A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)

 

100 best Science Fiction Movies, Empire Magazine list

#82. A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)

 

Part One -- Everyone involved in this film grew up in a Science Fiction World…

 

We all live in a SF World.

 

This has probably been true since the 17^th c. when (in the West at least) the cognitive mannerisms that we associate with Scientific Thinking and the Enlightenment Philosophers started penetrating the society as a whole, and people saw new technologies profoundly transforming the World within the space of their own life-times. The ideas emerging from transportation and navigation engineering, communication (by then mass-printing had been with us for a while, but cheaper paper proved to be what mass-printing needed to really reach the masses), newly-born political science, and many other fields, merged into until-then unimaginable transformations, like the American and French Revolutions of the 18^th c.

But to really live in a SF world, you probably need SF. A large number of books that should be considered SF were written going all-the-way-back to beginning of literature, but the emergence of Authors who became best-know for this work didn’t start until 1819 with Mary Shelly; there is a general agreement that her “Frankenstein: or the Modern Prometheus” was the first official SF novel, a declaration that was first made by Writer Brian Aldiss, whose name will come up later in this essay. Then, it wasn’t until 1871 that multiple printing houses started simultaneously publishing significant work that belonged in this category. Finally, it was not until 1926 that the category of SF was finally given its name with the premier of the first magazine devoted exclusively to it, “Amazing Stories.”

 

But I think what one really needs to live in a SF World is that you personally encounter things in SF literature or other media that are later realized around you in the Real-World. Well, there’s always been a little of that going on, but to live in a SF World, you have to see it a lot. So, let’s start with the 1926 date, now, add twenty years, so the first readers of the first magazines have grown up. We are now in 1946, World War II has just ended, and most were aware that the Cold War was about to begin, and between those two dates we’ve seen the arrival of electronic computers, TV, nuclear weapons, nations building rockets, and a lot of other stuff, all appearing at a blindingly fast pace. SF cinema was only irregularly popular in the ’26 era, but starting in 1950 they became a staple of our popular culture.

 

This film is in-part based on more-than-century-old Fairy-Tale, Carlo Collodi’s “The Adventures of Pinocchio” (serialized 1881, published in book form 1883), so the basic story has been with us in some form awhile. But as presented, it’s unlikely “A.I.: Artificial Intelligence,” could’ve existed until the 1950s or later because essential to this story is that it is set in the Future World and explores Global consequentialism of Human power and short-sightedness, things that couldn’t be presented to an audience that didn’t already live in a SF World and weren’t already immersed in the new language of ideas that SF grants us.

 

It was the creation of several Writers, the original short story was by Brian W. Aldiss, and after he was fired from the film, Bob Shaw did some work on the screenplay, then Ian Watson did a great deal more, and Sara Maitland finally hammered out a near-to-final draft. But more than these Writers, this film is the creation of two Directors, Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg. Everyone mentioned in this paragraph came into prominence after 1946, so they either grew up in, or at least became had the first professional achievements, in a SF World.

 

Director Kubrick’s first feature film was an Anti-War film, “Fear and Desire” (1953), and he became World famous after the release of another Anti-War film, “Paths of Glory” (1957). Steven Spielberg’s first feature was the SF film “Firelight” (1963, and really an amateur film, but feature-length); Spielberg was only 17-years-old at the time, and Kubrick, then 35-years, was one of the shining stars guiding his evolving talent.  

 

While Spielberg was still in school, Kubrick would turn his interests to SF with, “Dr. Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” (1964), the first of three SF films he made back-to-back, all of which are now considered core-Classics. Spielberg was already famous when he released his first major SF film, “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977). By then, Kubrick’s interests had moved away from the genre, though there was a long-discussed fourth Kubrick SF film promised.   

 

By that time, Kubrick had become equal in fame as Director Alfred Hitchcock (who was an even bigger influence on Spielberg) and for the same reason: He’d achieved rare, complete, control of almost every aspect of almost every production, including very big-budget ones. Kubrick and Hitchcock were the foundations upon which the Auteur era or New Hollywood period (roughly 1967 to 1982) were built, and Spielberg came up during that time. They had paved the way for Spielberg. 

 

In 1994 Spielberg received his long-over-due Best Director Oscar for the Holocaust film, “Schindler’s List,” based on a book Kubrick had, himself, wanted to adapt (Thomas Keneally’s novel “Schindler's Ark” (1982)); by that time, Spielberg was, by-far, the most financially successful filmmaker in history. Kubrick had been progressively slowing his pace of Directing films, and his last feature, the Erotic Thriller, “Eyes Wide Shut,” was released in 1999, the same year as his death. Spielberg and Kubrick’s collaboration began in-between those two dates, and “A.I. Artificial Intelligence,” though not released until two years after Kubrick’s death, was the result of that collaboration. “A.I…” was Kubrick’s long-awaited fourth SF, he had been working on it on-and-off since at least 1977.

