A.I. (film)
A.I.: Artificial Intelligence is a
science fiction film co-produced, written, and directed by
Steven Spielberg and
released in 2001. It was the last project on which filmmaker
Stanley Kubrick worked — he died before the film started shooting, and Spielberg dedicated the film to him.
The film won five
Saturn Awards, including
Best Science Fiction Film. It was nominated for
Academy Awards for
Best Effects, Visual Effects and
Best Music, Original Score.
*
Haley Joel Osment as David, a young
Mecha*
Jude Law as Gigolo Joe, David's companion and also a
Mecha*
Frances O'Connor as Monica Swinton
*
Brendan Gleeson as Lord Johnson-Johnson
*
Sam Robards as Henry Swinton, David's adopted father
*
William Hurt as Professor Allen Hobby, David's creator
*
Jake Thomas as Martin Swinton
*
Robin Williams as the voice of Dr. Know
It was adapted by Kubrick,
Ian Watson and Spielberg from the short story "
Super-Toys Last All Summer Long" by
Brian Aldiss.
Kubrick had long planned to film
A.I., but had been putting it off until he was confident that the effects could be handled convincingly, all the while working on the story in close cooperation with
Steven Spielberg. After many years of exchanging ideas about the project Kubrick became convinced that this film needed Spielberg's "different kind of sensitivity" and urged him to direct the film. Spielberg finally accepted. Using Kubrick's
storyboard, he wrote the
script himself.
The story of
A.I. begins sometime in the
22nd century following an ecological disaster that has resulted in a drastic reduction of the land area of the Earth and human population.
Androids with very high levels of
artificial intelligence (called
mechas, short for "
mechanisms," i.e. synthetic life -- as contrasted with
orgas for "
organisms," i.e. organic life such as humans) have become commonplace but have been granted no
civil rights and must submit to government registration or else be destroyed. While mechas have a level of intelligence comparable to that of humans, they seem to lack emotion. They are also able to simulate certain body functions, such as
sexual intercourse, but not others, such as eating or sleeping.
Henry and Monica Swinton are a married couple whose son, Martin, is dying of a rare illness. Hoping for a cure, the Swintons have their son cryogenically frozen (a state in which he has remained for five years). In hopes of cheering up his wife, Henry agrees to an offer from his company, Cybertronics, to let him bring home and test a prototype of an extremely advanced humanoid mecha that looks like a boy about the age of their hospitalized son, and which is supposed to be capable of feeling
love. The mecha's name is Davidâ€"modeled and named after his creator's late sonâ€"and although Monica is initially frightened of the android, she eventually warms to him after activating his
imprinting protocol, which makes the mecha feel love for her as a child loves a parent.
The couple's son eventually recovers from his disease and returns from the hospital. This prompts a sibling rivalry between the mecha David and the Swintons' real son, who delights in taunting David, chiefly by telling him that Monica will never love him because he isn't "real". After an accident in which David nearly drowns the Swintons' son, Monica decides to return him to the manufacturer. Fearing that David will be dismantled, she instead releases him in the forest of rural
New Jersey to live as an unregistered robot, accompanied by his animatronic teddy bear friend, named Teddy. David is soon captured and nearly destroyed by a group of anti-robot activists at an event they organize called a
Flesh Fair. He narrowly escapes with the help of Gigolo Joe, a
prostitute mecha, who is on the run after being framed for the murder of one of his clients.
The two become friends and set out to find the
Blue Fairy, who David remembers from the
fairy tale "
Pinocchio" as a being who has the power to turn him into a real boy. If he becomes a real boy, he imagines, Monica will love him and take him back. With the assistance of some sympathetic
frat boys on a road trip, Joe and David make their way to the decadent metropolis known as Rouge City, in search of the knowledge that will lead them to the Blue Fairy.
An
oracular computer personality called Dr. Know eventually leads David, with Joe in tow on the run from the authorities, to his manufacturers' laboratory at the top of a building in the flooded ruins of
Manhattan. There, he meets and frantically destroys one of his copies, outraged that there exist others who could also vie for Monica's affection and determined to prove himself as special. He is greeted by his human creator, Professor Hobby, who is unsurprised to see him there. The whole journey — David's obsession with the story of Pinocchio, the clues divulged by Dr. Know of the hiding place of the Blue Fairy — was in fact a test constructed by his creator. His creator excitedly tells David that his arrival at the planned destination demonstrates the true, 'realistic' nature of David's (artificially-created) emotions, because he was driven by his love for his mother and desperation to be with her. To Hobby, this proves that David is a perfect success as a robot model and the line of David replicates will be fit for the general market. David wanders around the lab and sees that he is not unique and his manufacturers have created dozens of copies of him. Disheartened, David leaves and falls from the office into the ocean, possibly trying to commit suicide.
