A.I. Artificial Intelligence

An ambitious but flawed project, A.I. appears torn between the logic of Kubrick and the emotion of Spielberg

Warning: big-time spoilers ahead

Ever since my eighteenth birthday I have attended Sunday classes in the women's auxiliary of my church, and in that time I've had the chance to see several very different teaching styles in action. (Trust me; I do have a germane point.) Some talented teachers present lessons that are well-crafted, intelligent and thoughtful; more often than not, these lessons and the discussion generated by them will touch the heart and create a genuine emotional response. Other teachers, perhaps not as thoroughly prepared, tend to cap off their lessons with a video or taped song filled with sappy sentimentality that seems deliberately designed to coax tears from the class. In all fairness, these teachers may not be able to tell the difference between creating a favorable climate for honest emotional response and simply manufacturing sentiment. Even at eighteen, I took umbrage at this kind of teaching; I knew the difference between being touched and being manipulated, and I didn't like it. I've never developed tolerance for emotional manipulation of this sort, whether in church, between people, or at the movies.

This is one of several reasons why A.I. Artificial Intelligence was ultimately a frustrating experience—one comes away feeling that, given the right director, this movie could have been truly touching rather than merely manipulative. What A.I. needed was a gentle hand at the controls, symbolic subtlety, a willingness to guide the audience with the gentlest of touches and the faintest of whispers—almost a Taoist outlook on directing. Instead, it got Steven Spielberg.

I don't mean to slam Spielberg as a director. He's done some excellent work to date, and has demonstrated an astonishing willingness to take chances with some odd and difficult projects that few other directors would touch. But the director of Jaws, E.T. and Saving Private Ryan is not known for his subtlety. His particular brand of storytelling is to lay it all out on the screen, sometimes with charts and graphs just to make sure nobody missed the point. He seems to be at his best when creating larger-than-life spectacle.

Part I: The Setup

The core story of A.I., by comparison, seems better suited to the intimacy of an "art house" flick: in the future, humanity creates artificial humans called "mechas" to do all sorts of work. One ambitious man, Prof. Hobby (William Hurt), proposes a new kind of mecha—David (Haley Joel Osment), an artificial child specifically designed to imprint upon and love his parents.

This premise immediately broke open a whole slew of questions for me: what is the proper human responsibility to a creation that is designed to love? Can human parents ever truly love a mechanical child? How would they react to a being who is perpetually physically young, never aging although he is presumably capable of gaining intelligence and mental maturity? Is it morally acceptable to create a highly durable artificial being who is programmed to love his parents deeply and unconditionally, even if such love goes unrequited? What happens when the objects of his love eventually age and die, and he is left alone? Unfortunately, few of these questions are directly addressed in the film.

Instead, we watch as David is reluctantly accepted into the home of Henry and Monica Swinton (Sam Robards and Frances O'Connor). Henry works for Cybertronics, the company producing the David prototype; he and Monica are chosen to be the first test family for David. Their real son, Martin (Jake Thomas), is in cryogenic suspension until such time as science can find a cure for his unspecified, but presumably fatal, illness—and in this future, reproduction is strictly limited and licensed, so they cannot have another child. Obsessive Monica, who visits and reads to her catatonic son in the crèche-like cryochamber, is incapable of giving up hope, unable to mourn, desperate to be a mother. Yet Monica often acts more frigid than her son—a brittle woman who is simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by the almost-human David, she avoids interacting with him. In one scene, she drags David into a closet and closes the door as though he were a vacuum cleaner left out in the hall.

To a certain extent, we are meant to empathize with Monica. David starts out as little more than an anthropomorphized appliance. His first appearance in the Swinton house is deliberately unfocused, so the audience is allowed to see him as a pin-headed mannequin. Eventually the shot resolves into a genial little automaton with a shiny plastic complexion, a Barbie-like smile and curious blue eyes that never seem to blink; his first comment is "I like your floor." At bedtime, his perky query of "Dress me?" is unnerving precisely because he is not a child, but a four-foot-tall doll for lonely grownups. Yet if David is not fully human, neither are Henry and Monica—characters who live in sterile surroundings and mouth such patently false lines as "I love you. Don't kill me." and "Silly man, of course I'm not sure." Based solely on their behavior, it's often difficult to tell the difference between the humans and the robots in this movie.

As time goes on and there seems little hope of resuscitating Martin, Monica decides to use the irreversible imprinting protocol on David. Once she says the seven magic words, the change is immediate: the little mecha begins calling her "Mommy" and expressing his heartfelt love for her. (Another unanswered question: why doesn't Henry also use the imprinting protocol on David? Are we meant to understand that in the future, as now, the need for a "Daddy" is no longer in vogue? Or did this 22nd-century fairy tale simply need an "evil stepfather?") Although Monica begins to accept David, she does not treat him as a real child—when she and Henry go out for the evening, she leaves David alone in the house with Teddy (voiced by Jack Angel), Martin's old Supertoy. Still, they are making progress.