 

Part Two. Kubrick and Spielberg are different from each other, and that was their bond…

 

Kubrick and Spielberg had very different styles, and both managed to stamp all their films with their distinctive vision, the cohesiveness of their aesthetics is remarkable given the diversity of their subject matters. Both were/are consummate technical craftsmen, frequently at the absolute cutting-edge of the technologies of their medium. Kubrick was more famously fastidious, but it would be unfair to describe Spielberg as any less so. Kubrick’s obsessive attention to detail drove him to engage in famously-long preproduction and shooting periods (two of Kubrick’s record’s, longest shooting schedule, 15 months for “Eyes Wide Shut,” and the most takes of a single scene, 160 in “The Shining” (1980)); while Spielberg’s immense care empowered him to execute equally famously-fast shooting with rare flawlessness (Spielberg gave us two highly-praised epics, “Schindler’s List” and “Jurassic Park” in the same year (1993)).

 

Critics sometimes held these two monumental talents in some disdain. Though Spielberg’s earliest professional work showed skill with darkly-themed Thrillers, he was long dismissed as a cheap showman skilled only at pandering Juvenilia and Spectacle because his unapologetic sentimentality and populism; it was perhaps no surprise that it took a Holocaust movie to earn him his Best Director Oscar even though his crowd-pleasing Monster Movie “Jaws” (1975) and Family-Friendly Cute Alien film, “E.T. the Extraterrestrial” (1982) were in no way lesser achievements. Meanwhile Kubrick was equally unapologetic, even down-right smug, about displaying his formidable intelligence, and it’s rare-indeed for big-budget films to demand so much from their audiences; this led to him to be often dismissed as a cold-blooded stylist.

 

That there could be a project that would unify both of their mannerisms is remarkable, but that is what “A.I…” is. Kubrick’s intellectualism, irony, and misanthropic tendencies needed Spielberg’s warmth and humanism to fully realize this tale of a lost child in a cruel world. Kubrick started considering Spielberg after the watching both “Schindler’s List” and “Jurassic Park.” The latter is of special note here because of its cutting-edge CGI-FX and Spielberg’s legendary skills as a Director of child Actors. Associates quoted Kubrick as saying, "I think the ideal director for this may be Steven Spielberg. If I do it, it may be too stark. I may emphasize too much the philosophical side.”

 

Spielberg past films connected to the contents of this story more obviously than Kubrick’s. Experience with child Actors is an obvious example, but even Spielberg’s most Family-Friendly outings were emotionally sincere regarding the darker-themes that existed in them in an almost subterrain fashion. Amid all the nostalgia for Heaven-like suburbs, he also offered fractured families, the fearful bewilderment of children facing a more adult World, and the more intense terror of being powerless when a familiar environment suddenly alters or disappears. 

 

The Kubrick-supervised script had some significant differences than the film as shot by Spielberg. This is to be expected, but Spielberg was himself a Scriptwriter who learned to trust other, better, Scriptwriters, so his rewrites generally focused on creating a more visual langue or opening up a Character for his Actors, they weren’t gut-jobs because Spielberg generally showed respect for the intentions behind the original texts.

 

Though Kubrick’s minimal use of dialogue in “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968) is famous, most of his films were not only dialogue-heavy, but included narrations, which were becoming increasingly unfashionable with basically everyone else. Spielberg not only retained the use of narration, but boldly chose to have changing types of narration to mark changes of time and distance; most or all were voiced by Ben Kingsley, but as the film progresses his voice subtly changes, giving the impression he was more than one identity. Kingsley also voiced one of the Robots.

 

Producer Bonnie Curtis said, "It's 'Stevely Kuberg,' because it literally is this fascinating combination of the two. Steven will tend to go towards the Heart, and he tried so hard to stay in the Head for Stanley.”

 

Part Three. The first act…

 

The story is both epic and complex, but remains cohesive because it is built around a simple theme, an adopted boy wants his mother to love him. It’s SF because the boy is a Robot, in the film called a “Mecha,” he’s our Pinocchio figure. It becomes epic as it embraces the Fairy Tale’s Bildungsroman narrative as the Robot transverses a vast (well, only a small geographical region in the states of New York and New Jersey), richly-detailed, Future World, and eventually even transverses the centuries. It’s complexity is in its break with the Bildungsroman tradition, those tales focus on the psychological and moral growth of protagonist from childhood to adulthood, but unlike “Pinocchio…” a large part of the point of “A.I…” is that our Robot can’t learn from experience or grow, he’s programed to be a child, and doomed to be a child forever, and the film digs deep into that idea. 

 

We’re introduced to Near-Future USA which stands alone in its capacity to maintain a high Standard of Living on an Earth devastated by Pollution and Global Warming. That Standard of Living is preserved through the accepting of cruelly-enforced limits on growth, specifically a One-Child Policy akin to that in Real-World China (a policy that has been somewhat relaxed since this film was released). Henry and Monica Swinton (Sam Robards and Frances O'Connor, respectively) are an affluent couple whose son Martin (Jake Thomas) has contracted a fatal disease. Their only choice was to place him in Suspended Animation and move on with their lives, because it is extremely unlikely that Martin will ever be awakened.

 

Forbidden by law to give birth to another, the Swinton’s obtain a Robot child, David (Haley Joel Osment), who is the first of his kind, indistinguishable from Humans and programed to love those who imprint themselves on his Computer brain. Despite his artificiality, a strong bond grows between David and Monica (a telling detail, Monica imprints herself on David, but leaves out Henry). David’s best friend is another Robot, albeit a less sophisticated one, a talking Teddy-Bear named Teddy (voiced by Jack Angel). There’s a sitcom-influenced humor in these scenes, but with a darkness underneath. David’ eagerness to please is funny, but also underlines his artificiality, creating something akin to a satire on the Heaven-like suburbs Spielberg was originally famous for.

