A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) (1 Viewer)

[Josh_Hill]

Im gonna watch this flick again, I feel theres much that I missed in my first 3 viewings.

 

[Ken_McAlinden]

If you look at the concept art in the extra features (which is well worth it, BTW), the creatures at the end of the film were frequently drawn with much more angular creases in their features. The design they eventually went with had them considerably rounded off which made them look much more "Close Encounters"-ish and lent itself to the alien-mecha confusion.

Regards,

 

[Ken_McAlinden]

I can't imagine ever weeping at the outcome of a film directed by Stanley Kubrick, no matter how grim the ending.

Why is weeping a bad thing? Are "serious" films required to keep the audience at an emotional distance? Are you suggesting that in the context of the entire film that this ending somehow turned it into "Beaches"? The fact that the ending elicited separate and almost contradictory emotional and intellectual responses in me was not a bug, but a feature. I'm sure this is why Kubrick thought at some point during the development of the film that it aligned with Spielberg's sensibilities.

Regards,

 

[Richard Kim]

I can't imagine ever weeping at the outcome of a film directed by Stanley Kubrick, no matter how grim the ending.

I guess you've never seen Paths of Glory then.

 

[JonZ]

My problem with AIs ending is the way it was executed. I hated the dialogue, the narration and the design for the mecha-robots.

I did like the first 2 hours very much. Unfortunately the ending leaves me so cold that I cannot justify a DVD purchase for this,which is too bad becuase there are some really great and beautiful moments in this film.

Its not a easy choice(a friend instant messages me every hour telling me to submit and buy AI).I do think its a touching story,I think the ideas presented are intruging and give you alot to think about, and I would recommend it to others to see.

 

[Steve Owen]

I would suggest that the "ending nay-sayers" should take a read of this discussion over in the software section (yes, the discussion has diverged a bit from a discussion of the discs to a discussion of the movie, but in this case the admins see to have sanctioned it).
I saw it in the theaters and thought it was a remarkable movie, but the more I read about it after the fact, the better it became. I can't think of another movie that left me with my brain churning this much. That it has generated as much intelligent discussion as it has is certainly a mark of its genious.
I forgot to pre-order this one... it's on it's way now. I can't wait to give it another watch.
-Steve

 

[Ken_McAlinden]

One more take on how to approach the ending. Think of it as man regarded as God. The Mecha are trying to understand their creators in much the same way that we strive to comprehend our own creation. They have now discovered a child-like entity that has a living memory of man -- their creator/God. Their interest in him ranges from archeological curiosity to reverence. Watch the ending again in this context and think about how they regard him and why some are so willing to accomodate him. Imagine yourself encountering an 11-year old child with first-hand knowledge of God.

Regards,

 

[Simon Massey]

It appears that a large number of people who dislike the tone of the ending would have preferred the film to end with the amphibicopter under the sea, just before the film jumps forward in time. Yet the tone of this scene is exactly the same as the one at the end ("voice-over narration")of the film. The difference is the meaning conveyed by the scene under the sea is clear cut, and whilst it may have made for a good ending to the "fairytale" aspect of the film, the actual ending is far more open to interpretation and encourages thought and discussion over the themes and ideas the film has tried (successfully or not) to convey. This, IMO, make for an infinitely more interesting film, and one which will not simply be dismissed in years to come.

 

[TheLongshot]

I like to call it a Flawed Masterpiece. While there are problems with the film in various places, there are also images and ideas that just grab you. For a few days, there were some things about the movie I couldn't stop thinking about. Bad movies don't do that to me. I would also describe it as the most interesting film that Spielburg has directed. Not the best, by any means, but the most interesting.

I don't understand people who want it to end with David under the sea. It doesn't make any sense to end it there. It would make the movie pointless. The plot point of David's love needed to be resolved.

I do think it might have been a better film had Kubrick been alive to work with Spielburg on it. I think both approaches were nessicary to bring this story to life.

What no one has mentioned was the score, which was probably the most un-Williamsish John Williams score that I've ever heard. It is nice to see people stretch beyond themselves, even if they aren't wholely successful.

Jason

 

[Ken_McAlinden]

What no one has mentioned was the score, which was probably the most un-Williamsish John Williams score that I've ever heard. It is nice to see people stretch beyond themselves, even if they aren't wholely successful.

It is probably his most interesting score since Close Encounters. So many people have that 5 note sequence stuck in their heads that they forget how interesting the actual score to that film was. I am not suggesting that he has not done good scores since then, just that he has not "stretched", as Jason puts it, so much for quite a while. I liked his use of choral music in Phantom Menace, recently, too, although it was really just a logical progression from his earlier Star Wars work.

