A.I (Spoiler)

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

The quote is from the poem “Spring and Fall”, which can be found here. Margaret is a little girl who us upset about plants dying in the fall, and an adult points out to her that she is really greiving for herslf, for her loss. It was my clumsy way of saying that when Monica abandons David, she is mourning for her own loss, not any loss that David might suffer.

I have to disagree a little with your interpretation of the David/Martin interaction. I do agree that Martin, and the other boys for that matter, are just acting the way boys that age act. But I think that David hasn’t been downgraded from son to the cute kid who helps out, he has been downgraded from beloved toy to neglected toy–more The Velveteen Rabbit than Pinnochio. He isn’t a neglected kid causing problems, he is (from the pov of Dad and Martin) a malfunctioning toy that has become dangerous. Actually, given that David nearly kills Martin, I would have gotten rid of him too.

42

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Number Six *
**

I see. Thank you.

**

Yeah, you’re right; I understated it. Velveteen Rabbit…sigh…

Question: If David stuffing spinach in his mouth caused a breakdown, wouldn’t immersion have ruined him?

43

yes, immersion should’ve turned him into a hunk of waste titanium alloy, but it didn’t just as a plot device. i whined about the same thing in my review way above.
[sub](however, up there i did it for erroneous reasons, as Number Six pointed out.)[/sub]

44

The more I think about it, the more I hate this film…and that makes me so sad. I’m gonna go watch A Clockwork Orange and remember what a REAL director gave to his audience.

A.I. = 2001 + D.A.R.Y.L. / Hook * (Heartbeeps)

45

Well… Where do I begin?

Spinach, being mainly water, shorts him out, but immersion in SALT WATER has no lasting effects on his circuitry, even after 2,000 years, and not being rinsed out before storage.

It put me in mind of a Kubrick film, sort of. Teddy struck me as TRUE Spielberg, i.e. we have to throw in a marketable toy, regardless…

Granted, it is a fairy tale, but some believability needs to be maintained when dealing with technology.

O

Vidi Vici Veni!

46

You can notice he has a rash of zits starting during the underwater sequence when he’s reaching out to the Blue Fairy and Law pulls him back. I also noticed his voice changing.

47

Maybe he didn’t ingest any? It’s not entirely outside the bounds of possibility. The spinach caused a malfunction because he didn’t have an esophagus or stomach. If he didn’t actually swallow any water, no problem. In any case, he wasn’t immersed in salt water for 2,000 years. The interior of the copter was dry, aside from some water vapor.

I’ve yet to see any merchandising tie-ins from the movie.

Again, in any case, Teddy is straight out of the Brian Aldiss story “Supertoys Last All Summer Long,” upon which A.I. is based. If anything, he’s about 1,000 times less cloying than he could potentially have been. When I first heard Teddy was in the movie, I expected a really cartoony voice.

48

That part bugged me, too. Actually, what really gets me is that he was capable fo swallowing the damn spinach to begin with. I mean, seriously. If you’re going to manufacture a fantastic and presumably expensive piece of AI, why in the hell would you make it capable of swallowing something that will break it? Wouldn’t you seal off the mouth at the back, or the throat, or make a fake stomach just in case? As for the water immersion, I didn’t think that any water necessarily entered David. His mouth was shut in the ocean scene, at least. I do want to know, however, how Teddy could have known that David would break from eating something, when David himself didn’t know. Also, was Teddy also programmed to love? Or merely to hang out with the kid who treated him the best? Why was Teddy supposed to be attached to David?

I still have mixed feelings about the move as a whole. I’d get really involved and then something stupid, like the spinach thing, would make suspension of disbelief impossible for a while. Made for a rocky viewing experience.

The Rouge City sequence was fantastic, and I wish they had stayed there longer. Jude Law is so yummy, any scene with Gigolo Joe should have lasted longer!

As far as the ending goes, I thought it was completely sappy (and non-sensical). I understood that the beings were highly evolved robots, which helps explain why they were able to access and share his memories. However, the resurrection of Monica via a DNA sample was, to me, ridiculous, and the one-day cutoff arbitrary. I don’t understand why she would remember anything at all. I’m glad David could have a happy day-- he’d certainly earned it, but the way it came about was silly. Many fairy-tale conventions could have allowed him to return home without such bizarre plot points.

49

Oh wow. *
Damn.

50

I saw A.I. last night and I was blown away by it. I have been reading reviews all across the net today and there seems to be a dichotomy among viewers (not unlike the reactions from most Kubrick films): they either loved it or they hated it. Not a lot of middle-o-the-road ‘kind liked it’ reviews out there. Interesting.