At this point, we'd have to expect Martin's imminent resuscitation—and lo, Spielberg comes through for us as a miraculous cure is found for Martin's illness. As soon as he comes home, the lines of family loyalty are drawn—David is kicked out of Martin's womb-like bed, relegated to a cot in the corner. Apparently Martin's unspecified illness was Terminal Brattiness, and there are lingering side effects. At first regarding David as just another Supertoy, at some point Martin realizes (though we never see this on screen) that his parents got David as a replacement child; from then on, Martin does everything he possibly can to make David's mechanized existence hell. He gets David to eat spinach, causing the robot to short-circuit. He convinces David to sneak into Monica's room while she's asleep and cut off a lock of her hair, an act Henry sees as an attempt on Monica's life. Later, at a pool party, David is physically threatened with harm by one of Martin's friends and, in an attempt to hide behind Martin, drags him into the swimming pool and nearly drowns the boy.

This final act is the last straw as far as Henry is concerned. Although he was originally the most vocal champion on David's behalf, he now insists that David be taken back to the factory. But Monica cannot bring herself to do it—now that the imprinting process has taken place and David is hard-wired to love her, she knows that the factory will destroy him if she sends him back. On a spur-of-the-moment decision, she drives into the woods next to the factory and abandons David and Teddy there. This is the best scene in the film as far as honest evocation of emotion—we truly feel horrified and heartbroken for poor David, who cannot understand why he is being abandoned, but believing his Mommy does not love him because he is not good enough, because he is not real. More than any other disturbing image in this film, however, this scene is the primary reason why A.I. is wholly unsuitable for children. They will understand exactly what is occurring, and seeing a protagonist with whom they identify, being abandoned by his mother with no explanation, would be enough to give most sensitive children nightmares for months.

Again, there are obvious questions the film overlooks: why doesn't the company want to know what happened to their prototype child mecha? At the very least, wouldn't there be conversations at work: "Hey, Henry, how are things working out with David?" Nope, not a whit. And you thought WE lived in a disposable society.

Part II: The Quest

Now abandoned in the woods with Teddy and trying to make sense of it all, David recalls the story of Pinocchio that Monica read to him and Martin. He reaches the logical conclusion that if he can find the Blue Fairy and ask her to make him into a Real Live Boy, then Mommy will finally love him. Thus begins (fanfare) The Quest, almost a perfect allegorical rehash of the quest for real boyhood in Disney's Pinocchio.

As with any quest, there are setbacks. David comes across a band of renegade and cast-away mechas in the forest, scavenging for spare parts. Eventually he and the other renegades are rounded up by red and green neon motorcycle hellhounds and taken to the Flesh Fair, a weird pastiche of truck pull, circus, gladiator arena and WWF Smackdown, where obsolete mechas are tortured and dismembered before a crowd of gleeful white-trash spectators. This is a horrifically grisly scene; the only reason why the film didn't get an R rating is because, ironically, the MPAA seemed to agree with the crowd that torturing mechas isn't the same as torturing real people. In the holding cage, David sticks out because he is 1) perfectly intact, 2) brand new and 3) a child. Apparently, there are no other child mechas. When David pleads for his life (something else mechas are never supposed to do) the crowd takes pity on him, and he and his newfound friend Gigolo Joe (Jude Law), a pleasure mecha framed for murder, are set free.

The lithe and slickly androgynous Joe points out that if David is looking for a woman, he's found the right mecha. Joe knows women, and he reckons the best place to find them is in Rouge City. They manage to hitch a ride into this nighttime carnival city filled with sex and neon, as bright as the Vegas strip, and visit the Einstein-like virtual professor Dr. Know (cameo by Robin Williams), who answers all questions for a fee. From him they manage to gain a cryptic answer about a drowned city "where the lions weep" as the place where David will find his Blue Fairy. Joe promptly has a run-in with the law, and he and David steal an aquacopter and head out for Manhattan.

In this future, most of Manhattan is underwater as the polar ice caps have melted (more later on the copious "bad science" in this movie). Yet somehow, Joe and David manage to find the weeping lions Dr. Know spoke of, and land their 'copter in the corporate offices of Cybertronics, the very company that created David. (Corporate offices, in the middle of a flooded ruin? H'm, not very cost-effective; guess it takes all kinds.) Here David comes face-to-face with—himself. Faced with the idea that he is not unique or special, that he might have to "share" Monica with another David, he flies into a rage and destroys his doppelgänger.

At this point Prof. Hobby arrives back on the scene, having somehow watched David through all of his adventures ("You have had the power all along... there's no place like home..." erm, sorry, wrong fantasy film). He points out that David is as real as he's ever going to be; then excuses himself to find his colleagues and share the news of David's homecoming—or perhaps he's just readying a balloon for his return to Kansas. Filled with despondency, David wanders through a room filled with rows of Davids on hooks, like so much meat for sale; retail Davids—and Darlenes—boxed up for shipment (presumably to Fry's Electronics, Circuit City and Bots R Us). Left without hope, he throws himself from the edge of the building into the sea below—and there, deep under the water, he sees a vision. Before he can do anything about it, though, he is "rescued" by Joe in the 'copter; but Joe is apprehended by the police, and David takes the aquacopter underwater, rooting through the flooded remains of Coney Island until he finds the statue of the Blue Fairy. There he remains, begging and pleading for her to make him real.