Regards,

 

[Patrick Sun]

Watch this film as a fairy tale told by the Mechas, and everything falls into place wonderfully.

The problem is that most people will not get this on their first viewing and cling to the idea that the story should have ended when David is on the bottom of the sea, but that negates the entire point of view from whom the story is told from in the first place, and gives even more resonance to the issues raised in this film as the Mechas try to understand who their creators were and what they were all about.

 

[Rich Malloy]

The ending is maudlin! maudlin! maudlin! "Happy" or "sad" it's still maudlin! To me that makes it sappy.

I think some are misreading the tone of the narrator as the ostensible or intended tone of the ending. A closer look - something few are willing to afford a Speilberg film - reveals a much more complex and ultimately unnerving conclusion. We are, after all, talking about a scene not unlike a murder-suicide. And one that includes some startlingly erotic moments between mother and son. This is an ending that takes all the dark mysteries of that relationship and ultimately sends the two principals sailing off into oblivion: artifacts of an extinct race and mythological forebears of man's mecha legacy.

Only the tone of the narrator suggests the simpler reading. And it is precisely this faery tale tone that the entire film riffs upon, as it reveals the darker, grimmer underbelly of all such tales.

For me, it's precisely the view into the taboo corners of human love that sets this film apart. Surely, there is no more selfish love than that between a boy and his mum. Even that complex known as "Electra" has never excited so much psychological confusion, or so sabotaged the social-order.

And this selfishness is at the very heart of the oedipal fixation, which is precisely a rivalry against the father for the mother's love, but also the rivalry among siblings. Though David's near drowning of his brother was caused by a somewhat different urge for self-preservation, their entire relationship is but a flashpoint of sibling rivalry. It's like the bringing home of a new baby - the ultimate obstacle between a former only child and the mother - but here it's a new baby that's both more socially sophisticated and somehow more deserving of the mother's love. "A real boy", and the ultimate threat.

Don't forget: David is "born" on the threshhold of a new world, one where orga offspring and mecha offspring compete for the evolutionary legacy - it is the sibling rivalry writ large. Writ on an evolutionary scale.

This is a film wherein every step in David's evolution is marked by violent gestures, all arising from that first, most potent love - the one thing he shares with the orgas and that which sets him apart from all other mechas that came before him. By "violence", I mean the violence in scenes between David and his father, his brother, his mother, and of course the "other" Davids. I mean the violence implicit in the scene where David quietly creeps to his mother's bedside, slowly bringing the scissor's blades toward her face, if only to cut a lock from her hair. This is a violence and violation implied quite intentionally within the sexual realm of the bedroom, his "parent's" bedroom, a place we will revisit in the climactic scene. But, in that final reality, the violence of the previous act, as well as the fruits of David's violation (his mother's hair), are transformed into an uneasy eroticism... one in which their relationship is finally consummated, and where death is finally realized.

Armond White writes: "There’s been nothing in modern movies more grownup or sensitive than David’s fascination with his sexy young mother. It’s as if Spielberg took that key image from Bergman’s Persona (of the small boy reaching up to the huge opaque image of Woman) and interpreted it from the inside out. Suspended in fascination, Spielberg introduces Monica applying her makeup – a vanity gesture shared with a female robot. Yet, where another filmmaker would stop at obvious irony, Spielberg dissolves/resolves ironies in love. This view nearly shuts out the father – Freud is both acknowledged and crushed by Spielberg’s awe at that first relationship, the most powerful and baffling in everyone’s life."

Or consider the scene in which David is confronted by the other David, and then all the other Davids, each striking at the very heart of his perceived "uniqueness", the very thing which makes him special enough to win a mother's love. After all, if there exists another David, much less thousands of other David's, then how could his love be special? His response, of course, is to destroy them. It is the ultimate defense of self. For what is "self" if we do not perceive ourselves as unique? And if we are not unique, then how could we hope to command our mother's love?

In the end, David does command it... if only in death. And in that act lies the connection between man and his legacy, between orga and mecha, transformed into an allegorical narrative, a faery tale, a sacred text: the Genesis of a New Race.

Dissolve to the Ocean Mother.

