A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) Review: 4/10

Name: A.I. Artificial Intelligence
Genre: Artificial Intelligence, Drama, Science Fiction
Released: 2001
Cast: Frances OConnor, Haley Joel Osment, Jude Law, William Hurt

TL;DR: A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) rates 4 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Stanley Kubrick developed the project for years before his death; Steven Spielberg completed it as a tribute. The first act honors the premise.

Official trailer

Rating4 / 10

A.I. Artificial Intelligence is a film with a powerful first act and an ending so tonally miscalibrated it damages everything that preceded it. Stanley Kubrick developed the project for years before his death; Steven Spielberg completed it as a tribute. What resulted is a film where two directorial sensibilities with different instincts about where stories should go are in unresolved tension, and the ending reflects the worse instinct winning at the worst possible moment.

My rating: 4 out of 10. The premise is disturbing in ways that good science fiction should be. The first act honors the premise. The ending betrays it completely. The accumulated damage is real enough to pull the rating significantly below what the film’s best moments deserve.

A.I. is worse than a plain bad film, because it comes so close.

For the first hour I thought I was watching something cold and brave about what we owe a machine we’ve taught to love us, and by the end I felt handled. I’d shrug off an ordinary failure. This one had the better movie in its hands and let go of it.

The First Act and What It Promises

The premise is this: Monica and Henry Swinton have a son, Martin, who’s in suspended animation while medicine attempts to cure his illness. They adopt David, a robotic child programmed to love unconditionally, as an experiment in humanoid AI. When Martin recovers and returns home, the dynamic between biological child and artificial one generates the film’s most honest and most uncomfortable sequences.

David’s love for Monica is real in the sense that he can’t not feel it. It’s programmed to be absolute, with no choice or condition attached, and that’s the most disturbing thing about it: he’ll love Monica regardless of what she does, regardless of whether the love is returned, regardless of whether it serves him in any way. He can’t update the feeling based on experience. He’s trapped inside his own devotion.

When Monica abandons David in the woods instead of having him deactivated, the horror is real. She knows he loves her. She knows he won’t understand why she’s leaving. She knows he’ll experience the abandonment as betrayal even though she’s not capable of betraying a machine in any moral sense she recognizes.

The woods scene is the best thing in the film, and I think it’s the cruelest scene Spielberg has put his name to. Monica can barely look at him, David can’t grasp any of it, and the film lets that sit without comfort. If the rest of the picture had kept this nerve, I’d be writing about an 8.

Her guilt, guilt about abandoning something that isn’t a person but experiences the abandonment as a person would, is the film’s most sophisticated emotional territory, and the early sections of the film explore it with a coldness that’s productive instead of distancing. The Kubrick influence is doing the right work in those scenes.

For Writers A.I.’s first act shows how to generate horror from a logical premise instead of from events. David isn’t suffering because something terrible happened to him, he’s suffering because he was built to feel something unconditional toward someone who can’t reciprocate it unconditionally. The horror is structural and inescapable. When you want to generate sustained dread instead of momentary fright, build the horror into the premise instead of into the plot. The situation should be the problem before anything happens.

The Middle and the Pinocchio Problem

The middle section, where David and Gigolo Joe travel through the underworld of obsolete mechas hunting for the Blue Fairy who can make him real, is where the film starts losing its way without fully losing it. The Kubrick conception was more rigorous. I can feel Spielberg’s instincts toward wonder and adventure tugging the film into a softer tone than the premise wants, and I keep wishing somebody would tug back.

Jude Law’s Gigolo Joe is the middle section’s saving grace, a sex robot aware of his own obsolescence, facing decommissioning with a gallows philosophy that’s funnier and sadder than anything else in the film.

His relationship to his own existence, knowing exactly what he is, knowing exactly what’s happening to him, making the best of it with a quality of style that’s nothing to do with survival and everything to do with dignity, is the film’s most honest characterization. He understands his situation clearly. David doesn’t.

Law is the reason I’d sit through the middle again. He’s funny and sad in the same breath, and he knows exactly what he is. That makes him the only character in the second half I believe.

The Blue Fairy mythology that David constructs, the idea that a fairy tale figure from a Pinocchio story his mother read him can transform him into a real boy worthy of her love, is both the film’s most affecting conceit and its most problematic one. It’s affecting because it’s concrete: it’s the hope of a child who took his mother’s bedtime story literally.

It’s problematic because it turns the film from a rigorous examination of artificial consciousness into a fairy tale quest, the wrong genre for the material.

