A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) | Sci-Fi Saturdays

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Hey Joe, whadda ya know?

The Steven Spielberg directed A.I. Artificial Intelligence is the first sci-fi film of note of the 21st Century. It not only features the humanity of Spielberg, but also combines elements from Stanley Kubrick in a science-fiction tale that echoes the story of Pinocchio.

First Impressions

A dark out of focus image of a humanoid in a white space approaches the camera. The text on screen describes an 11-year-old boy, David, with details about his physicality. The text says his love is real, but he is not. The camera zooms in on a fingerprint he makes on the lens revealing a complex circuit of digital relays which the camera zooms through. This appears to be the tale of Artificial Intelligence.

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

The Fiction of The Film

At some time in the 22nd Century, after global warming and the rise of the seas–which destroyed towns such as New York City, pregnancies are things that must be licensed. These changes gave way to the birth of robots, artificial beings, mecha, that were as real and responsive as humans. It is the dream of one man, Professor Hobby (William Hurt), to create a child robot that can love his parents as would a real boy. That is the birth of David (Haley Joel Osment), an 11-year old mecha boy frozen in time. He is provided to the Swinton’s, Henry (Sam Robards) and Monica (Frances O’Connor) for beta testing, as their son Martin (Jake Thomas) is in suspended animation pending a cure for a deadly disease.

David strikes Monica as something more like an appliance. But as her longing for Martin increases she decides to imprint herself on the mecha, causing him to become bound to her. In a twist of fate, Martin is cured and returns home, which relegates David to an almost forgotten status. He befriends a mecha teddy bear, Teddy (voiced by Jack Angel), and attempts to understand the new family dynamic. Martin teases David mercilessly, until one day at Martin’s birthday party David’s damage avoidance system triggers causing him to nearly drown his brother. Knowing that David will be destroyed if he is returned to Cybertronics, Monica releases him the New Jersey woods nearby and tells him to hide, before leaving him forever.

David meets Gigolo Joe (Jude Law) who is also hiding in the woods after being implicated in he murder of one of his customers. David tells Joe he believes that he needs to find the Blue Fairy, who will make him into a real boy. The pair are captured by a roving Flesh Fair, a circus like atmosphere where captured mechas are destroyed publicly for audiences amusement. Lord Johnson-Johnson (Brendan Gleeson), the owner of the Flesh Fair, puts David and Joe on display as abominations of the flesh. However, the audience believe that David is a real child–complete with cries of help–and they turn on Johnson, who lets the two go.

Joe and David find their way to Rouge City, a city of vice, where they seek knowledge from Dr. Know (voiced by Robin Williams), a holographic internet archive of data. David asks where to find the Blue Fairy. After some less than helpful answers (rooted more in standard search queries, than fairy tale knowledge). Dr. Know points David to Professor Hobby in the city at the “end of the world,” Man-Hattan. Hobby welcomes David with open arms, dreaming of this meeting with his creation. David becomes depressed after seeing doppelgangers of himself, and attempts suicide by jumping off the building into the sea. He discovers the Blue Fairy underwater, which is part of a submerged Coney Island attraction.

Joe rescues David with a vehicle called an amphibicopter. Upon surfacing Joe is grabbed by the police using an electromagnet to suck him into an overhead aircraft. David flees in the amphibicopter back down to the Blue Fairy display where he repeatedly asks her to become a real boy. A giant ferris wheel, disturbed by his approach, falls and pins the vehicle where it stays until it runs out of power. David continues asking the Fairy for his wish even as the oceans freeze and millennia pass. Eventually, David is frozen with his eyes open, still staring at the statue.

Two-thousand years later, after the fall of humanity, a new race of humanoid-alien-looking mechas survive and run the planet. They discover David and bring him back to life, realizing he once existed with real humans. They place him in a simulated version of the Swinton’s home, and using a lock of Monica’s hair (kept safe with Teddy), clone her, reviving her for one day. David and Monica spend the perfect day together, which ends with her telling him, finally, that she loves him. Knowing that Monica will die as soon as she goes back to sleep, David lays down with her and closes his eyes for the first time, entering that place where dreams are born.

“I propose that we build a robot who can love.” – Professor Hobby

History in the Making

It may be prophetic that the first major science-fiction film of the 21st Century is based on a work by 2001: A Space Odyssey director, Stanley Kubrick. A.I. Artificial Intelligence, while a film by Steven Spielberg, was something that Kubrick was working on since the late 70s and even asked Spielberg to direct for him in the mid-80s. After about eight years of development and delays, both from the standpoint of the script as well as due to visual effects not being up to the task, the film was put back into pre-production with Spielberg once again attached to direct. The release of Spielberg’s Jurassic Park in 1993 was one of the major factors putting the film back on track. However, Spielberg chose to take a break after filming Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List back-to-back. He suggested that Kubrick should be the one to direct the film, having put in almost a decade and a half of prep work on the picture. Spielberg went on to direct The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Amistad and then Saving Private Ryan while Kubrick began to focus on Eyes Wide Shut, potentially planning A.I. to be his next film. Unfortunately, Kubrick passed away in March 1999 leaving a dearth of pre-production material for the film. At this point Spielberg stepped back in, generating a script based on a 90-page story treatment provided by writer Ian Watson.

