A question, and I hope I can phrase it in a non-confusing way:
How did David’s creator know that David would somehow get to Dr. Know so Dr. Know could feed him the directions to the Blue Fairy? It seems to me there’s little way he could, and that made it hard for me to suspend disbelief through the end. I guess it’s possible Gigolo Joe was in on it, but again, that seems implausible.
The father never bonded with David. Only the mother did that. Remember, Monica had to say specific words in a particular order so that the “love” would kick in. As far as the father was concerned, David was just a toy he had given to his wife to help distract her.
There were a lot of things that bugged me, and a lot of things I liked, and I confess to bawling at the end.
But when he touched the blue fairy and she crumbled? I got a case of hysterical giggles. I just thought that was so sadistically funny! “Sucks to be you!” I wanted to holler. I mean, he’s been yearning for this thing to grant his wish for 2000 years, and then when he finally gets close enough to touch her, she shatters?!
I thought my husband and brother-in-law (sitting on either side of me, staring at me in disbelief) were going to have to smother me in the seat before we got thrown out of there.
Anyone else have that reaction?
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Lyllyan *
**
**Lyllyan is exactly right. I saw the movie a second time yesterday (yes, I loved it), and there’s a moment when the Swintons are about to leave for some fancy party. This scene takes place after the imprinting. In the span of a few short seconds in this scene, David refers to Monica as “Mommy” and to Henry as simply “Henry.” No bond between David and Henry is ever established in the beginning of the movie. Which is why David never asked for Henry at the end of the movie.
DOH!
I only meant to have Lyllyan’s name bolded in my message.
Mods, could you please fix the coding? Pretty please?
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.
This is an excellent observation, made more apparent by the fact that, when we see David “come to” at the dinner table, the film stock is different – it’s given a slightly pixellated, “washed-out” look similar to what was used in portions of the movie Three Kings. It then begins to clear up and achieve the sharp look of the rest of the film.
I also noticed that, in the POV shot as David is walking down the hallway in this scene, John Williams’ use of a vocal choir in the score subtly echoes Gyorgy Ligeti’s music in 2001, in the scene wherein Jupiter and its moons align before Bowman enters the stargate.
Oh my God. You’re right. You’re absolutely right.
<<banging head on desk>> *How I could I have missed that? Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! *<</banging head on desk>>
When I see it again (which will be soon), I’m sure this interpretation of the ending will become painfully obvious to me then.
Oh, and I talked about the spinach in this thread. It doesn’t really bother me.
Did anybody think that the movie was hampered by its PG-13 rating? Personally, and I may be way off here, being a young’un and all, but I don’t think Kubrick made a PG-13 movie in his life.
Personally, I would’ve liked to see a little more of the noirish elements that were hinted at in Joe’s 'hood, as well as in Rouge City. (What can I say, I was always a fan of Kubrick’s brand of unashamed debauchery. Would’ve gone nice with those sequences, IMHO.)
I also would have imagined a little more swearing during the capture scene and the flesh fair, and a little rough language from the kids at the party would have made things a little more realistic. Not that I wanted it to turn into South Park or anything, but still…
Cervaise, you are a genius! What an awesome interpretation! Ever since someone else here (I forget who, sorry) mentioned the idea that the narrator was a super-mecha, I have been thinking about the movie on those terms. It makes a lot more sense to me that way. And the way you explained it makes it even better. Thank you.
One thing that kept bothering me was that we (humans) wouldn’t care about a robot-boy’s feelings, since he really doesn’t have any. But another mecha might care (or at least would care as far as they understand what caring is) about making him happy. So they make him “happy” by giving him that one moment he always wanted–the moment where his mom loves him. In other words, it’s a fairy tale by mechas, for mechas.
I’ll have to see it again now that I have this new outlook. Heck, maybe I’ll even give 2001 another shot 
Cervaise! Thank you! That’s a much better lens through which to regard this movie (at least for me). I read your post to Mr. Cranky and he agreed–and noted that you stated things very clearly.
Now I think I could see it again, and see it differently. Great post.
I just saw it tonight, and I have several of the concerns already brought up in this thread (Waterproof but not spinach-proof? He can’t be taught “Martin can’t breathe water?”) but there’s one thing that bugged me mightily that none of you has mentioned yet.
David is supposed to be the first mecha that can love (and presumably feel other emotions), right? And he’s also supposed to be the first one with an instinct for self-preservation (the people at the Flesh Fair exclaimed, “Mechas don’t plead for their lives!”).
But this premise is undermined from beginning to end, without any explanation. This is nowhere more obvious than in the character of Gigolo Joe.