 

This seems idyllic until amazingly good news devastates David’s life (is it life?). A cure for Martin’s disease is developed; he woken-up, treated, and returned home. (It’s worth noting that it is at this point, more or less, that the original short-story ends.)

 

It soon proves impossible for the Real Boy and Robot David to live in the same house. After a near-tragic accident, Monica, guilt-ridden but also selfish, leaves David by the side of the road to fend for himself. Weeping, she says to him, “I'm sorry I never told you about the world," slams the door and drives away.  

 

In the Real-World, outside major air-ports, you can almost always find packs of stray dogs. A lot of families dump their pets by the side of the road before getting on a plane.

 

Earlier in the film, Monica read David the book “Pinocchio…” (she had been tricked into doing so by Martin, who was playing a cruel joke). David’s inspired by the tale, and he and Teddy begin a Quest to find the Blue Fairy, whom David believes can turn him into a Real Boy, so then he can return to his mother. 

 

Part Four. Why Robots?

 

Not always, but often, the purpose of the Robot in SF is similar to that of the Alien, an invented Other meant to be a mirror to hold up to Humanity. This was true even with the first fictional Robots named as such, found in Karl Čapek’s play “R.U.R.” first performed in 1920. The word “Robot” was borrowed from the Czech word for “Serf” or “Slave,” and that story concerned a revolt by the Robot labor against their Human Masters.

 

This mirroring deepened when Isaac Asimov authored his famous Robot stories, the first of these, “Robbie,” published in 1950. In them, Asimov applied the evolving theories regarding AI to his speculations about what machine intelligence might actually become and, in the process, permanently changed how SF was written. He developed the famous “Three Laws,” a totally commonsensical idea that if we start programing Robots to serve us, we will also put in that programing that they weren’t allowed to kill us. This became the springboard for a lot of Philosophical musings for decades to come, because it made Robots more moral than Humans because they simply can’t be immoral, but also lesser than Humans, because the inability to be immoral denied them Free Will and brought their Autonomy into question.

 

Asimov’s influence can be seen in Aldiss’s short story, “Super Toys Last All Summer Long,” which was the basis for “A.I…” That story was published in in the momentous year of 1969; among the other landmarks of that year was Kubrick winning one Oscar and earning three other nominations for his second SF film, “2001…” and in the Real-World, the first men stepped on the Moon and the ARPANET Computer was established; ARPANET was basically the first version of an Internet.

 

Asimov’s revolutionary approach to the imaginary reality of Robots continued to ripple through the expansion of Aldiss’ story into this film. This also reflects a notable indifference that SF in general showed to more immediate applications of Computer technologies -- very little SF explored the economic, cultural, and spiritual impact of the already-existing Internet until the William Gibson’s novel “Neromancer” (1984). The Robot was, and still is, SF’s favorite approach to exploring our growing intimacy with our technologies, and as the Other, they are a device that helps us to ask what it is to be Human, even as Real-World Humans seem to prefer to disappear into the technologies that already exist. Notably, “A.I…” was released into an Internet-driven world, is all about the Future of Computer technologies, but the Internet plays little role in the story.  

 

One of the things driving the long peculation of this film Kubrick’s dis-satisfaction with the then-current FX technologies. In the early ‘90s, much time was devoted to creating an Animatronic Robot to play the Robot boy. There were various reasons offered for this after Kubrick’s death:

 

One of the Producers, Kathleen Kennedy, said, “The UK has very strict labor laws with children, and to make a film where the child is in every scene, you couldn’t do it. You’d have to go somewhere else, but he wasn’t willing to travel. So, we tried to build this robot.”

 

Producer Curtis quoted a fellow-Producer, who was also Kubrick’s brother-in-law, "One of my favorite things which Jan Harlan actually told me is that Stanley wanted to build a mechanical boy to make the movie with … [Kubrick] knew that if you cast a real boy, the child would age a couple of years before he was finished shooting, so he would have a real continuity problem!"

 

Either of them could’ve been kidding. Or both. Or neither.

 

This would’ve been a bold move, but not completely unheard of. The modestly-budgeted Horror film “Child’s Play” (1988) had gone that route and created a memorable Villain. But Animatronics could be troublesome; though Spielberg has only nice things to say about the Robot he used to play the Alien in “E.T…” when he’s asked about the Robot that played the Shark in “Jaws” he generally referred to it as “the big white turd.” Anyway, the Robots built for Kubrick were said to be awful-looking, and “Jurassic Park” opened Kubrick’s eyes to the possibilities of CGI.

 

In the end, though there’s a lot of CGI in this film, Spielberg chose a Human actor to play the Robot that looked Human, he didn’t even have Actor Osment wear any prosthetic make-up. Part of this must have been his faith in his Actor, but also it visually established how Robot David was more advanced than any of the other Robots around. Another actor playing a Robot was Jude Law as Giglio Joe; in most films, Actor Law seems like he’s got unnaturally smooth skin, but here, playing a Robot, his face is, in fact, unnaturally smooth.