The one thing that I must comment on is the way that the film has been viewed. Some people tend to accept the film on it’s terms. They suspend disbelief. They allow the film to work its magic. Others try to dissect every nuance, every bit of logic, every action and reaction in an attempt to justify the movie.

I think that this correlates directly with the viewer’s reaction.

I tend to allow myself to be taken in by a movie (especially one as well-made as this one). My advice: don’t play devil’s advocate. Allow the film some artistic license. Why should a film be held to the strict boundaries of logic? We do not look at a painting by Dali and say to ourselves ‘there’s no way that clocks could melt like that,’ or listen to Peter and the Wolf and say ‘birds don’t sound like that, that’s just some crummy flute player.’ Allow the film the room it needs to make its larger point.
Don’t get me wrong, I love to dissect movies. Plot holes and story underdevelopment are perfect fodder. I do not, however, think that movies should be accountable for every logical nuance: i.e. ‘that robot boy could never have survived frozen for 2000 years,’ or ‘those robots would never act/look/sound/react like that.’ Give the movie room to breathe. Take it as a whole and not as a challenge to your 20th century sensibilities and you will enjoy it. It is a fairy tale after all.

**this is not a flame or any such thing, just an attempt to speak my mind.

51

For some reason I could not suspend disbelief for this movie. Which is odd, because I’ve never had that problem before.
Teddy really got to me. I thought he was the most interesting character in the whole movie, but he was supposed to “be” a toy, whereas David was supposed to “be” a real boy. Yet it seemed that Teddy was just as capable as love and feelings as David was.
Goo Goo Ga Joob

52

David, A Boy of Your Own[sup]TM[/sup] would never be a successful product. He can’t grow up. Would you want to spend fifty years being the parent of a seven-year-old? And what would happen to your David[sup]TM[/sup] when you finally die of old age? That’s right, he’s rubbed out. After imprinting on him for fifty years (because he’s designed for the parents to love him, too), how would that make you feel?

Why didn’t Monica’s husband bring her to a shrink rather than indulge her in her grief and delusion? The movie lost me the night he brings David home, when Monica’s husband says to her “What do you want to do? I’ll do whatever you want.” WTF?!? Grow a spine, pal. You’re in this marriage, too.

I’m aware that it’s a fairy tale and I’m supposed to suspend my disbelief, but c’mon. Give my disbelief a fighting chance.

53

Rilchiam, you’re no fun. I try to start an argument, and you agree with me. Actually, I didn’t notice “The Velveteen Rabbit” parallel until I was writing my post.

One of the things I did like about the movie is that it allows for multiple interpretations, depending on what you bring to it. I see robots as tools, so it would be exceedingly difficult for me to be sympathetic to a robot, and I was never able to see David as anything other than a very complex toy/tool, unlike the robots in Blade Runner or Terminator 2, which I did actually feel sympathy for.

I didn’t love AI, but I can’t seem to stop discussing it, so there must be something here. I think it’s a deeply flawed masterpiece.

54

Just in case anyone is interested in reading the original Brian Aldiss short story, it can be found here.

55

**

I do the same thing, or at least I try. When I watch Edward Scissorhands I realize that it is suppose to be a fairy tale and it doesn’t hamper my enjoyment of the movie. However since I expected AI to be hard science fiction as opposed to fantasy I was let down by the movie.

**

I can only go far with my ability to suspend my disbelief. I managed to do it through the whole movie up until the 2,000 years later part. After that the movie really went further down hill then I thought possible.

Marc

56

Oh! Oh! I forgot to mention that Mr. Rilch and I saw it at the Chinese Mann, which is always a trip, but beyond that…

…we saw the trailer for Harry Potter AND the trailer for Lord of the Rings!

It was the matinee showing, so we only paid $6. Had we not liked A.I., we still would have gotten our $6 worth from those trailers.

57

I think some people on this thread are missing the forest for the trees in their criticism of this movie. Yeah, the ending could have been better; some of the dialogue was cheesy, and yes, some specific plot points are bothersome, but for Chrissakes people, this is a hell of a movie.

In a day where the usual fare seems to consist of “Freddy Got Fingered”, “Dude, Where’s My Car?” and “The Animal”, it’s nice to see that Steven Spielberg is using his enormous clout to create a movie with such incredible special effects and a truly thought provoking and touching story.

Haley Joel Osmont is simply incredible in this movie, and is an early pick for an Oscar nomination. Man can that little guy act. And I wouldn’t pass up Jude Law for one either. The special effects are incredible, and not annoying or distracting in any way. And the story is in the right place. This is Spielberg’s best movie ever.

