A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)

WARNING: This review discusses key plot points throughout the movie. If you want to go into the experience spoiler-free, come back and join the discussion after you’ve watched it yourself.

In the late 1970s, Stanley Kubrick began developing a film adaptation of Supertoys Last All Summer Long, a short story by Brian Aldiss set in a dystopian future plagued by overpopulation and depleted resources where procreation is strictly regulated and manufactured artificial children have been introduced as a means to fill the emotional hole in the many, many childless families that have resulted.

The film adaptation went through a torturous development process over the next three decades, outlasting Kubrick himself. After Kubrick’s sudden passing, Spielberg was approached to direct, having previously been attached to the project in the mid-nineties. Spielberg took the 90-page story treatment Ian Watson had written for Kubrick and fleshed it out into his first solo screenwriting credit since Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

The result is a hybrid between two very acclaimed but very different filmmakers that doesn’t fit in comfortably with the rest of either filmmaker’s works. That has proved incredibly polarizing to moviegoers, in no small part because it attracted an audience who wanted what they’d come to expect from a Steven Spielberg film. Those looking for Speilberg action were disappointed. Those looking for straightforward Speilberg drama were disappointed.

Like most Kubrick films, A.I. Artificial Intelligence is more cerebral than emotional. This movie is a mental exercise, and that’s not what many people were looking for out of this movie. But I know that by the end credits it left me thinking about what I’d seen more that most movies do.

David, the central character, is a conundrum. He’s enough like us to provide a witness to the uglier side of human nature. But Professor Hobby’s goal was to create a robot almost identically, emotionally and physically, to a “real boy.” At the end of the film, I was left with the conclusion that he’d failed; that the very act of trying to replicate God’s creations is an act of hubris with horrible repercussions. David’s tragedy can in the end be equated to a programming error: He is able to love, but he is not able to age or forget.

In David, Professor Hobby has electronically reproduced the entire mental pathway responsible for love. He hypothesized that that would be enough to force the other emotions to emerge. But David doesn’t age or forget. His experience equips him with none of the checks and balances that our other emotions and the limitations of our fleshy vessels provide. He can’t accept his fate, because he doesn’t have the capability to move on. It’s what makes his semi-sentience so tragic; he has the feelings, but not the tools necessary to process them appropriately.

Some Mechas showed signs that sentience was coming. Gigolo Joe made the jump from programmed love (purely sexual in nature) to true caring and compassion for another being. He was still a slave to his programming in many ways, but he was clearly making the journey to “break through”. David never quite got there.

Natural selection results in creatures evolving to serve their own self-interest. But sometimes the good of the many is undermined by the self-interest of the one. Free will can be seen as natural selection’s workaround for that problem, allowing individuals to act against their personal self-interest for the good of others, so that the species as a whole will endure.

Viewed from that perspective, Gigolo Joe demonstrates a more pure version of free will than humanity has ever had the possibility to show. Whenever we do a selfless act, it can be chalked up to primordial programming aimed at the survival of a species. Joe was clearly not created with such programming. A nanny Mecha may have, but not a robotic male prostitute. For him to give up his existence for David’s is clear evidence of a conscious and free act against his programming. It is interesting that at this point, as he is hauled away by the police chopper, he proclaims such a basic and Descartean statement: “I am.”

Still, David can’t be entirely reduced to a machine enacting its preprogrammed functions. He did make creative leaps, most prominently, the leap to imagining the Blue Fairy as real and accepting fairy tale logic as a way to get back with his mother. The ways he does and does not act like a human would are both surprising and disconcerting. His entire existence occurs within the uncanny valley between imitation and inspiration.

The final sequence, which has been criticized in some quarters for undercutting Kubrick’s dystopian vision with Spielbergian schmaltz, is in reality incredibly dark and bleak in its implications: Someday, our creations will be all that are left of us. The robots of the distant future resurrect David as a means of better understanding their organic biological progenitors. But David is a flawed and limited representation of who and what we were. And in spite of that, or perhaps because of that, the robots of the future are able to grace David with a period of genuine comfort and contentment that his human creators were unwilling and unable to provide.

It’s a daring film, that forced Spielberg out of his comfort zone in exciting ways. It’s one I’m sure I’ll revisit for many years to come.