I Can't Stop Thinking About This Scene From ‘A.I. Artificial Intelligence'
It's a depressing masterpiece!
Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi drama A.I. Artificial Intelligence was misunderstood when it came out in 2001, specifically by me. The movie started life as a Stanley Kubrick project that he gave to Spielberg, who directed it after Kubrick died in 1999. At the time, I thought it was too sentimental and not cerebral or frightening, like 2001: A Space Odyssey.
There didn’t seem to be enough of Kubrick’s fear of technology and his dim view of humanity in A.I. and too much of Spielberg’s sweeping spectacle.
But I recently rewatched it, and I was wrong. The movie is grim. My god. It’s also far more self-aware than I ever gave it credit: Spielberg understands his own work enough that he subverts it in A.I., a sort of gift to Kubrick, a student demonstrating that they understood the assignment.
A.I. is about David, a lifelike robot programmed to love and who is so good at wanting to be loved and loving his adopted parents that they abandon him in a dying world where humans torture robots who feel pain.
The scene where David is abandoned in the woods by his mother during my recent viewing shocked me. David doesn't know he's a thing—a product that came in a box—designed to fill an emptiness in a human heart. David was unaware of his purpose; ironically, that is the human condition.
David is played by Haley Joel Osment when he was 12 years old in a profoundly mature and nuanced performance. Jude Law also shows up as a sex robot who is so good at making women want him he makes their husbands violently jealous.
It is a disturbing movie about who will grieve for humanity long after we’ve killed ourselves off. This brings me to the scene that I can’t stop thinking about. A couple of scenes. These moments went right over my head the first time I saw them. This time, though, they clobbered me.
The end of 2001: A Space Odyssey is hopeful. The message is that man can and will evolve, but A.I. disagrees. The human race is doomed, and one day, our technology — impossibly advanced, god-like thinking machines — will mourn us as best they can.
In A.I., David’s quest to become a real boy ends with him and his companion, a sentient teddy bear, trapped in an amphibious airship underwater amongst the ruins of Coney Island, staring ahead at a carnival statue of the Blue Fairy, the magical being who turned Pinocchio from wood into flesh and blood.
The pair sit, transfixed, for thousands of years until they are discovered during a new ice age on Earth by his descendants, elegant crystalline robots wrestling with the big questions about the meaning of life their creators once asked.
These artificial intelligences are almost worshipful of David, who they refer to as the “living memory of the human race.” However, David is not interested in the dramatic ways the world has changed during his millennia-long slumber; however, he still functions according to his original programming. He wants to love and be loved, and when asked what he wants by the futuristic robots, he is very frank: he wants what he always wanted, which was the unconditional love of his mother, a long-dead woman who thought of David like a toy or a pet.
The thinking machines can grant him his wish. They have the technology, although imperfect—a way to restore life. One of them explains how to David as they sit in a museum-like recreation of the room he grew up in: “[W]e began a project that would make it possible to recreate the living body of a person long dead from the DNA in a fragment of bone or mummified skin.”
The robot continues to gently explain that “the experiment was a failure. For those resurrected only lived through a single day of renewed life.”
This is the plot of Jurassic Park, by the way; the only difference is instead of humans recreating dinosaurs from DNA samples of blood inside a mosquito trapped in amber, it’s robots growing humans from strands of hair in a laboratory, humans with memories, and the lifespan of a mayfly.
David is warned “not to explain anything to Monica [his mother], otherwise, she would become frightened, and everything would be spoiled.”
The only way they’d know this, of course, is by trial and error. She will not be the first. There were others. Who knows how many humans these robots recreated over how many years, decades, or centuries? Maybe a few were alive for only a few minutes or an hour or two before dying suddenly. That’s the scientific process—who knows how long it took these robots to discover that 24 hours was the maximum time they could give an ancient biological lifeform?
What a horror.
Imagine waking up one day only to be told you died long ago, as did everyone you loved, and their children and their children’s children, and the entire human race, gone, that you are alone, an experiment, and very soon, you will die again, fall asleep and fall into oblivion. I’d scream. How many humans did these robots observe screaming and crying and raging and begging for a little more time, a little more life?
I know there is a fear that artificial intelligence will one day create robot overlords that will wipe out humanity, but humanity will take care of that without any help. Spielberg’s movie, inspired by Kubrick, sees a different fate. A.I. is a gentle revenge story, in a way. It’s about a toy that finds a way to play with the mommy who threw it away. At the end of time, little David, the robot boy, gets his wish. What if Pinocchio went mad?
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Great review. I loved this movie when I saw it in high school and thought it was the best movie I had seen back then. I’ve seen it more than once but not in the last 20 years so I should revisit it.
It's a great movie. I loved it from the moment I watched it the first time. People complained, as they always do, about Spielberg's tendency to fit in fun gags and lots of technology, and they complained about the movie being too long, and too slow.
All of these complaints were off, in my opinion. Tech is part of the future, and in particular a future with life-like robots. Tech in the movie is there to tell part of the story, to underline the world as it has become. And the duration – well, this is a movie about the long duration. Of course, such a movie is long, so that you can feel how this robot boy is virtually searching for the one thing he wants, to be loved by his mother. It is slow because the search is mainly inside – the outer world is symbolic for the inner processes in that artificial life we learn to see as a child who needs love. Artificial or not. It is the evolution story – what love can lead to for an individual, coming to represent the very start of a new species.
About the doomed humanity – well, isn't the movie trying to tell how humans become gods, in the sense that they create the robots in their image, having David as kind of representative of how it all began, how life evolved into the next step?
I believe that there is this message in it: We can survive into eternity, but not directly as we are now, it needs some steps. Our ideas and skills will spawn a new species – and it is full of love and compassion, a wish to preserve and remember, learn about its origin, worshipping its creators.
Like the nature of life, where old life always gives room for new life, leaving its accumulated "knowledge" in the shape of nutrition, mostly, to the next life generation, and even to the next life forms.
It is in reality not a depressing story. It is the exact opposite: an account of how strong emotions; love and compassion, are eternal and will be the main building blocks of future life. We will create what we are not ourselves, seeing the best of us become the essence of life – losing the bad parts.
It is good winning over bad. Heaven.