For what it’s worth, here’s my review.
Basically, I think it’s utterly fascinating, and a worthwhile experience, but with significant flaws. Many have been mentioned (the spinach thing, for example), and yes, they distract from the thought-provoking premise and make the movie seem less than it is: There’s too much emphasis on the “Pinocchio” parallel. The transition to “two thousand years later” is handled clumsily. The Flesh Fair is an interesting and plausible element of this hypothetical future, but it isn’t well integrated into the storyline. And so on, and so on.
However, I should address a few things that have come up, but that haven’t been answered. In particular, the ending.
Ah yes, the ending. Okay, first of all, to anyone who thought it was a happy ending, that David got what he wanted and so on, it wasn’t. It only appears to be on the surface.
Consider: The supermechas (which look like aliens because they fashioned themselves after the Cybertronics logo) speak to one another in a subtitled machine language. Then, a bit later, when speaking to (and in front of) David, they speak in English.
We see them watching David, not through a window, but in a circular simulator of some kind. The whole end, thus, is VR. David cries, but he’s a mecha and has no tear ducts; he can only cry in an artificial simulation based on his imagination. The blue fairy doesn’t actually speak to him. His mother isn’t actually there. None of the cock-and-bull about “space/time currents” is legit. The whole thing is phony, made up by the supermechas to give David what he wants. The alleged happiness is just as artificial as the entity supposedly enjoying it.
This is the Kubrickian ending, and this is why Kubrick suggested to Spielberg that he direct it, because Kubrick didn’t think he’d be able to achieve the faux sentiment that sells the bitter irony of the conclusion.
It’s already been mentioned that the voice of the supermecha is Ben Kingsley, who also narrates the film, and that this makes the whole movie a fairy tale from the perspective of the future mecha society, the ultimate A.I. (hence the significance of the title). From this viewpoint, you can dismiss the plot holes; that stuff doesn’t matter in a fairy story. Okay, yes, that’s glib; those things did (and continue to) bother me, and distracted me from the movie on the first viewing. However, I firmly believe that, knowing what I know now, this will be a movie that rewards a second viewing, because additional information about point of view and theme will greatly inform the experience.
And don’t get me started on “But it didn’t make sense the first time! Why should I have to see it again! Whine, whine.” Yeah, yeah, whatever. Some movies are designed like that – disposable commodities that stand up to one viewing and don’t ask you back. Other movies are more complicated than that, and require multiple viewings to untangle. That’s the way it is; deal with it. I can’t guarantee that A.I. will improve on repeat viewings, because I suspect Spielberg’s intellectual reach falls short of the story’s requirements (and I wish Kubrick had been around as producer to Spielberg’s direction), but I do know that it will be a very different experience than the first time.