David is fished from the ocean by Joe in a stolen amphibicopter (amphibious helicopter), but before he is pulled up he briefly sees the Blue Fairy on the bottom of the ocean. After Joe is seized by the police, David flies the amphibicopter back under the water, where it is revealed that what he saw was a statue of the Blue Fairy in the submerged ruins of
Coney Island. NaĂŻvely believing it to be the real Blue Fairy, he makes his wish to be turned into a real boy. He decides to wait for the wish to come true, repeating it into infinity, with Teddy by his side.
The ending
In a long flash forward, the action skips ahead two thousand years into the future. Manhattan is buried under several hundred feet of glacial ice and snow, and the human species is extinct. Highly advanced future mechas are conducting an archaeological excavation and discover David, perfectly preserved and seemingly "shut down" after presumably having his original power stores depleted during his long centuries under the ice.
The future mechas reactivate David and download his memories by touching his forehead. They form a circle and share and analyze David's memories. To them, David represents a discovery of supreme importance, as he was constructed by human hands, and therefore knew members of the extinct race. One of David's first vision upon reawakening is that of the nearby statue of the Blue Fairy, which cracks and collapses as David touches it.
The advanced mechas reconstruct the Swinton household using data from his memory banks, hoping that this will make him happy. However, when they explain to David that Monica died long ago, he responds with deepest despair. It becomes clear to the future mechas that David's programming was never equipped to deal with this kind of revelation, and that they would need to do something more.
Eventually the mechas tell David, through a holographic version of the Coney Island
Blue Fairy (voiced by
Meryl Streep), that they can resurrect Monica from some strands of her hair that Teddy had saved, but that she would only live for one day, and she could never be revived again. David eagerly accepts their offer and spends one long day alone with Monica, basking in her love. The film ends as Monica and David lie down at the end of the day, to go to "the place where dreams are born."
The film had a reported budget of $100 million (according to
Box Office Mojo) with a domestic gross of $78,616,689 and an overseas gross of $157,309,863 (for a total worldwide gross of $235,926,552) and ranked (domestically) in 28th place for the year of 2001 (it ranked 16th worldwide).
Critics affiliated with
Rotten Tomatoes gave the film 121 "fresh" reviews out of 162.
[A.I. Artificial Intelligence from Rotten Tomatoes]Roger Ebert called the film "both wonderful and maddening"; he ends his print review noting:
[Roger Ebert's review of A.I.]A.I. is audacious, technically masterful, challenging, sometimes moving, ceaselessly watchable. What holds it back from greatness is a failure to really engage the ideas that it introduces. The movie's conclusion is too facile and sentimental, given what has gone before. It has mastered the artificial, but not the intelligence.
In a review for
The New York Times by
A. O. Scott,
A.I is described as the"best fairy tale — the most disturbing, complex and intellectually challenging boy's adventure story — Mr. Spielberg has made." He comments on the film's ending:
[ Do Androids Long for Mom?, a June 2001 review from The New York Times]:After the Flesh Fair and a tour of the artificial fleshpots of Rouge City (which looks like a fusion of the old
Times Square and the new), David and Joe, with the help of
Robin Williams's voice and
William Butler Yeats's poetry, come to the end of the earth, the half-submerged island of
Manhattan.
A.I. goes even further: on at least two occasions, it seems to be ending, only, like
2001, to push into ever stranger territory, ultimately leaving the human world altogether.
The final scenes are likely to provoke argument, confusion and a good deal of resistance. For the second time the movie swerves away from where it seemed to be going, and Mr. Spielberg, with breathtaking poise and heroic conviction, risks absurdity in the pursuit of sublimity.
The very end somehow fuses the cathartic comfort of infantile wish fulfillment — the dream that the first perfect love whose loss we experience as the fall from Eden might be restored — with a feeling almost too terrible to acknowledge or to name. Refusing to cuddle us or lull us into easy sleep, Mr. Spielberg locates the unspoken moral of all our fairy tales. To be real is to be mortal; to be human is to love, to dream and to perish.
The film's ending has been the subject of much debate. Many allege that it is really a dark ending disguised as a happy one. They suggest that the resurrected Monica is, in fact, an illusion planted in David's mind by the future mechas, so that David could finally end his quest and terminate his program. They point to the fact that the resurrected Monica has a much warmer persona than her original self, and that during the long day she spends with David, she never asks about her husband or her son. The future mechas warn David not to mention her past family because it might cause Monica to fall into despair, and David eagerly complies.
