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 fundamentally 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.
The First Act and What It Promises
The premise is this: Monica and Henry Swinton have a son, Martin, who is in suspended animation while medicine attempts to cure his illness. They adopt David, a robotic child programmed to love unconditionally and specifically, 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 genuine in the sense that he cannot not feel it. It’s not chosen. It’s not conditional. It’s programmed to be absolute, which is the most disturbing thing about it, he will love Monica regardless of what she does, regardless of whether the love is returned, regardless of whether it serves him in any way. He cannot update the feeling based on experience. He is trapped inside his own devotion.
When Monica abandons David in the woods instead of have him deactivated, the horror is real. She knows he loves her. She knows he will not understand why she’s leaving. She knows he will experience the abandonment as betrayal even though she is not capable of betraying a machine in any moral sense she recognizes. 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 is productive instead of distancing. The Kubrick influence is doing the right work in those scenes.
A.I.’s first act demonstrates how to generate horror from a logical premise instead of from events. David is not suffering because something terrible happened to him, he’s suffering because he was built to feel something unconditional toward someone who cannot 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, David’s journey with Gigolo Joe through the underworld of obsolete mechas, searching for the Blue Fairy who can make him real, is where the film loses its way without fully losing it. The Kubrick conception was more rigorous; Spielberg’s instincts toward wonder and adventure pull the film into a different register than the premise requires.
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 is funnier and sadder than anything else in the film. His specific 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 has 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.
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 simultaneously the film’s most affecting conceit and its most problematic one. It’s affecting because it’s specific: David’s hope is not generic hope but the specific 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, which is the wrong genre for the material.
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 is not 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 is still asking.
That is the correct ending of this film. David sitting at the bottom of the ocean, asking a statue to fulfill a wish it cannot fulfill, forever, that is the honest conclusion of everything the film built. The programmed devotion that cannot update. The hope that cannot be extinguished. The waiting that 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 David’s DNA to reconstruct Monica 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. The film spent its entire runtime building an argument about love that cannot be returned, about consciousness that cannot update, about the specific tragedy of a being who is trapped inside devotion that has nowhere to go. The ending dissolves all of that in warmth and resolution that the logic of the premise explicitly cannot support.
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.
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.
The Verdict
A.I. earns its 4 as a film that got important things right in its first act and then chose the wrong path at every subsequent 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, automated devotion, the absence of the irony or self-awareness that would make it 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.