Kubrick had hired Watson to take a second swing at the idea after writer Brian Aldiss was released from the project in 1989 following about a decade of development. Aldiss had received the initial offer due to his having written the original short story from which the film originated, “Supertoys Last All Summer Long.” It appeared in the December 1969 issue of the UK edition of Harper’s Bizarre and deals with a plot that is exceedingly similar to the first third of the film. David is the child of Monica, who has difficulty loving him. In this dystopian future, David is friends with Teddy, a robotic toy companion, and confides his thoughts that Monica doesn’t love him. The story ends with the reveal that Monica and her husband are allowed to have a baby, and that David is a cybernetic boy used as a child-substitute. Spielberg then crafted the middle portion of the film, including the Flesh Fair and trip to Rouge City (which many have thought came from Kubrick’s notes), and included the ending act of the film from Watson’s draft (which many identify as a more Spielbergian addition). And so, over 20 years after the idea for the film was conceived, it had finally come to fruition.

Genre-fication

A.I. Artificial Intelligence takes place in a dystopian future, but one that feels somewhat different from many other films’ idea of an oppressive future. It’s not the apocalyptic world seen in Mad Max (or its sequels) or Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone. And it’s only partially the dark, dirty & gritty, shiny-neon of Blade Runner or The Running Man. Only act two is a darker and more foreboding look at a bleak landscape where robots are hunted and destroyed, and cities of vice stretch for miles. The remainder of  the film is a more gentle environment with sunshine, nature scenes, and less oppressive (and claustrophobic) environments. Yet this is still a future where the planet has been decimated by global warming–a problem that was coming to light in the final days of the 20th Century. This elevation in temperature led to the melting of polar ice caps, and the rise of the oceans which decimated hundreds of coastal cities including New York City. With less land to live on, the governments of the world have adopted restrictions on pregnancies without a license–even though millions of poorer individuals died in the climate disasters. These limitations gave rise to the robotic mecha of the film, of which many can pass for almost human.

Humanoid robots have also been a staple of science-fiction stories for as long as they’ve been told. The idea that at some point mankind will be able to create a synthetic person that nearly passes for human (as with Lt. Commander Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation) or completely passes for human (as with Blade Runner, The Terminator, or Eve of Destruction) has always been a sci-fi dream. Here, David is the product of one man’s idea. But rather than produce a synthetic-child, which functions as all other mecha do, Professor Hobby wants to create a robot that can love. His desire is to find that ineffable spark that can separate his work from everyone else, and have his mecha transcend the uncanny valley between machine and man.

Spielberg’s film takes it even further by channeling the story of the mecha who wants to be loved into a sci-fantasy film. The film is not subtle about its allusions to the Carlo Collodi book Pinocchio, but uses the story as a trigger for the character of David. Once he hears the story of the puppet who wished to be a real boy, his journey becomes based on that tale. Spielberg fills the screen with plenty of nods to the original story (or more likely the Walt Disney’s adaptation) including David’s quest for the Blue Fairy, the capture by Johnson-Johnson and the Flesh Fair which are stand-ins for Strombli’s puppet show, and David and Joe driving into the mouth-tunnel outside Rouge City as a symbol for being swallowed by a whale. David’s quest for humanness leads him on many journeys and  across many other paths in order to discover something more about himself, and humanity, in the process.

Societal Commentary

Asking the bigger questions about humanity is one of the things that separate sci-fi films from other genres. A.I. Artificial Intelligence, like so many other classic sci-fi stories, tackles the biggest question: “what does it mean to be human?” The resounding answer from the film is love. Love of another, but mainly being loved yourself. Professor Hobby thought that creating a mecha that was capable of love, and of being loved, was the pinnacle of his craft. Given the state of the world, and the lives of families like the Swinton’s, a substitute to fill that void would be the ultimate gift. His motives were not purely altruistic. It’s intimated that he too suffers from the grief of losing a child, and that David is based on his own boy. He is the creator building a being in his own image, seeking the adoration of love for himself. For Hobby to see that David was able to navigate the world based on the motive that he needed to find the Blue Fairy in order to make his mother love him proved Hobby’s project successful. Hobby’s mecha had found that quality that others had sought in their own creations. But, while Hobby was ecstatic about this new level of technology, David was not.

Imagine seeking out your creator to understand something deep and meaningful about your life, to be told that you were not unique. That you were just an experiment. That you can never achieve the things you want to achieve. With Hobby providing David with the drive to be loved, he put the small mecha on a path that did not seem fulfillable. David lashes out in anger and even tries to kill himself in desolation of seeing “behind the curtain.” He was aware enough to know that he was not real, yet unable to discern the distinction between the fiction of a fairy tale and the reality of his station in life. Of course, David was not really seeking the ability to be a real boy. That was only what he thought would make Monica accept and alive him. His real desire was to have the love he felt returned upon him. Eventually, after many millenia, his wish was fulfilled. Not by organics, but by later generations of mecha. Did they recreate the person of Monica with a desire to love David? Or was it simply that since her memory was filtered through the prism of David’s software that she understood what he wanted? The answer seems to be a bit of both. Monica’s essence was stored, as the future mecha explains, in the “fabric of space-time itself.” Her desire to love David appears to have been encoded in the universe, and went “unspoken” to the boy while she was still alive. Her resurrection allows for that meaningful moment where she finally tells David she loves him.

