction of robots at Flesh Fairs -- a combination of tent revivals and NASCAR for those religiously opposed to robots and like to see robots dismembered in a variety of caustic ways.
David escapes from a Flesh Fair with another renegade robot, Gigolo Joe (Jude Law), a pleasure robot. Joe takes David under wing and tries to help him locate the blue fairy. The two visit Dr. Know (voice by Robin Williams), a fast food, voice-activated version of an encyclopedia. David's unusual query directs him toward Manhattan, now mostly underwater after the melting of the polar ice caps. In Manhattan, David finds Professor Hobby, who doesn't seem particularly interested in the consequences of his creation's emotional state. Here, we have commentary on the human state: created by a God and left alone in the world. David feels so despondent at finding not only an unresponsive creator but also that Hobby has created an entire line of David robots, that David throws himself into the ocean.
(Spoiler alert: the following paragraph discusses the ending of the movie, so you might want to skip this paragraph if you haven't seen A.I.)
In the ocean, David finds a statue of the blue fairy from the Coney Island theme park. He sits in front of her and speaks a mantra, "Please make me a real boy." David literally sits in front of the blue fairy long enough for an ice age to freeze the oceans and an alien race to start archeological excavations of human remains. The aliens highly value David since he actually interacted with real human beings, and they mine his memory of all his experiences. The aliens have the technology to temporarily reincarnate a human being, but the doppelganger only lasts for a single day. David requests that the aliens bring back Monica for one last day of pure love.
This final act doesn't necessarily present moral issues as much as possible ironic events about the human race. We often hear about eternal love, but in A.I., only a robot can express true, unreserved, unending love for another. Just like we examine Egyptian or Anasazi civilizations from their literature and archeological remains, the aliens study the human race. Only long after the human race has died out does David represent a truly unique individual valued for himself, and only the alien race can create an artificial human with which David can have the happiest day of his life.
In A.I., humans refer to robots as "mecha," which rhymes with the Islamic city Mecca. Muslim's believe that at least once in a lifetime believers should make the hajj (pilgrimage) to Mecca and should face Mecca during daily prayers. We could read a lot into the homonymic relationship between the two words. Since Muslim's consider Mecca a holy place, we could relate the robots as a holy creation, contrasting the relationship between robots and humans and the relationship between humans and god. Of course, you could draw many other interesting interpretations by mapping the symbolic meanings of the mecha to Mecca.
I appreciate all the interesting moral and philosophical questions Spielberg introduces in A.I., and the movie does manage to keep your interest -- espically visually -- for the almost three-hour running time. Although intellectually stimulating after the fact, the movie drags, even in during its most frenetic scenes in the Flesh Fair. I probably would have given A.I a score of 6, but Haley Joel Osment and Jude Law do such an excellent job, that you keep watching because of their obvious passion for their roles. These two even overcome my pet peeve against the "X years later" transition, which Spielberg uses twice, once for 38 years at the beginning and once for 2,000 years at the end. (And the 2,000 years should have probably been 20,000 or even 200,000 years -- at least enough time for the planet to transition from melted polar ice caps to complete ice age.)
