I felt way more sympathy for Teddy than I ever had for David, and Gigolo Joe was the most interesting character of all (why was he “in bad trouble”, though? Wouldn’t his memory of finding the body and the killer’s confession be useful evidence? It’s too pointlessly heavy-handed, like a black man in 1950s Mississippi witnessing a white man commit a crime and knows he’ll be accused of it no matter what).
I was somewhat annoyed by William Hurt telling the babe to undress, then stopping her and revealing her as a droid. What was the point of that, except blatant titilation and misdirection of the movie audience? Hurt’s lecture audience certainly didn’t need the Robots 101 presentation, did they?
What was the deal with that 24-hour soul stuff, anyway? The hyper-advanced droids (it never occured to me that they were aliens, and it’s pointless to assume so) could surely perform a detailed scan of David’s mind and construct a Mom-bot that would behave exactly as David wants (yikes! Oedipus reborn!) There’s no indication that it is necessary to make a copy of the real Mom, since David’s impressions of her are immature and one-dimensional, anyway. The technobabble time limit is supposed to add poignance or something.
I dislike the obvious and intended emotional manipulation of the film. It’s not Spielberg’s worst, but the same subject has been handled far better elsewhere, including Blade Runner.
This was the only film that I’ve ever seen actively heckled at the cinema. I was watching the ending unfold and thinking man, this is desperate, but its not like I’m going to walk out or anything. Then the silence was broken by some guy shouting “Bollocks!” It seemed like everyone in the audience just about busted a gut laughing, and it was followed up with numerous heckles from all quaters at the stinking turd that besmirched the cinema screen before our eyes (this wasn’t a late showing, either, I doubt too many people were drunk). I could have done without all this subsequent shouting, but that first guy really hit the nail on the head.
Well I loved it, but I won’t get into a pissing argument over why you all are wrong
But the “aliens” at the end aren’t “aliens” they are advanced mechas, the movie only makes sense that way, including the ending. And there is plenty of evidence during the movie that this is indeed the case.
I enjoyed the movie, but the flesh Fair could have been left on the cutting room floor. It really took me out of the film and I thought I’d stumbled into Mad Max, Beyond the Thunderdome.
It’s arguable whether or not Gigolo Joe was truly self aware, or fully conscious the way humans are, but I had no problem accepting that the little boy was.
It’s the ending that confuses me. I saw the theatrical version when it first came out, and my vague recollection is at the end, the super advanced AI’s took pity on the boy and put him in some sort of VR where he could spend the rest of his life more or less as a real boy, with his mother.
I recently got the extended director’s version, and the ending was too long and drawn out, kinda depressing, and a little too metaphysical. What was all that about how, when they occasionally clone a human, it somehow has genetic memory of its former life, but can only exist for 24 hours? Huh? Wah?
It was also a little disturbing how the little boy was so ego-driven he demanded they bring back his mother even though he knew by doing so, he was basically killing her forever.
The movie was an absolute trainwreck. Most of the reasons have been listed above, but I’ll add one more: if I heard that kid whine one more time about becoming a “real boy” I was gonna puke. It was two hours of Spielberg hitting me over the head with frickin’ Pinoccio.
I thought it was pretty terrible, too. Nothing really jelled for me at all throughout the film - didn’t care about anyone in the film at all.
An even more geeky reason to dislike it was having read Asimov, though. I find it hard to conceive of anyone building a robot without putting in some absolute prohibition on harming humans. This makes it (I would contend) absolutely impossible to build a robot child, as an inherent part of childhood is an imperfect understanding of cause and effect, and that’s incompatible with ‘do no harm’ programming, which requires all reasonable cause and effect to be taken into consideration.
What I remember (which mercifully isn’t too much) is that Spielberg spent a lot of time drumming up sympathy for the badly-treated robot. Then the robot ends up under water for a really long time, so that there are no people left. So what’s the point? There’s nothing but this glorified toaster oven and some aliens. Ho-hum.
Really bad, but not as bad as Minority Report, IMO.
He was clearly malfunctioning and should have been dismantled back at the factory, where Will Smith was looking for him in the first place… wait, that’s not right, is it?
In that case, it would have been interesting if the advanced mecha created a Mom-bot but David realizes it/her is fake, and destroys it/her in a moment of anger, leading then into the whacko clone-for-a-day bit.
At the very least, it’d make the audience question their sympathy for David because up to that point his irrational violence was only directed against his human foster-brother (who was being mean to him), the “unawakened” David-bot (who “doesn’t count” for being soulless mecha), or himself, i.e. no actual “victims”.
Or drop the whole soul-clone crap. David destroys the first Mom-bot and the advanced mecha offer him a choice: live alone (pining for his “real” Mom, who is impossible to obtain) or let them alter his thinking enough so he will be satisfied with another Mom-bot, and possibly more elaborate interactions in future. Let the movie end with David thinking about the decision to either stay as an immature child whose needs must be satisfied perfectly and instantly, or a slightly more-mature “boy” who can compromise himself a little with the real world and truly grow. That’s your Pinocchio ending; the puppet who finally understands what being a real boy entails (rather than just cluelessly wishing) and must decide.
I *love * robots and even I didn’t like this movie. It was emotional tripe, and didn’t really address any deeper issues for me. In the wake of giants like the book I, Robot and the movie Blade Runner this turned into a big ol’ tear-jerker - waa, look at the little robot with no mother, waa, waa, waa. There was little character development, we were just supposed to automatically sympathize with the kid because he was a kid.
I hated that git Pinocchio too. Stupid Blue Fairy. :mad:
Most underrated film of all time.
Among Spielberg’s best. Hell, a damn sight better than many of Kubrick’s works.
David wasn’t a robot any more than I’m a bag of water and proteins. He was the first of his line to develop true capacity to love, the “soul” if you want to get all metaphysical.
Yeah, the editing could have been much smoother towards the end, and they did a poor job of selling the advanced robots, but even so, I loved the movie.
I completely disagree with this. I don’t think we we are supposed to automatically sympathize with David. One of the points of the movie, IMO, is whether we as the viewer can accept David. The questions in the movie aren’t just whether or not a robot can be a real boy, but whether we could ever accept a mecha that in every other way seemed to us to be a real boy. It isn’t a dilemma just for the characters in the film, but for the filmgoer as well. At the end of the movie you may in fact be left feeling hollow or cheated, because you just watched a movie about a robot (toaster) that you never could connect with. To me that is what makes the movie so fascinating.
And now…courtesy of our friends at the Council for Defective Robots…these buckets of “tripe”.
I imagine in the future having a “Pinochio Complex” will be right up there with Psychotic Cyborg Syndrome and Robotic Manic-Depression (AKA HAL 9000 Disease) as items covered on your robot’s warrantee. I can think of nothing more asinine than designing a robot that wants to be human. Maybe they can design an airplane that wants to be a toaster?
I like the way robots are featured in Futurama. They are built for a particular purpose (often an inane one) and they get sad and depressed when they can’t do their job. Or they are put in a robot mental asylum.
Ok meatbags*…He’s not a real boy. he’s just programmed to think he loves. Unfortunately he was never programmed to move on with his life. That’s why even after thousands of years trapped in ice, he still wants his mom as passionately as his first day out of the plant. He no more love’s his mom any more than a T-1000 loves Sarah Conner. They’re just programmed to seek out a target and execute a set of instructions (one arguably, a little messier than the other). It’s not “ego”. It’s just all he knows how to do.
A real human would have felt resentment at being left in a ditch by the side of the road. A human would have said…“well, I guess mom has been dead 10000 years. I’m sad…but…now I guess I need to move on.” A human (if it could) would not have prayed to some stupid statue for millenium and would have up and walked out of the Hudson River.
Oh, c’mon. You think the network Lifetime for Women would even exist if lots of people didn’t secretly love the fantasy that their boys & men are singularly programmed to do nothing more than live out their entire existence in the pursuit of a woman’s love?
Exactly. Just because David is a cute boy who is the protagonist doesn’t mean there isn’t something a bit monstrous about his obssession. The tagline of the movie was “His love is real, but he is not”, but the irony is that he is real, but his love is not. No matter how selfish and self-absorbed the human parents behave, David’s love is frightening in its purity. Because the film is set up as a fairy tale, Spielberg rather insidiously invites us to identify with someone who’s not only artificial, but inhuman in its single-minded obliviousness. And how does the film end? With the death of the human race, the termination of the “hero”‘s existence, and the most sympathetic character in the film alone and companionless. It’s as dark an ending as Spielberg has ever provided, but because he films things in soft focus with Williams’ swelling strings, people think it’s a cop-out happy ending. It’s anything but. And 20 years from now, it is the one film of his that, IMHO, will achieve the most comprehensive re-evaluation, and people will come to generally accept what a great film it is. Like 2001 and Blade Runner–both films which are in the pantheon of important science fiction filmmaking–AI (though not without its flaws), will eventually be seen as ahead of its time.
I liked it. I didn’t think it was up there with Spielberg’s best (Jaws, E.T.,Schindler’s List), but it was far from his worst movie (Hook or Always, anyone?).
Well in that case I was automatically prejudiced against David from the start. I don’t know why. As I said, i really love robots, robot movies, and robot books. I would definitely have a robot. But there was something so simperingly irksome about that little robot that drove me up the wall.
Oh…disappointed I thought it was only from the assassin droid in the KOTOR game (whom I loved by the way). I don’t like Futurama nearly as much. (Not that I’ll stop liking the word!)
I basically liked the film. It is stunningly beautiful most of the time and at other times very silly looking.
As to the arguement that the kid was only a robot and so they have no real feelings and you don’t care what happens to them, well, I think that tells us more about you than the movie.
Yes, it’s too long, and yes it is a Kubrick story. The ‘hero’ does very little but is just subjected to all kinds of things. It’s hard to relate to that kind of character. Make him a robot and it’s harder. Make him a child actor that reached his saturation point the moment this movie came out and it is even harder.
