I think some are misreading the tone of the narrator [and the music] 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 double-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 humankind's mecha legacy.
Only the faery-tale tone of the narrator suggests the simpler reading, and this is one of the basic dialectics of the film: the tension between the scientific and mytho-poetic ways of knowing the world and comprehending our existence within it. This is one of the primary themes of the film and the reason why there is so much faery tale imagery grafted into an ostensibly sci-fi oriented film. It is precisely the confluence of these two inherently human ways of comprehending the mysteries of existence that the entire film is built upon.
Let's back up for a moment and consider whether the other suggested ending (the "false ending" in narrative terms) would work as well. I'm of the opinion it would not.
I would easily concede that David's yearning, his overwhelming desire for the most basic of human needs, is given its most spectacular cinematic rendering in the underwater scene: a mecha, imbued with the most potent of human needs and emotions, shall spend an eternity praying in vain at the alter of the Blue Fairy.
But this wasn't Kubrick's intended ending, and I doubt it's one that would sit well with Spielberg either. And with good reason, I think. While it's an extraordinary visual metaphor for human longing, left unresolved it's merely another nihilistic trope, neither illuminating nor complex. It's a too easy gloss of the human condition. Fortunately, the film goes well beyond the dubious and sophomoric 'depth' of some dark, portentous parable. Kubrick/Spielberg take the narrative several steps further into territory that defies the simplicity of this false ending, but without undermining this extraordinary metaphor of eternal yearning.
Just consider what we would miss without the ending : (1) the human race is extinct; (2) man's creations have outlived and out-evolved us; (3) man's creations are fascinated by their creators and wish to understand us; (4) David's experience with us - something all Mechas can share through him - makes him an extraordinarily significant relic in their eyes, perhaps even a holy relic, perhaps the most holy connection with their creators the Mechas possess; (5) David evolves into something more human, though our notion of what is human has hopefully by now been expanded far beyond the simplistic definition of "a being housed in an organic vessel". David sleeps, perchance to dream (at least in the comforting words of the narrator), but we understand that he has reached the end of his existence. He "dies" after consumating his love with a being who's not really his mother, not even the same physical entity as his "mother", and perhaps more a symbol, the mother of all mechas, the ocean womb, all in a room that doesn't really exist except in David's memory, in a scene that culminates in the deaths of both principals and their passing into the mythology of a new race of beings.
Let's not 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. And then told as mythology. By whom? Surely by now you know the identity of the narrator!
A.I. is ultimately a film about the evolution of one species and the extinction of another. But had it ended with David Swinton trapped under the sea in a disabled craft before the alter of the Blue Fairy, it would be like leaving David Bowman sitting in space on a disabled craft before the monolith at the end of 2001. Had Kubrick ended 2001 at this analogous point, what would we have? Man overcomes his creation, his tools (HAL), only to have the door to 'beyond infinity' closed in his face. Bleak? Yeah. Dark? I guess. Complex? Not quite. That ending would have earned Pauline Kael's otherwise inapt criticism: "copout".
Instead, we discover a race - our progeny, our evolutionary legacy - and we discover that they are fascinated by their organic forbears, just as we are fascinated by our own evolutionary history. Fascinated enough to dig up a long-lost relic of a long-ago time when creator and progeny walked the earth together. Fascinated enough to craft mytho-poetic origins tales, so-called "legitimating narratives" in the language of Joseph Campbell.
And, so, we discover that they too search for artifacts to explain their existence; they too need fables to ease the anxiety of the ultimate question of being: from whence did I come and why this inescapable yearning?
It is a question that confronts us all as beings capable of reflecting on our own existences, and its great mystery inevitably reduces us to mere children. 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. Freud is both acknowledged and crushed by Spielberg’s awe at that first relationship, the most powerful and baffling in everyone’s life."
From the particular (David born of Monica) to the general (Mecha born of Orga): David finally does command his mother's love, if only as metaphor and if only in death. And in that transformative 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.]