 

It’s worth comparing David to HAL-9000, the murderous AI from Kubrick’s “2001…” and a quite memorable heir the “Frankenstein…” tradition. Kubrick seemed moved to make “A.I…” in part because he thought he was overly harsh on HAL; as he researched the script for “2001…” he began to like the idea of an AI even as made one the story’s Villain.

 

The final Writer Kubrick worked with on this film, Maitland, said, "He decided to make this film because he wanted people to shift to a more positive view of A.I., he was quite open to me about that. Kubrick was fascinated by artificial intelligence and fond of robots, which he regarded as a more environmentally adaptable form of human being. He said, 'I think of them as I'd like to think of my great-grandchildren.' And he's very fond of his grandchildren."

 

Part Six. Authoritarianism, Materialism, and Original Sin

 

Since at least the 1960s, Kubrick had been enormously rich and more than happy to indulge the luxuries and eccentricities that only great wealth could afford; it should be no surprise that Kubrick’s politics held any Liberal-ism that smelled of Socialism in deep contempt. Really though, his Politics were more fundamentally anti-Authoritarian than Left-vs-Right, and as he lived in the West, where the clear-and-present threat of local Authoritarianism tends; this was reflected in his films, making them generally seem more Liberal-leaning and resentful of Class Stratification than I think he really was. (Had Kubrick grown up in the USSR, I think his presented politics would’ve been reversed, assuming he could stay out of prison long enough to finish any movies.)

 

Woven into his films’ Political expressions was Kubrick’s Philosophy regarding Original Sin. In an interview he once said, “One of the most dangerous fallacies which has influenced a great deal of political and philosophical thinking is that man is essentially good, and that it is society which makes him bad … Rousseau transferred original sin from man to society, and this view has importantly contributed to what I believe has become a crucially incorrect premise on which to base moral and political philosophy.” Arguably, that’s a Conservative opinion, rejecting Rousseau’s Secularization of the idea of Sin and rejection of Organized Religion, but in his work, Kubrick seems to most often demonstrated Original Sin through contempt for Materialism, despite being plenty Materialistic himself. I’d argue that, for Kubrick, Materialism was the best demonstration of Original Sin because it encourages us to embrace Authoritarianism to satisfy it.

 

“The Killing” (1956) mocks the Violent Criminals’ pursuit of money in the heart-rending last scene. “Paths of Glory” visualizes the Military’s betrayal of the Honor of the Soldier’s purpose through the obsessive lavishness displayed around the High Command. “Spartacus” (1960) links the lavish life-style of the Romans to their oppression of their slaves. In “2001…” gave us a sanitary, stylish, well-appointed, Utopian Future, but he deliberately made it seem coldly inhuman leaving us longing to be liberated by Devine Intervention. “A Clockwork Orange” (1971) gives us a Dystopian Future where everyone wears the latest fashions and has nice places to live, but then they insist on wrecking everything because they are purposeless and bored, all the while telling us Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s hypothetical “savage men” is more legitimately human than those who don’t rape and pillage. “The Shining” (1980) turns a luxury hotel into a vast maze of Supernatural Horrors that is Hell-bent on destroying a nuclear-family. “Eyes Wide Shut” hated rich people more than all of his other films combined.

 

“A.I…” continues this theme. The Swinton’s have a beautiful house and lots of nice things, but this film is explicit, the USA sold-off a lot of its Freedoms and Humanism to preserve the beautiful houses and nice things. The Government is never shown to be explicitly Authoritarian, but the narration made it clear that it was, so the only reason the Authoritarianism is unexpressed is because it’s so perfectly accepted, no one resists it enough for the Government to put any real energy into cruelty.

 

There is something very wrong in the whole idea that the Swinton’s would buy a child as a store-bought commodity, and the whole film is built around that. After David is cast out, most of the rest of the World he sees are the garbage dumps, wreckage, and brutalisms of vice that the Swinton don’t have to look at because they are Materialistic and Complacent.

 

Part Seven. Frankenstein, the Bourgeoisie, and Autonomy

 

It is significant that Writer Aldiss was the one who named “Frankenstein…” as the first official SF novel, because “A.I…” is mostly about child abandonment, so it’s as much a “Frankenstein…” influenced tale as it is a “Pinocchio…” one. It was Kubrick, not Aldiss, who made the “Pinocchio…” connection explicit.

 

Opposite of this film, in “Pinocchio…” the character Geppetto is a kindly and loving surrogate-father; Pinocchio leaves Geppetto, not the other way around. Pinocchio broke the rules dictated to him by the hectoring Blue Fairy: he sold his school books and became a vagabond. It’s worth noting that when the story was published, all but the most basic schooling was a luxury for only the Bourgeoisie and Upper Classes, and it was their children, not the child of a poor Wood-Cutter like Geppetto, who would be going to school and reading this story. Just below the surface, the Blue Fairy was extolling virtues that most benefit the Bourgeoisie, education and obedience, while mocking those traits the Bourgeoisie perceived as Lower-Class, sloth and vagrancy. This subtext has become less-obvious as Society became more literate and marginally less Class-Stratified.