 

[Tino]

Beautifully stated Rich. Ditto! :b

 

[Dave Mack]

Rich, that rules!
Also, now that I've had a couple of days, I wanna bring up RESPOSIBILITY!!!!
The mother CHOSE to "activate" David's undying love, fully knowing that he could never NOT love her after!
That is HUGE!!!!!
And then knowing he would be DESTROYED if the "experiment" didn't work out between him and the person he now loves!
Notice the father never did it! He wasn't "DAD"...
And how the mother seemed to actually love and want to be rid of him SIMULTANEOUSLY when she tells him to run!
And he is SCREAMING!
Like in "Saving Private Ryan" when the medic is mortally wounded, is actually the one in his squad to best give advice to "help" himself, and at the end just before he dies, keeps saying , "MOM, MOM....!!!!!"
AI is incredibly deep and works on MANY levels.
And to think that some people passionately HATED this Film, (like an actress at my theatre said last year, VERY vociferously...) I think shows that the reaction of a person to this Film, reveals an AWFUL lot about the person!
Maybe You Love it, maybe you hate it, but BROTHER, it most certainly is a work of ART to me!
How many Films in 2002 can you say THAT about!!!!!
PEACE!

 

[Ron-P]

Damn fine write up Rich
Peace Out~

 

[Edwin Pereyra]

Rich, welcome back! And keep straightening these guys out who are still mislead by the ending of A.I. I did my share already when the film came out last year. What a great film.
~Edwin

 

[Richard Kim]

Continuing with the Oedipal themes in A.I., notice that when David finds Monica in the toilet, the book she's reading is called "Freud and Women."

 

[Guy_K]

I thought the ending was a spielberg manipulation to try and get the audience to shed a tear. Notice how the bright white colors in the background flash in the viewers eyes at that scene.
I don't think it was a happy ending though, it was a depressing ending, but ending it under the ocean would be far more depressing (IMO of course).. Basically David would be begging the blue fairy to be real forever. Obviously the actual ending brings more meaning to the film, but (IMO again), it felt tacked on and out of place.
About the actual ending though.. David sleeps, becoming human. When he wakes up from his dream, he will be a human still though. After a loss, humans eventually get over it. That's not to say they don't love and miss their lost loved ones, but they will not cry about it forever. Am I mis-interperating this ending.. that be becomes human? If he stayed a mecha, he would never get over the loss and be incomplete forever. There's another reason why I think the end isn't as meloncholy as some say.
It also seems to me that they made the mecha's look like alien's on purpose. My take on that is that it was simply to confuse film-goers. Why make them look like aliens if you could make them look like robots? Obviously the robots may change form eventually, but why would Spielberg make them look like aliens that look EXACTLY like the ones in Close Encounters? It would be too convenient to then say everyone didn't 'get' it.
What was with Chris Rock's cameo? How unnecessary was that?
I liked it though. I'd probably rate it :star: :star: :star: .5 / :star: :star: :star: :star: . The acting is amazing. Haley Joel Osment plays his character very well. I think it's Jude Law who had the best performance in the film. Anyone whose seen The Talented Mr. Ripley knows that after Dickie (his character) dies
the film loses something. Same goes for A.I. When Gigalow Joe is taken away, part of the film goes with him too. There are hardly any serious science fiction films anymore, hopefully with A.I., and the upcoming Minority Report, and Solaris there will be more following their footsteps.

 

[Tino]

"Exactly" like the aliens in Close Encounters?
IMO, they have nothing in common except perhaps elongated "necks", if that's what you want to call them.
The great thing about A.I. is that there are countless interpretations of every aspect of the film. What you get out of the film sometimes depends on what you bring in. This is one film that definitely improves on subsequent viewings, becoming deeper and more profound than what appears on its surface.
My interpretation is that it is a modern masterpiece.

 

[Simon Massey]

About the actual ending though.. David sleeps, becoming human. When he wakes up from his dream, he will be a human still though. After a loss, humans eventually get over it. That's not to say they don't love and miss their lost loved ones, but they will not cry about it forever. Am I mis-interperating this ending.. that be becomes human? If he stayed a mecha, he would never get over the loss and be incomplete forever. There's another reason why I think the end isn't as meloncholy as some say.

David doesn't go to sleep....he dies/shuts down. It is expressed clearly near the beginning of the film that mechas can't sleep, and the narrator is the one who tells us that David goes to sleep.
Since the narrator of the film is one of the mechas (The Specialist), I would argue that this had to be interpreted from the mechas point of view of what "sleep" is, thus it makes more sense that this means death/shutdown to them. I am sure this is also confirmed somewhere in the extras on the DVD as well.
Whether he dies with a soul, so to speak, or shuts down as a computer would having fulfilled its program is another matter entirely. David's blind acceptance of the artificial Monica's love as "real love" felt more artificial to me, as he cannot tell the difference, and therefore I felt he simply shut down, without realising he hadn't actually got what he wanted. But the comment by the narrator at the end has made me question this.
"and he went to that place where dreams are born" Does this mean he ultimately has a soul, and, in a sense, became human (although not literally).
Every time I watch this film it raises new questions