Official trailer
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 have 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.
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.
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 programmed devotion that can’t update. The hope that can’t 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, 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.
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, 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, 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.