Part III: The Tortured Push for Closure

Flash-forward two thousand years. Alien-looking beings, presumably descendants of the mechas left on Earth after humanity died out, find David still locked in the aquacopter beneath a frozen ocean. As he is a first-generation mecha, one who actually knew and interacted with humans, he is of particular interest to them. Through the persona of the Blue Fairy, they explain to him that, while they cannot make him truly human, they can bring back individual humans for him to enjoy—but each one will last only a single day, and they must have samples of DNA to bring the people back. Luckily, Teddy still has a lock of Monica's hair—and so they revive Monica for a single, perfect day, at the end of which she finally whispers to David the words he's waited over two millennia to hear—that she loves him and always has. Swell the music, sniff sniff, roll credits.

I've read a little about this project, so I realize Stanley Kubrick pushed hard for this ending. I don't understand why; it's pointless and shamelessly manipulative. David cannot be made any more real than he is, nor can he truly have what he wants, and I could hear the audience's willing suspension of disbelief slipping away from the moment the futuristic mechas showed up. Then again, this was the man who specialized in peculiar endings, from Dr. Strangelove (ooo-kay...) to 2001: A Space Odyssey (HUH?). Perhaps he wanted the film to end on a jarring, discordant note. Instead, as directed by Spielberg, it drips with treacly sweetness. In retrospect, it would have been better to leave David under the ice, pleading with the Blue Fairy, and let the viewers decide for themselves what finally happened to him.

Part IV: In which TPK rants incoherently about Bad Science and Flawed Internal Logic

Yarrgh! Where do I begin? This movie is peppered with Bad Science Facts and logical contradictions that make suspension of belief extremely difficult.

• In the first few minutes of the film, we are told that the polar ice caps have melted because of greenhouse gases. Setting aside all questions of the reality of global warming, the piddling human contribution to greenhouse gases, the celluloid horror that is Waterworld, etc., etc., I must ask: what really happens when the world's temperature heats up? The polar ice caps actually increase in size. Ordinarily, the Arctic and Antarctic regions are like freeze-dried deserts; there's not enough heat to keep much moisture in the air. When heat rises, however, it becomes warm enough to snow in the polar regions; the water is locked into the ice, expanding the ice caps and causing sea levels to DROP.
• OK, let's assume that something has happened to start the polar ice caps melting. What kind of massive flooding could we expect? According to the best scientific estimate, worldwide sea levels would rise by just over two feet. Far from putting the Statue of Liberty almost completely underwater, as seen in the film, the additional water wouldn't even be enough to get her feet wet. New York might expect some flooded basements, nothing more.
• It's said that the massive flooding caused a worldwide decline in population, yet we also learn that couples must be licensed in order to have their one child. Wouldn't it make more sense to let people breed like mad?
• Oh, but the floods have left very little arable land for crops! Poppycock. If the earth's temperature and floodwaters have risen that high, previously arid deserts and cold areas are now prime farmland.
• But the world is overpopulated! You certainly couldn't prove it by this movie. The Swintons live in spacious, icy luxury; David and Teddy tromp through virtually deserted forests, urban jungles and metropolitan ruins. Where are the huddled masses yearning to breathe free?
• If resources must be carefully managed, how can people justify creating expensive, apparently disposable mechas? Far from allowing Flesh Fairs and other such travesties, they should be carefully harvesting every chip and circuit board for re-use. One would expect a partially swamped California featuring "Do Your Part—Recycle Used Mechas Here" machines at the local supermarkets.
• Further, in a world where humanity is in decline and resources are scarce, where did people get the funding to build the 24-hour sexfest that is Rouge City?
• Why is Gigolo Joe being arrested for murder? Surely the police know that, as a mecha, he is probably incapable of killing a human being?
• What kind of phenomenal internal power supply and lubricant system does David have? After two thousand years locked under the ice of a frozen ocean, he still works.
• If the world's temperature cooled to the point that every bit of water on earth froze, one would expect the waters to ebb as the polar ice caps re-formed.
• Spielberg takes great care to inform his audience that people can only be brought back to life from a DNA sample. First, if the future mechas can revive actual human beings, why is David's secondhand experience with humans so important to them? Second, um, I hate to say this, but there's no human DNA in hair.

There's more, but I've said enough. Mutta mutta.

Conclusion (finally!)

People tell the same story in vastly different ways. Perhaps A.I. was destined to fail, in that it had two very different storytellers involved: the coldly intellectual Stanley Kubrick and the warm-and-fuzzy Steven Spielberg. I think Spielberg tried very hard to tell at least part of the story as Kubrick wished, but in the end he couldn't help putting his own spin on things. The result is a weird, disjointed tale that goes on far too long and tries too hard to please.

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