Even rewatching the movie and seeing that they have translucent skin with circuits and machinery underneath?
I agree that the advanced robots at the end were deliberately made to resemble popular depictions of aliens, to make some sort of point. Like, that robots are like aliens or something. But they are clearly robots. I suppose it is a weakness of the film that so many people didn’t catch the visuals that show the creatures are robots, but then again it wasn’t exactly subtle either.
I’m not exactly sure why, because I’ve never seen the film and have no interest in it, but it sounds as though Davcid was the least human of the robots. More like a Dumb AI, incapable of making choices. The other 'bots made choices and lived or died by them.
I think Kubrick is a genius with ideas; development, not so much. In both cases these could have been really amazing . . . War and Peace-length novels.
But that for me is what the movie is all about. Remember that at the beginning there was some discussion about whether a mecha could truly love. The underlying question is whether the love he showed was real love or artificial love.
In the end, though, his “getting to be loved by his mother” was only an artificial love. And the final irony was that the artificial love that he gave was, in the end, the only type of love he could receive.
Plus there was something about how creating that clone would destroy her soul/kill her forever/whatever it was (I’m fuzzy on the details since I only saw it at release). He traded that away for a single day with her.
I also felt sorry for the teddy at the ending. Poor cute little guy was stuck there with David.
The tag line for the film was “His love is real. But he is not.” But in fact, the opposite was true. He was real, but his “love” was only a monstrous, obssessive, single-minded perversion of the genuine thing.
I think the film is one of Spielberg’s best, and the “happy” ending is laced with such sadness and acidity that it’s easy to project a Spielbergian warmth on a finale that’s all Kubrickian ice. The future Mechas are in awe of David, but he is oblivious to everything but his programming, and while that last day may be perfect to him, it’s relentlessly futile and hollow to everyone else (including the wry, observant Teddy).
This is actually the first I’ve heard that people thought Spielberg had invented the ending, as all that I’ve read indicated just that he changed it to make it only appear a little nicer than what Kubrick might have done.
This FAQ discusses the ending as it was planned in some detail. Somewhere I recall reading about the discussions Kubrick & Spielberg had over the ending, but I can’t find it now.
In the Microsoft team’s version (see here) of how humanity got replaced by mechas, it was partly some of the same themes as the movie - humans ignored them and failed to fully recognize their abilities. As a result, they rebelled; one of their actions was taking over a weather-controlling network (which is how the ocean levels changed so dramatically).
That’s an interesting take and one I had not considered before.
I liked the movie very much, although it really hit me hard (terrible parents, bullying, child abandoned, child in danger, extinction of all humanity, oy!). I was a little resentful, I guess you could say, of how manipulative it was.
I had no problem believing those were very advanced mechas at the end, and always assumed as much. I never liked the scene where David destroys the other Davids in their shipping cases in the NYC office tower, though; seemed uncharacteristically destructive of him. I also didn’t buy that the advanced mechas could make a simulacrum of David’s “mother” for only a single day. That’s a helluva short warranty period…
Even 2000 years from now, “Made in America” won’t mean squat.
Well, they are Mechas, so I simply assumed they interfaced with David’s neural net so he “experienced” everything exactly the way he wanted it, but none of it was physically happening. Check out the shot starting at 4:10. I think it strongly suggests that everything is going on in his mind, observable by the linkable minds of the Mechas who are “watching”. After all, it makes no sense that they would physically reconstruct all the particulars of the house for just a day or two (except for an extraneous sunroof), but tapping into his memory of the house, they’re able to emulate it in all its details and recreate both it and her so he can get what he wants and “die” “happy”.
Actually, it was the jellyheads – the artificially bred plankton (?) that were meant to control the weather by changing the albedo of the oceans.
Anyway – I found the ending with David and his mother really chilling and horrible. Throughout the movie, David does all this horrible stuff (most obviously, trying to murder his brother) and we excuse him because he’s cute, and he’s just a child. But he’s not a child – he’s a hypersophisticated machine programmed to do one selfish, hedonistic thing without any recognition of the consequences of his actions. Which is why, when the robots tell him they can bring back his mother for one day, but that this will completely burn out her memory in the universal omnisphere, or whatever, and it will destroy her forever. His response? “Then you know what you have to do.” That’s meant to be scary.