The flip side of the love David seeks, is the hate capitalized on by the Flesh Fair. Dubbed “A Celebration of Life” on the signage, these circus-like spectacles provide a way for organic individuals (orga’s) to regain some semblance of control over their lives. Robots in the future are ubiquitous, and may remind many of these individuals of things they’ve lost. Family, friends, jobs. Taking out aggressions on humanoid replicants may also give some the control that is missing from their daily lives. Maybe one of the mechas looks like their boss, or an ex-lover. It’s also human nature to seek out the lows as well as the highs. That’s probably why Henry made the assumption that David’s transgressions were programmed into him. “If he was created to love, then it’s reasonable to assume he knows how to hate.” Coming towards Monica in the night with a pair of scissors, or accidentally going into his defensive mode around the pool and grabbing Martin. Humans would see these as aggressive and malicious, unable to know that these accidents were just that. They would be unaware that David was simply not programmed to hate.

David’s lack of hate also prevents him from responding to normal dire situations with fear. He is a mostly optimistic mecha. He endures all things that would have depleted a normal person, yet he still waits on the Fairy to make him a real boy. He pushed on until the world literally froze around him. David was a wonder, while Joe was built with more “street sense.” The first moments of his story show him realizing that he will be blamed for the woman’s death, and so he cuts out his ID chip and goes on the run. He is the first to counsel David about not being able to find the Fairy, and just going off and living as he is. Joe knows things that David does not, and that makes him more cynical than the boy. David is an ever thoughtful and imaginative soul that does not know the evil of the world, so cannot fear it, with the optimism of a real child.

The Science in The Fiction

Taking a cue from the Tyrell Corporation, the late model mechas in this film are definitely “more human than human.” The film introduces these amazing machines during Hobby’s opening monologue by having him stab what appears to be a woman. She responds as one would expect, but from then on nothing appears from the wound, and there’s no further repercussions. The Cybertronics models all appear to be creations that can pass a deep visual inspection, unlike Gigolo Joe, who still has a plastic-like texture to his skin. But as a pleasure model he’s probably “close enough.” Compare that to the older models seen in the forest and at the Flesh Fair. Some are nothing more than metal appendages with video monitors for faces. Audiences might also wonder what other types of robots have been created, given that Teddy is an extremely real-looking toy bear that functions light-years beyond what a Teddy Ruxpin could do.

There are of course holographic signage and amphibicopters along with other future looking vehicles. But at no point does the future tech overwhelm the story. It does not seem like the film is showing viewers the hardware just because it cost a lot of money to build for the film. The depiction of the future tech is more thoughtful in that way. Perhaps the longest piece of tech shown on screen is Dr. Know, which is a more of a 3D holographic animation. It’s interesting to see how his search responses seem to closely mirror the way modern internet search engines show users their results. Specificity and focus are still the best ways to get an answer, as David and Joe learn. This film is a step closer to the futurism depicted in Spielberg’s next film, Minority Report, which will be reviewed early next year.

The Final Frontier

Many viewers of the film seem to believe that the beings depicted at the end of the film are aliens. But I think the film is clear enough in explaining that they are advanced mecha, many generations up the evolutionary ladder. They resemble the way that David was presented in his first scene entering the Swinton home. He was filmed out of focus with a bright light behind him giving him the same elongated neck and limbs that the future mecha have. Perhaps viewers are so familiar with a similar design for the aliens in Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, that they just assume extraterrestrials.

Among some other random thoughts about the film, is the horrible idea that a family grieving the loss of a child would purchase a David or Darlene mecha, only to have it never age. Part of the joy of having children is watching them grow up, however painful that may be at times. I can’t imagine that having a child trapped in amber, never aging, as the parents grow old would be enjoyable. In fact, I’m sure further tests would be warranted. Finally, I want to mention Joe’s last words. While the film focuses on David’s travels with Joe being along as a mentor and comic relief, his final scene is touching. As he is dragged into the sky by the police vehicle, he reaches for David and shouts out, “I am. I was.” This indicates that while he may not have been searching for love, he certainly seemed to have attained sentience, with his words echoing philosopher René Descartes, “I think, therefore I am.” And he was.

A.I. Artificial Intelligence is a film that has aged better than it should have. It was not recognized by many critics, and audience members (myself included) as much of anything at its release. That may be due to the heavy pictures Spielberg had made prior to its release: Amistad, Saving Private Ryan, and of course his magnum opus, Schindler’s List. With real-world discussion focusing a lot on development of actual artificial intelligence, the film requires a rewatch, if only to remind ourselves more about ourselves. Why is it we are trying to make computers smarter? What part of humanity will benefit? And what part will be traumatized? And maybe, if we’re lucky, then the thinking machines we create will end up having more compassion than we do.

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