Fiver: Why on earth are you taking the word of the humans in the movie? They’re selfish, violent, self-absorbed – and they’re the ones who say the mechas are limited. Obviously, they’re wrong. Think again about how this is a story told from the point of view of a future machine. Look at the visual symbolism where David dives off the building into the ocean; as Gigolo Joe watches from inside the copter, David’s reflection in the windscreen passes across Joe’s face like a tear. Of course the movie contradicts itself. That’s part of the point.
Freyr: It isn’t another Ice Age. In Kubrick’s conception, the ice is due to nuclear winter. It’s only two thousand years from now, and all the humans are gone. Where’d they go? It’s not enough time to be evolved away; they had to destroy themselves. No, the movie doesn’t actually come out and say this; like so much in Kubrick, you’re expected to think about it and figure it out, instead of most movies where it does all the interpretation for you and hands the explanation over on a silver platter. Kubrick never (well, almost never) does this, and I think it’s to Spielberg’s credit that (for the most part) he resists the urge to do this as well.
Montfort: Thanks. I saw it just once (though I’ll be going back), but I thought about it and debated it with others who had seen it for hours and hours.
jab1: Let me ask a question: Is it reasonable to think that Gretel, a little girl, would actually be able to bodily shove the witch, a fully-grown adult, all the way into that oven? Of course not. If we were first told that story as grown-ups, we’d roll our eyes and say, “Yeah, right.” But we hear it as children, and we accept it without thinking, and thereafter we don’t consider that as a “plot hole.”
Rilchiam: Virtual Reality is a simulated environment beamed directly onto the eyes or into the brain. This is different from, say, Star Trek’s holodeck, because you’re not actually physically present in the environment. You’ve seen those 3-D goggles and special wired gloves that simulate your being surrounded by a computer-generated world. Now take a step further and imagine David, an artificial computerized being, hooked up to a point-of-view world simulator (like a really complicated “Doom” or “Quake”) with inputs to all his senses, so even while his body lies still, his brain thinks he’s actually moving around in his house. Hence, his mother isn’t actually brought back from the dead; she’s part of the simulation. He shouldn’t be able to cry, but he does, because it’s what he should do in his imagination. Starting to make sense now? This is why the ending-Monica doesn’t seem disoriented, isn’t confused about why she’s young, doesn’t ask about her husband, etc. So when David is fulfilled by her saying “I love you,” it isn’t real. He’s being conned. The supermechas are giving him what he obviously wants, and he’ll never know it was fake. So from his perspective, it’s a happy ending, but objectively, outside his manufactured reality, his happiness is just as phony and artificial as he is.