The ending also became a matter of debate among science fiction fans from a storytelling standpoint. Some believe the ending is an intrinsic part of the story's larger theme, and hail the film (as a whole) as a modern classic. Others believe the ending to be unnecessary and discordant, and that the film should have closed with David finding the Blue Fairy. The debate over the ending is further complicated by the possibility that the future mechas are extraterrestrials, an interpretation significantly affecting the meaning of the ending.
It is worth mentioning that Stanley Kubrick planned to have an ending similar to the one found in the film, and it is also notable that, even when given the "happy" ending interpretation, the finale is quite dark: humanity has been extinct for thousands of years. Also, in the DVD's supplemental material, composer John Williams confirms that David "dies" at the end of the film; after Monica passes away, he shuts down, essentially committing
suicide.
The film echoes
Isaac Asimov, the Asimov-derived films
Bicentennial Man and
I, Robot, many old and new episodes of
Star Trek, and doubtless the original work by Brian Aldiss. It explores philosophical and moral challenges that emerge when
robotics and artificial intelligence move ever closer to the human condition. Will a sufficiently complex machine find emotions awakening inside it as an
emergent property? Or will human beings supply them? Is it
being loved that makes us human?
If machines can be made to feel, but remain effectively immortal, what kind of responsibility would humansâ€"their parent raceâ€"bear? How far down the road shall we go? Do we love them back? Do we have a choice? Could we stop ourselves if we tried? The film suggests that all barriers to engaging in physical love could eventually disappear.
The film also provides a series of non-technological, social implications. It is implied that human reproduction is heavily regulated (as evidenced by the mother's need to receive approval to conceive another baby) and this would suggest that sexual intercourse and reproduction are decoupled in this world. In fact, the movie suggest that sexuality becomes much more overt and extreme in this environment. Jude Law's mecha character is a gigolo and clearly caters to female customers. When David finally enters the Rouge City, it is clearly portrayed as a red light district commonly frequented by everyday suburbanites. If sex does not lead to pregnancyâ€"by lawâ€"then what would the world look like? Is it a liberating environment or does the circumstance fall apart into seedy despair? While the movie does not take a specific posture on the overall merits of this circumstance, it does suggest that female sexuality does become more of a public affair; there is enough of demand for sex by women that a class of robots like Jude Law's character are created.
There is another school of thought that simply attributes the entire Rouge City sequence as a loving tribute (among many in the film) to the late Stanley Kubrick. It is similar in content to the hedonistic flourishes of Kubrick's
A Clockwork Orange. Similarly, the Teddy character at one point being hauled around the entire Flesh Fair complex, repeats a line about "are you taking me to David", et al., which sounds eerily close in monotone delivery to the voice of
HAL 9000 at the end of
2001: A Space Odyssey.
The movie had an unusual publicity campaign consisting of a new type of "game" involving approximately 30 interlinked websites. This type of game has since become known as an
alternate reality game (ARG). The A.I. game did not have an official name, but became known as
The Beast by its most ardent fans, the 7000-strong team who called themselves the
Cloudmakers. The Beast was wildly successful as a game, attracting a much more devoted audience than the game designers had expected. It set the tone for future ARGs, and defined much of the genre's terminology.
In the game, the interlinked websites purported to be sites for a number of organizations (universities, businesses, and personal home pages) set in the fictional world of the movie in the 22nd century. Hints to the websites' existence were contained in posters, trailers and other movie publicity materials.
By studying the information on the sites, a story set in the world of the movie involving the murder of one Evan Chan became apparent. Solving various puzzles and hints, some involving email, physical meetings in
New York City,
Los Angeles and
Chicago, telephone calls and telephone answering services, allowed the unlocking of more websites which gradually revealed the story of
whodunnit and why.
* 'The actual on-screen title for the film is
Artificial Intelligence: A.I.* The
World Trade Center towers are shown standing 2,000 years into the future after humanity has ceased to exist.
* The
November 6,
2005 episode of
The Simpsons, "
Treehouse of Horror XVI" features a parody of the film entitled "B.I.:
Bartificial Intelligence."
* It is often believed that the character David does not blink until the very end of the film when he closes his eyes and dies; this is not true. Actor Haley Joel Osment thought it best to not blink as it would make the robot character seem less human, however there are a few scenes, particularly the scene in which Monica abandons David in the forest that he can be seen blinking a few times.
* One early hint that the alien looking creatures at the end are really advanced mecha is that when David arrives at his home for the first time, his figure is initially out of focus and appears blurred. The camera subsequently comes back into focus to reveal David. The out of focus figure of David looks a lot like the figures of the advanced mecha, thus foreshadowing the evolution of robots of David's class into the advanced mechas of two thousand years later.
*
Official website*
Supertoys Last All Summer Long or the
copy on the Kubrick site*
The Kubrick FAQ's entry on A.I.*
Creating the real-life "Teddy" at M.I.T. Labs