When we first meet Joe he’s just been framed for murder. He announces “I’m in big trouble” and flees. Why? He wasn’t programmed for murder and there’s no reason he’d be considered a suspect. There’s no reason he’d have been programmed to lie about anything other than his clients’ attractiveness, either, so we could reasonably have expected him to be a cooperative witness-after-the-fact for the police. In fact, we know Joe has memories, and they’re probably photographic, so the police should’ve been able to just plug a cable into his ear and download what his eyes saw at the murder scene. He wouldn’t have been a suspect.
He definitely wouldn’t have run. Frankly, it would have made more sense for him to shrug his shoulders and ask the murderer if he was up for a rogering; that’s what Joe was built for. Or even better, go straight home and tell his owner/“pimp” what happened.
Later he meets David and decides to help him in his quest. Why? Because David saved him from the Flesh Fair? That calls for gratitude, an emotion. Because Joe became friends with David? Platonic love, another emotion. Or species loyalty, another kind of emotion. And why would he wanted to be saved from the Flesh Fair? An instinct for self-preservation? He’s a mecha built to a purpose; the only credible reason would have been because no one at the Flesh Fair wanted to have sex with him.
This concern applies to all the other discarded mechas. Accepting the premise of the first scene in the movie, they are not emotional entities. They shouldn’t even care that they’ve been discarded, much less try to rebuild themselves from cast-off parts or anguish over their fates at the Flesh Fair. And why would they be discarded to wander the countryside and get into mischief anyway? Their owners didn’t just shut them off? Why the hell not? When I buy a new car I don’t start up my old one and send it down the road driverless, and a driverless car would be MUCH less dangerous than one of these mechas. Even the nannybot.
I hated this movie.
Fiver, it is explained. As explained earlier by me and Cervaise (though I missed that the end was VR), the story is a fairy tale told by one of the superrobots at the end, voiced by Ben Kingsly. You may not like the explanation, but there is one.
I went back for a second viewing, and my opinion of the film has increased a bit. There are big flaws, but they’re like Ted Williams’ inability to hit to the opposite field; sure they’re flaws, sometimes big ones, but in a damn fine package. The flaws mostly didn’t bother me as much the second time through (except the spinach thing; that bothered me more).
I just saw the film last night, July 6th. SIGH It is a fairy tale with a hard science overlay.
I just realized a MAJOR plot flaw, however. In the future, the earth goes into another Ice Age.
If that happens, the previously covered coastlines would be uncovered as the ocean levels dropped and the water was locked up in the polar ice caps. So, why was the New York City skyline shown locked in ice as if the water suddenly froze?
I guess you could explain it thru a meteor strike that kicked up enough dust to block the sun and trigger a near instant Ice Age, but that sounds too corny. But then again, LOTS of this film is corny, so why not?
I saw the movie for the second time this afternoon and Cervaise’s analysis is spot-on. What I saw of it, the whole story was a bedtime story for future robot kids. At the end of the film, David went to sleep, and that’s probably used as a device for robotic parents to get their kids to sleep, too. Of course, the fairy tale is two and a half hours long, and not five minutes, but robots have a lot more time to dwell on a nighttime story than us boring, mortal, humans do. 
Great job, Cervaise. How many times did you see the film before you deciphered it?
I’m not so sure about that. Could you program a robot to think illogically, to overlook plot holes? And would you want to? Could it function in the real world? (You might joke that "People who think illogically can function in the real world," and my reply to that is, “Not very well, they don’t.”)
I felt that David became, in some way, (but not totally), a real boy when he smashed the other-David. He wasn’t programmed for rage. And it wasn’t in any way related to Monica. This was his reaction to finding out that he wasn’t the unique creation he thought himself to be. And in that moment, he did become a unique being. The other David didn’t feel rage, didn’t try to protect himself. He was just a mecha. I found it very interesting that the thing that triggered that response was very ego-based. He wasn’t afraid that Monica would love the other David, he wasn’t thinking of her at all. Also, I’d say that the amorphous emotional response they were trying to program into David was already in the mechas. It was in Teddy. It was in Joe. It was shown in a minor way in the nanny robot in the Flesh Fair.
I didn’t think it was a movie for children. The themes of motherly abandonment would be very troubling for some children, not to mention the brutality of the Flesh Fair.
StG
Some one tell me what the hell is VR???
Damn, I HATE the abbreviations in these boards…
VR=virtual reality. It’s not unusual to see it abbreviated that way.
Saw the movie again today, and this time, Cervaise’s interpretation of the ending seems dead on. In fact, the parallel to the ending of 2001 seems so painfully obvious that it’s a wonder I didn’t catch on earlier.
Virtual Reality?