I also enjoyed the Kubrickian 2001 Space Odyssey ending taking place in a movie released in 2001, complete with another “David” in a surrealistic setting full of memories. The scene with David in the Mecha factory in Manhattan is creepy to the max, and Osmont pulled this off incredibly.

As for the ending, it’s been said before, but up until the underwater scene, it was an almost perfect movie. The scene gets the same point across- that this kid would have sat here in this boat for thousands of years begging the Blue Fairy to make him real.

The whole thing with the Robots was getting real cheeseball, and by the end of the movie, I felt like yelling at the screen

** “DAMN YOU SPIELBERG, YOU SADISTIC FUCK, LET THE LITTLE BASTARD SEE HIS FUCKING MOMMY ALREADY!!!”**.

But keep in mind this is Spielberg- he’s not going to let the kid sit in a submarine for 10,000 years begging for his Mommy!!! Besides, this movie is a fairy tale- all fairy tales should have happy endings. Spielberg’s only crime is falling back on his tendency to drown the audience in cheesiness. During the first 2:10 the audience seemed spellbound. . the last 15 they were fidgeting, and some were standing in the aisles, ready to go home, and it’s a shame it ended this way, because it’s still a great movie.

Just like a Stanley Kubrick movie, it’s a flawed masterpiece:

-Someone posted this earlier. . yeah they can make child robots. . but they can’t find the kid underwater? Speaking of which, when he first tries to drown himself, he says he sees the Blue Fairy, even though he fell in Manhattan. But when he sees the Blue Fairy again, it’s in Coney Island, which is in south Brooklyn. Did he swim 30 miles in 5 minutes???

-How does an 8-year-old boy pick up the controls to a helicopter? Was he pre-programmed?

-I could have done without the narration. It’s a Kubrick movie. . let us figure out that it’s 2000 years later. The fun thing about some of his movies is you have to have your thinking cap on.

-Spielberg came dangerously close to using Flesh Fair as a really bad holocaust analogy (the robot begging for his life saying he was strong and could work, and the Flesh Fair organizers saying they were extermination the Mechas for the good of humanity). Fortunately, it came across more as the Holocaust meets the WWF.

-Why couldn’t the Robots create his Mommy every day? The “time space continuum” thing just seemed a little contrived. And they could create a Blue Fairy . . . why not an apparition of the kids Mom?

Nonetheless, a great great flick. Between Joe the Gigolo and David attempting suicide, I’d think twice about bringing little kids.

58

The school of fish propelled him along. And I’m not sure he was trying to commit suicide.

**

That, plus his face melting off after he eats the spinach. I thought, “Geez, if I were a kid, I’d be seeing that every night after lights-out for weeks!”

59

**

I can’t think of many movies I’d call “hell of a movie” that had many bothersome plot points and a crummy ending.

**

I’ve heard simliar things before. But it seems to me that if you look at films from the past you will find a lot of crap among all the gems that we call classics. I love westerns but for every Magnificent Seven there’s two or three Terror Comes to Tiny Town.

**

He’s a good actor, I agree.

**

I enjoyed the special effects because even though it was the future it didn’t look all that fake. I didn’t much care for the actual story and thought that Bicentennial Man had a better plot. I don’t think this is Spielberg’s best film though I suppose that’s a matter of opinion. I just can’t think in my mind “Move over Shindler’s List there’s a new boy in town.”

**

I couldn’t feel sorry for the robot through the entire movie. To me he had no more genuine emotion then a toaster or his pal Teddy. Through the movie he really didn’t change all that much. He was still just an automoton.

**

I thought it was a pretty sad ending. I kept wondering what happened to mankind. Depressing ending really.

**

This was the lamest thing from the whole movie. But then in a Fairy Tale who cares if there’s some one time magic spell that can never be repeated?

Well, it is PG-13 isn’t it?

Marc

60

I liked the movie a lot. It, like all Kubrick films, is gonna take a while to digest (I might go see it again this afternoon).

I was truly mystified during the third act, mostly because the “über-robots” subtitled dialogue was cut off by the poor screen projection (White Flint Mall in Rockville, MD, for those in the area that care). So, I have no idea what they said.

Anyway, I was pretty puzzled, trying to figure things out when a completely different twist was given upon the story in the final scene: it’s an Oedipal myth, too, in addition to being a Pinoccio fairy tale. David didn’t have his father resurrected, but only his mother, whom he loved. In the final shot, the camera shows him lying with Monica in bed just like she did with Henry. The boy had “killed” the father to lay with the mother.

Now, I need to see it again to figure out what it all means. But, I didn’t see any other reviewer mention the Odeipal Complex so I thought I’d post this.

BTW, where can I get my own Gigolo Jane? :wink: