SPOILERS!
As the guy who originally said the movie sucked, I have to admit that none of your stated reasons seem to apply.
I, and everyone else who has ever watched the movie, was rooting for David against “us.” (Where the heck did you get that idea?) Nor did his expressing savage emotions bother me. The character of David was very well done, and brilliantly acted.
(As an aside about Haley Joel Osment, if you want to know just how frigging great an actor he is, watch the scenes with him acting with Jake Thomas, who played Martin. Thomas is a good actor but next to Haley Joel Osment, it’s like watching John Goodman play tennis with Pete Sampras. You’re watching a master at work and nobody else compares.)
The movie was fine for 90, maybe 100 minutes. In fact, it was pretty good, if a bit disjointed and uneven. It was thought-provoking, creepy, technically brilliant and visually staggering, and the acting was outstanding, at least among the major characters.
And then it ended. And then we got thirty minutes of some of the worst cinema ever committed to screen - an irrelevant, cloying, ultra-cornball ending that had nothing to do with the rest of the movie and that was completely devoid of logic.
Had the movie ended with David praying to the Blue Fairy, it would have rated an 8 out of 10. The ending, however, was just awful, beyond any sort of reasonable defense. The scene with David and the alien thing sitting on a bad having a heart-to-heart was just ludicrous; if anyone but Spielberg and Kubrick had had their names attached to such a laughably dumb scene, they’d be run out of Hollywood on a rail. The entire ending sequence is about as logical and intelligent as a Pauly Shore film.
So no, sdimbert, I don’t believe AI asked much from the audience. As a matter of fact, I felt it asked very little; you’re just trotting out the classic “Someone who doesn’t like it just didn’t understand it” argument, which is usually bullshit and in this case is definitely bullshit. In fact, I would say that AI FAILED to ask enough of the audience - aside from money, I’m not sure it asked much at all. The horrible ending means that the audience needn’t go away worried that David was unhappy or failed in his quest. The movie’s harshness and grim atmosphere were significantly toned down. The movie’s narration was spoon-fed and unneccesarily detailed, with more storyline cliches than any intelligent film could ever need. The entire Pinocchio aspect of the story was practically torn off the screen, liquefied, and fed intraveneously to the audience.
Look at it this way; if you ended the film at the bottom of the ocean, what would be lost, aside from clumsy alien scenes and the trusty sidekick becoming an unlikely hero? Nothing. In fact, you’d be left with far more to think about, because the questions would still be rolling around in your head.
The emperor is wearing no clothes; Spielberg blew it, big time, by not ending the movie when it was over. Which is a shame, because it might cost Osment his shot at the Oscar he was robbed of for “The Sixth Sense.”