 

In this film, Humanity collectively sucks, only Robots act decently, because it’s their programing. Of the all the rotten Humans, the most powerful Villain is Doctor Allan Hobby (John Hurt), David’s creator and Henry Swinton’s Boss. Actor Hurt plays Allan as a kindly Fred-Rodgers-type, but he’s ultimately revealed to be indifferent to the pain of others and obsessed with God-like power. Georgia Panteli wrote, “He is so absorbed in his self-admiration for having created the life that stands in front of him that his speech sounds almost delusive.” As in “Frankenstein…” the true Monster isn’t the Artificial Human, but the Human Doctor who created him. These dark-themes tie directly into Kubrick’s themes of Original Sin and anti-Materialism.

 

Monica abandons David because she can, he’s an object, and his existence disrupts the serenity of their picture-perfect family now that Martin is back (oh, how un-Geppetto-like). When the Blue Fairy finally, sorta, appears to David, she looks a lot like Monica, and the Fairy’s animated image (voiced by Meryl Streep) provides no moral instruction like her Fairy-Tale version. Even Teddy, the stand-in for Jimmy Cricket (who in the original text is un-named), is less David/Pinocchio’s conscience than in earlier versions of the tale. The only character to give David any meaningful advice is Joe, the Robot Prostitute, and David’s programing makes him resistant.

 

So, “Pinocchio…” is about earning the right enter the Bourgeoisie, while “A.I…” is about the cruelties inherent in the Bourgeoisie’s embrace of Materialism and Authoritarianism.

 

In “Pinocchio…” the Blue Fairy tells him that to become a “real boy” he has to avoid the temptations that real boys often surrender to. Humans have certain birth-rights that Artificial Humans aren’t granted, so Artificial Humans have to earn the things that Humans accept thoughtlessly. Differing from “Pinocchio…” regarding these birth-rights is that the Robots in “A.I…” are denied Free Will, this means no Robot can’t be cruel like the Swintons and no Robot has Pinocchio’s option to earn equality.

 

Think of it this way, Monica can be compared to Eve in the Garden of Eden. The temptation in Genesis was for Eve to taste the Apple of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and her tempter was the Serpent. David’s creator, Allen, would be the Monica’s serpent, David the apple. That is essential, because the apple, like David, is an object someone does something to, neither the Sinner nor the Sin. And because David is more than just an apple, when bitten into, he becomes the Victim, not the Perpetrator, of Original Sin.

 

David’s “more-ness” over an apple is that, even lacking Free-Will, he has a personal identity. In Kubrick and Spielberg identity demands we in the audience recognize that this Automation deserves Autonomy, but Humans in the film refuse to see it that way.

 

The evolution of the idea of Autonomy is fundamental to any of the Moral advances our Civilization has collectively managed since the 17^th c. and the emergence of the Enlightenment Thinkers. Autonomy was introduced when they began exploring the idea of Natural Rights, that an Individual is just that, Individual, not merely an extension of the needs of the Powerful or the Collective.

 

The concept of personal Autonomy challenged the assumptions of the role of Children and Women in the Society, questioned unbreachable Class-Stratification, and made Slavey, much-praised in the Bible, increasingly untenable. Increased literacy encouraged cheaper books, so more books, and specifically more novels. These novels demanded we imagine the world through the eyes of the Other, and therefore imagine their Autonomy. The impact of the increasing popularity of novels, and the importance of personal correspondence carried by improving Postal systems, has come to be known as the “Republic of Letters,” and had an enormous impact on our collective, evolving, morality.

 

Long-before Mary Shelly created “Frankenstein…” there was Aphra Behn, perhaps the first woman in the English-speaking-World to make her living as a Writer. In 1688 she published the SF (or more properly Proto-SF) novel, “Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave: A True History,” perhaps the first fiction ever to condemn the Slave-Trade. 

 

In 1719, Author Daniel Defoe would rise to prominence with the novel, “The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner,” which asked us to view the dark-skinned man as Human (often viewed as Racist now, it was groundbreakingly-progressive in its day). He followed that up with two more landmark novels in 1722, “A Journal of the Plague Year: Being Observations or Memorials, Of the most Remarkable Occurrences, As well Publick as Private, which happened in London During the last Great Visitation In 1665,” which challenged Class-Stratification, and “The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders,” which questioned the place that Women were regulated into in Society. I should also throw in his less-famous Proto-SF novel of 1705, “The Consolidator: or, Memoirs of Sundry Transactions from the World in the Moon: Translated from the Lunar Language,” which is a Satire involving Space Flight and how Aliens living on the Moon do things just a little bit differently.

 

In more modern SF, choosing to view Robots and Aliens as Others with Autonomy is generally meant to shame us like we are also supposed to be ashamed of keeping Slaves (with Robots, it’s in the name). At the beginning of many tales of Artificial Humans, they initially exist in a pure state, without the stain of Original Sin; this is true both of the Creature from “Frankenstein…” and David in “A.I…” But unlike that Creature, David lacks Free-Will so he can’t be corrupted, or stained, like the Creature eventually was.