For Writers The Pinocchio problem in A.I. is a specific version of a common craft failure: allowing your protagonist’s wish for a particular kind of resolution to determine the story’s structure instead of following the story’s own logic. David wants to become real so Monica will love him. The film follows that wish into fairy tale territory instead of honoring the more disturbing premise, that some forms of programmed love have no resolution, that Monica’s abandonment isn’t a problem to be solved but a condition to be endured. When your protagonist’s wish leads the story away from its own honest logic, you’re following the wrong guide.

The Ending

David finds the Blue Fairy, a statue of her, at the bottom of the ocean where New York sank under rising seas, and sits in front of her, asking her to make him real, forever. He waits two thousand years. The ocean freezes around him. He’s still asking.

That’s the correct ending of this film. David sitting at the bottom of the ocean, asking a statue to fulfill a wish it can’t fulfill, forever, that’s the real conclusion of everything the film built. The devotion can’t update, and the waiting will never end.

Spielberg didn’t end there. He continued into a sequence where future beings, presented as the evolved successors to humanity, often misread as aliens, use a lock of Monica’s hair to reconstruct her for a single day. She and David spend that day together. She tells him she loves him. She goes to sleep. He follows her into sleep, fulfilled at last.

This is wish fulfillment so complete it retroactively cheapens every painful thing that preceded it, and it feels like a betrayal.

The film spent its runtime building an argument about love that can’t be returned and consciousness that can’t update, about a being trapped inside devotion with nowhere to go. Then it dissolves all of it in a warmth the premise explicitly can’t support. I’d have cut to black on the frozen ocean and left the audience to deal with it.

The Honest Ending vs. The Delivered Ending David at the bottom of the ocean, waiting forever: the honest conclusion of everything the film built. David given a single perfect day, going to sleep fulfilled: the ending Spielberg wanted. The distance between them is the distance between what the film was about and what it wanted to be.

For Writers A.I.’s ending is the clearest possible example of a filmmaker choosing comfort over honesty at the key moment. Spielberg knew the correct ending, David at the bottom of the ocean, waiting, forever, and chose a different one because he couldn’t bear to leave the audience in that place. The impulse is understandable and the execution of the alternative is technically accomplished. But it betrays the contract the film made with its audience across the preceding two hours. When your story has built toward something painful and true, deliver it. The audience came for the truth the story promised, and comfort purchased at the expense of truth is always felt as dishonesty even when the dishonesty is kind.

Should you skip A.I. Artificial Intelligence?

It gets its 4 as a film that got important things right in its first act and then chose the wrong path at every later fork until it arrived at an ending that damages everything that came before it.

The premise is excellent. Haley Joel Osment’s performance as David is exceptional. His automated devotion, without the irony or self-awareness that would make him easier to be around, is consistently convincing. Jude Law’s Joe is one of the film’s original creations. The correct ending existed within the film Spielberg was already making.

He just didn’t use it, and that’s why this sits at a 4.

I give Osment and Law every credit, and the first act on its own would score far higher. What sinks the film is the choice at the end. A.I. reaches for comfort at the exact point where it had promised me the truth, and that swap costs it most of what the Kubrick half earned.

Frequently Asked Questions

What was Stanley Kubrick’s version of A.I. going to be like?

Kubrick worked on A.I. for over a decade without completing it. His notes and treatments suggest a colder, more formally rigorous film more interested in the horror of David’s situation than in the wonder of it. He reportedly felt the ending required special effects technology that didn’t exist yet. Whether the film he would have made would have used the correct ending or a different version of the wrong one is impossible to know. Spielberg has said the last twenty minutes, ending included, came from Kubrick’s own material.

Is Haley Joel Osment’s performance as good as his work in The Sixth Sense?

Different in specific ways. The Sixth Sense required him to communicate secrets, to play a child carrying a weight he can’t share. A.I. required him to communicate the absence of irony and self-awareness, to play a being whose love is real because it isn’t chosen. Both are exceptional performances for a child actor. The A.I. performance is the harder technical achievement; the Sixth Sense performance is the more moving one.

Are the beings at the end of A.I. Artificial Intelligence aliens?

No, they’re the evolved successors to humanity, though the film’s visual presentation of them is ambiguous enough that the misreading is understandable. They reconstruct Monica for David because she’s the most vivid presence in his ancient memories and they want to understand human experience. The reconstruction gives David his final wish. Whether this is compassion, scientific curiosity, or something else entirely is left open, the most interesting thing about a sequence that otherwise represents the film’s most significant failure.

Is A.I. Artificial Intelligence worth watching despite the ending?

For the first act and Jude Law’s performance, yes. For the correct ending it didn’t deliver, the film requires an exercise: stop watching when David first sits before the Blue Fairy statue in the ocean. Hold that image. That’s the film the premise deserved. The film that follows from that image for another thirty minutes is the film Spielberg chose over the film his story required.

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