In other news – Minority Report and War of the Worlds are really distopian and bleak as well. Spielberg has the ability to craft these powerful, deeply moving (some would say manipulative, but I reject that as a criticism of art – what else is it there for?) scenes of pathos. And in the science-fiction projects of the last several years (those made after he confronted man’s capacity for evil while making Schindler’s List, not coincidentally, I think), he uses these tools to tell depressing stories of futility and frailty that look like they’re something else altogether.
–Cliffy
Awesome post, and I agree with most of it, but I don’t think the incident with the brother was David intentionally trying to kill him. It struck me as a last straw in a very unfortunate series of events, accidents, and manipulations. He was scared, grabbed his brother (just as he did with the gigolo-bot later when scared) and accidentally backed into the pool. I think he even smiled a bit when the brother’s foot moved after they resuscitated him. I don’t think he wanted to kill him at all. I do agree that his single-track, obsessive programming made him extremely oblivious to the other needs, emotions, and signals given by the people around him.
Elendil’s Heir, I think he just destroyed the first one. The one he met when he first showed up. He was either programmed to believe, or his “mom” told him often enough, that he was unique and special, etc. Meeting an exact copy of himself seemed to basically short-circuit some emotion–he also saw the copy as competition for the mom’s love (that “sefish, hedonistic, frightening” obsession with love). He walked into the other room, saw all the others hanging and in boxes, then jumped off the building.
Additionally, I did get the sense that everything was physically constructed (including the mom). When the mechas first flew to the site, we saw the excavation and other activities, as well as the ship they were flying in–it appeared that the mechas could manipulate matter in ways to create nearly anything in seconds just by thinking about it. When they land, their ship just sort of disintegrates out from under them, for example. If they have this power, why would they spend their computation cycles generating an artificial world, when they could just use the plans in David’s memory to construct a physical copy to stick him in (the scene Archive Guy is talking about is, I think, the mechas reading his memories). Apparently they need actual DNA to reconstruct a “living” person though. Some technobabble here about each life being a pathway through the fabric of space-time, etc. Works for me, because the point is, as others have said, David’s selfishness in wanting to end his mother’s path forever just to have one day for himself. On the surface, very sweet. But quite chilling when you think about it.
This was on HBO this evening, so I just finished watching it literally 15 minutes ago.
Where did he try to murder his brother? I don’t remember that scene. IIRC he did grab his brother for safety because he was scared and being threatened with a knife by the other kids, and fell into the pool while latched onto him and they both sink to the bottom, but that really wasn’t an attempt on his brothers life.
Well, if that’s so, you’d think they could keep the experience going indefinitely, Holodeck style, so that they could learn much, much more about human beings. All the uber-mechas have to do is keep David charged up and well dusted. It certainly wouldn’t be the bittersweet ending Spielberg gave us, if we knew that David and Mom will keep enjoying “day” after “day” together ad infinitum (unless it was purposefully shown to be a static and emotionally dishonest relationship, which I suppose it was on one level already).
I agree that David didn’t purposefully try to kill his brother. He panicked and didn’t know his own strength. I have to admit, I thought to myself while watching the movie, “You know, if David were just programmed with the Asimovian Three Laws, he could’ve avoided a whole lot of grief.”
Yes, I think it was known as the “PT web” - a vast network of artificial Phytoplankton. Somehow it became self-aware the way all distributed systems do in fiction. I forget if maybe other mechas (Brutus?) assisted in this or were just the first to notice it; I think the network became known as ‘Cloudmaker’ IIRC. Enough of a hijack.
To hijack the other way, while I think Minority Report is quite bleak throughout, War of the Worlds balances some of the futility with hope and positive action. In A.I., David is not as pleasant as he seems but not everything about the movie is depressing (Teddy at least is observant if unable or unwilling to act).
I second this. All in favor of getting a refund DIRECTLY from Spielberg…
I haven’t seen it all the way through since it was in theaters, but, while I don’t think David necessarily pulled Martin into the water on purpose, ISTM that while he held him there, he knew Martin was drowning, but that wasn’t important enough to David to let him go. (But he’s just a kid! See above.)
–Cliffy