 

In 1970, not long after Disney Corporation was manufacturing human-looking Robots for their theme-parks, Robotics Professor Masahiro Mori wrote an essay about what he called “Bukimi no Tani,” which translates roughly as “valley of eeriness,” his term for our discomfort Robots that are Human-looking. This concept has proved influential and is now usually referred to as “the uncanny valley.” It’s most easily demonstrated in how we generally respond best to the least-human looking cartoon characters, like the movie “Schrek” (2001) finding a more appreciative audience than “Polar Express” (2004).

 

Critic Rosi Braidotti was taking about this when she wrote, “the automaton is monstrous because it blurs the boundaries, it mixes the genres, it displaces the points of reference between the normal — in the double sense of normality and normativity — and its ‘others.’”

 

In the film, the Robots are bringing discomfort to the Human character because they look like us, they are unstained by Original Sin, and they have certain elements of superiority, or as J. Hoberman put it, David’s “been designed as a perfect reproach to humanity, hard-wired for innocence.” The discomfort is not a strong fear, they can’t rebel so they are forever vulnerable, but that very vulnerability encourages Humanity to act-out the discomfort with acts cruelty. David can’t rampage like the Creature, he can only be Victimized.

 

And there are those who say that discomfort is wholly justified. Among those Critics who were hostile to this film, there a small group that took specific umbrage with connecting the plight of Robots with exploited Humans, for example, Slaves. Wrote Chris @ 21^st Century Films: 

 

“That script has at its heart a seemingly complex philosophical question: Are we responsible for the broken heart of a robot that we've programmed to mimic love? … but at its core is an invalid conceit: that a robot can have a broken heart to begin with. If I were to believe that I'd also have to believe that I'm violating the civil rights of a lightbulb if I forget to turn if off when I go out.”

 

I reject this, as any SF Fan would reject someone opposing the use of Robots as stand-ins for the Human Other. Above and beyond my Fan-based umbrage, such an attitude ignores that the film addresses that concern at almost every turn, even the tagline reads, “His love is real. But he is not.” Spielberg successfully gets us to identify with David, so David must be viewed as having Autonomy, but the limitations of this Imitation of Life are demonstrated in every scene. The film demands we walk the uncanny valley and be not afraid.

 

This is an argument we don’t have to face in the Real-World yet, but mark my words, it’s coming.

 

Monica’s emotional conflicts are those that almost every Human would feel trapped in her situation (a situation she trapped herself in), but Kubrick and Spielberg made a film about David, not her, so her conflict is demonstrated to, but not inflicted on, the audience. Throughout, we identify with the Robots more than the Human race, and this only becomes more extreme after David’s abandonment.

 

Part Eight. The second act…

 

As stated above, the whole of the action is restricted to a small geographical region in NY and NJ (the actual filming mostly sound-stage-bound in California with some exterior scenes shot in Oregon). The Swintons live in Madison, New Jersey, and the film ends in Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York, so presumably the fictional cities David encounters on his journey are somewhere in the industrial wastelands in northern New Jersey, close to the Hudson River.

 

The future Madison echoes the Heaven-like suburbs of Spielberg’s early films, but once David is abandoned the look changes, and Spielberg engages in visual homages other SF movies, notably Kubrick’s.

 

Lost in the woods, David and Teddy are captured by a gang of Human thugs and dragged to a Flesh Fair (a scene suggested by Aldiss before he was fired, written by Watson, cut by Kubrick, then restored by Spielberg). At the Fair, resentful Humans destroy obsolete a Robots for entertainment, “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome” (1985).

 

It is there that David and Teddy meet Robot Joe. Joe’s a fugitive because of a Murder he didn’t commit. As it is clear that Robots can’t harm Humans, he’s certainly not a suspect, but in fear for his Robot-life none-the-less. Perhaps, given that he’s a witness who knows who the killer is, his brain will be ripped apart in pursuit of evidence, but unfortunately, that is never made clear. Joe and David face destruction with some passivity, and while awaiting this, Joe explains to David why Humans resent them, “They made us too smart, too quick, too many … in the end all that will be left is us. That’s why they hate us.”

 

The trio narrowly escape destruction, and Joe takes David and Teddy to Rogue City, a decadent Las-Vegas-like entertainment hub that evokes the street-level scenes of “Blade Runner” (1982), but also the shopping mall and Milk Bar from Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange” (1972), and has a store-sign that reads “Strangelove’s.” The only interaction with the Internet in this film is in Rogue City; the way the Internet functions suggests that in this Future access to the Internet is highly restricted (more so than in Real-World Authoritarian states like China). The Internet Search-Engine, called Doctor Know (voiced by Robin Williams), then directs the trio to the upper-floors of Rockefeller Center in Manhattan, New York.

 

Global Warming has drowned Manhattan, and the imagery of sky-scrapers popping up out of a stormy in-land sea is impressive. The fact that the Elites still occupy some of the upper floors is down-right eerie.

 

It turns out that Doctor Know tricked David to come to this place because the residents of Rockefeller Center were waiting for him. David meets his Creator, Allen, for the first time. There are devastating revelations, Allen’s motives prove to be akin to the Swintons’, he’s trying to replace a Real boy who was lost, and David encounters a factory that mass produces Robots like him -- he’s not special, he’s a copy, commodity, unentitled to Autonomy.  Violence results and David attempts suicide.

 

He’s rescued by Joe, but then Joe is immediately captured and taken away. Joe’s last lines are poignant, "I am ... I was." It refers back to previously lines in the film, David insisting, “I am real,” and Teddy petulantly saying, “I am not a toy,” but David is not real, and Teddy is a toy. It also refers to the famous dictum of 17^th c. Enlightenment Philosopher René Descartes, “I think, therefore I am,” considered the First Principle of the emergence of the concept of Autonomy.

 

David and Teddy proceed to a completely submerged Coney Island. David will find a statue of the Blue Fairy in the dead and drowned Amusement Park. Waiting for her to speak, he will sit there for the next two thousand years.

 

The film’s settings were designed by Artist Chris Baker, also known as Fangorn, who Kubrick hired (Baker also worked on “Eyes Wide Shut”) and by Rick Carter (who had also worked on “Jurassic Park”), who was brought in by Spielberg.  The Cinematographer was Janusz Kaminski, whom Spielberg has been working with since “Schindler’s List” and displayed the kind of tracking-shots, back-lighting, strong whites and play with flashlight beams that have been part of Spielberg’s visual vocabulary since the very beginning. As Roger Ebert observed, “The effects seamlessly marry the real with the imaginary.”

 

Part Nine. The final act…

 

So, after another narration, the next scene is set in the Far-Future, and the World is wholly transformed. It is no longer ours; the Human race is long-extinct and the Planet is now ruled by advanced Robots that are similar to designs for Aliens that Kubrick rejected while working on the script for “2001…” It is suggested that they do a better job of being custodians of the Earth than Humans were.

 

These Robots revive David and wake him into a reconstruction of the Swinton home, the scene strongly evokes the end of “2001…” where Astronaut David Bowman (Keir Dullea) is kept in a luxury-hotel-like Zoo awaiting transformation.

 

Through a faked image of the Blue Fairy, the advanced Robots finally granted David his wish, sort of. Monica is raised from the dead, and he is given a perfect day with her, but only one. Though the advanced Robots say they are using Monica’s DNA to reconstruct her (it was saved by Teddy), the scene is almost certainly an illusion they built to appease David.

 

Monica tells David she loves him. She falls asleep in David’s arms, signaling her death, though her dying is not on-screen. David also closes his eyes to sleep, but Robots do not sleep, and David has never closed his eyes earlier in the film, so it is suggested that he died as well. The last line is from the Narrator: "David falls asleep as well and goes to that place 'where dreams are born.'"

 

This is very close to how Kubrick envisioned the scene. Though “A.I…” received Critical praise from most, the majority seem to hate this scene specifically. Multiple Critics stated the film would’ve been better had ended with David drowned in Coney Island.

 

Writer Maitland’s version of the same scene ended with David enslaved to an alcoholic Monica indefinitely, and being too naive to realize that was a bad thing.

 

Kubrick, himself, had David watch Monica literally fade away. Maitland hated that version, “It must have been a very strong visual thing for him because he wasn't usually stupid about story. He hired me because I knew about fairy stories, but would not listen when I told him, 'You can have a failed quest, but you can't have an achieved quest and no reward.'"

 

Spielberg’s version, so close to Kubrick’s, seems off to me. Spielberg obviously knew this wasn’t a happy ending, so he must have meant the scene to be dripping with irony, but the wetness we feel is sappily groping for sentiment, not corrosively bitter, like a cinematic version of Poe’s Law violation. Critic Mic LaSalle was especially harsh, “The most vicious parodist of Spielberg could not devise anything more precious, more shallow or more patently ridiculous.”

 

Critic Ebert wasn’t nearly as harsh, but deeply torn, so much so that he wrote his review twice. In the first version he said, “We are expert at projecting human emotions into non-human subjects, from animals to clouds to computer games, but the emotions reside only in our minds. 'A. I.' evades its responsibility to deal rigorously with this trait and goes for an ending that wants us to cry, but had me asking questions just when I should have been finding answers."

 

In the second review, written ten years later, he revised his opinion, “Watching it again recently, I became aware of something more: ‘A. I.’ is not about humans at all. It is about the dilemma of artificial intelligence. A thinking machine cannot think. All it can do is run programs that may be sophisticated enough for it to fool us by seeming to think. A computer that passes the Turing Test is not thinking. All it is doing is passing the Turing Test.” He also concluded, similarly to me, that the hollowness of the Happy Ending was deliberate, and that the more advanced Robots were misleading David.

 

Some though, not only got what Spielberg was trying to do, but thought he actually did it. Critic Panteli again, “We have to remind ourselves that this is a horrifying future … But it is told lovingly, as a fairy tale, an ever-after ending. Yet this is exactly what makes it even more disturbing, i.e. the sweet note that is added to the very morbid ending.”

 

She then quoted Tim Kreider:

 

“[A] story about hopeless human attachments and our bottomless capacity for self-delusion. David’s Oedipal fixation remains utterly static throughout two thousand years, in spite of the fact that no human being — including his mother — ever shows him any reciprocal affection. The fact that his devotion is fixed, helpless, and arbitrary ultimately makes his heroism empty and the happy ending hollow.  David searches and suffers and waits all those eons for a goal that’s not of his own choosing; it’s irrational, unconscious — what we might call hard-wired. This is what makes him a tragic figure, and, in a way his manufacturers never intended, also what makes him human. This is a bleakly deterministic, distinctly Freudian view of the human condition, a vision of human beings wasting their lives blindly chasing after unconscious goals just as hopelessly fixed and childish as David’s — most often the idealized image of a parent.”

 

Part Ten: Contrasting the Human and Robot characters…

 

The film has a huge number of speaking parts, including A-list Actors in very small roles, and it is a credit to Spielberg that all the Actors are convincing, but this film only has five Characters that get enough development that the Actors were permitted to make an impression.

 

The smallest significant part belongs to Hurt as Allen, who is in only two scenes. Hurt’s calm and soothing demeanor never tries to disguise Allen’s narcissism.  Except for the narration, Hurt is the first voice heard, and he’s giving a presentation in a board room, so he’s almost a Narrator himself. He describes the Robot children he’s creating as “caught in a freeze frame, always loving, never ill, never changing…a robot child with a love that will never end.” and when someone raises an ethical question, his response is, "Didn't God create Adam in his own image to love him?" When Allen reappears and speaks with David, he still seems more like a he's still narrating than engaged in a conversation; that’s not sloppiness in the script, it was meant to be subtly condemning.

 

O’Connor as Monica, disappears about a third into the film, only reappearing briefly at the very end. O'Connor is wholly credible, projecting a completely understandable, but also neurotic, need to fill the void in her life. Her gradual acceptance of David makes complete sense, even though its wrongness is obvious, so she’s second only to David in audience identification. We even sympathize with her somewhat when she commits her act of unforgivable cruelty by leaving David by the side of the road.

 

Law as Robot Joe appears shortly after Monica disappears, then he disappears with a half-hour of the story still left to be told. After Osment, Law’s performance garnered the greatest praise. What distinguishes Law is though he’s passive in the hands of the thugs at the Flesh Fair, his demonstrates he desperately wants to live; his programing forbids defiance, but his fugitive status means he’s pushing those limits because life for him is joy. Law is the most alive of any Human or Robot in this film, his patter is fast and slick, he dances and flirts, and he wants to meet the Blue Fairy only to test his ability to get in her pants. Joe is much revised from the Kubrick script, Law describes the earlier Joe as “aggressive” and “twisted” and the script contained explicit sex, but in the final film he’s more a buoyant “scoutmaster.” When he says “I am” he’s demonstrating that he “is” in ways that David isn’t prepared to be, and he “is” in the brightest colors, right up to the second he’s taken away.

 

Angel, voicing Robot Teddy, is not as sophisticated in design as David or even Joe, and unshakably loyal to David. His gruff, adult voice, contrasted to David’s, makes him adorable, but also underlines his disability; David’s illusion of being a child is compelling, but an old man’s voice coming out of a Teddy Bear’s mouth demonstrates dissidence. In the beginning of the film, Teddy, who first belonged to Martin, was forgotten in the back of a closet, a foreshadowing of all Robots being denied Autonomy, seen only as commodities. He’s with us for most of the film, but even his purpose as a supporting character takes a back seat while Joe is on screen and he becomes easy for David to ignore, suggesting that Robots are not only commoditized by Humans, they commoditize each other.

 

Osment as David owns this film. At the time, coming off his landmark success in “The Sixth Sense” (1998), he was the top child actor in the USA. He gives a performance of remarkable nuance, alternately full of cheer and confusion, with almost every gesture expressing how David was sincere, but also incomplete. Osment seemed aware that what he needs to project wasn't just some cute kid, but the idea of idealization, an artificial image of what a cute child is supposed to be.

 

An un-named Critic for Straus Media described him this way, “He achieves amazing transparency in A.I. This looks like the most artless screen performance I have ever seen; David's naive conviction matches Tim Holt's pathos in ‘The Magnificent Ambersons’. Contrived to detach us from sentimentality, Osment's performance does what the past two decades of teen movies could not, it cleanses our self-recognition of any immodesty.”

 

Even Lasalle, who didn’t like the film, praised him, “Osment is either the best child actor in history, or he's tied with Shirley Temple.”

 

David keeps our sympathies because his blind obsession is never harmful to others. His inability to grow and learn from experience was never his own failing, he was programed that way, but maybe this isn’t much different than the traits expressed in the Humans. Critic Kreider summarized the film this way:

 

“Every character in the film seems as preprogrammed as David, obsessed with the image of a lost loved one, and tries to replace that person with a technological simulacrum. Dr Hobby designed David as an exact duplicate of his own dead child, the original David; Monica used him as a substitute for her comatose son; and, completing the sad cycle two thousand years later, David comforts himself with a cloned copy of Monica’”

 

Blameless David, Allen with his God complex, and Monica the bad mother, all trapped by the closely-related obsessions. David didn’t choose his, so he is the innocent, but did the others choose theirs? Much of this film explores the difference of existing with, or without, Free Will. It raises many of the questions regarding the legitimacy of David’s Autonomy because of his lack of it. But what is the Humans’ Free Will is also an illusion? What if we are all Robots, only we’re more sophisticated compared to David as David is compared to Teddy?

 

Can there be Original Sin if we are all so unoriginal?

 

Trailer:

AI: Artificial Intelligence - Trailer - YouTube