OK so I saw AI tonight and certain things caused me to furrow my brow and say “Eh?”.
Amongst these things were:
David, the robot kid, doesnt breathe. This is made clear by the fact that on a couple of occasions he goes underwater and has no problems. But then at the end of the movie, his mother makes him a birthday cake and tells him to blow out the candles and make a wish.
So David takes a deep breath and - blows out the candles.
Eh? Where did he get the breath from? I thought he didn’t breathe.
One of the futuristic robots at the end of the film reads David’s mind by holding its hand above David’s head thereby “downloading” Davids memories.
But then the other robots have to touch each other in order to share the information being downloaded.
Now, we already have the embryonic beginnings of voice-activated computers etc that don’t require any hands-on contact and these robots are supposed to be at least 2000 years in advance of us.
Not to mention the fact that they didn’t need to touch David to get the information from out of his head.
In addition, they appeared to be able to communicate with each other telepathically.
So why did they need to touch each other? Eh?
There were other things that bothered me about this movie but these were a couple of things that sprang immediately to mind.
Am I the only one who thinks the writer of the script decided to start dropping acid about half way through? It was plausable up to a point, then everything went weird.I mean weirder.
I think it was all tripped out becuase it’s supposed to be a fiary tale itself. Fairy tales usually have strange and graphic imagery. I think to make a movie that IS a fairy tale in which a fake boy who just wants to be real (sound like any fairy tale you know?) is led into a false fairy tale by his creator is supposed to be some kind of clever play on itself. I think it’s less then clever, it’s kind of obvious. I didn’t like the movie except when the robots show up. I love to see peoples ideas of what the future will bring. I wasn’t in the mood for a big metaphor and expedition into the mechanics of Fairy Tales.
My favorite was the ship they fly in. Yeah, could you just drop us of over there then dissassemble and fly off in every direction.
Jeez. Saturday night at midnight. I gotta go out. Thank god the bars don’t close till 4:00 or so.
The part that really bugged me was when David ate spinach and totally shorted out his insides, yet he apparently didn’t swallow any water when he fell into the pool (if I remember correctly.) In any case, you’d think the robot builders wouldn’t have constructed such a glaring design flaw.
Not having to breathe and not being able to breathe are not the same thing. It was never said in the movie that he COULDN’T breathe, just that he didn’t have to . Since the designers were going for as much realism as possible in David, including the ability to do things like blow out candles would likely be something they would do.
They weren’t robots, they were aliens. Only guess I can venture is that they were linking their mental powers together to process the data and project it, and that required contact.
Camoflauge(sp?). They didn’t want the robots running away, so using a balloon means no real sound for the bots to pick up on, and the moon is a common sight at night(DUH! lol), so they could sneak up on the bots.
They were advanced robots. That’s been pretty well established, even if the film didn’t hit you over the head with it.
What was up with David’s creator at the end of the second act? He wanders out of the room, David jumps off the edge of the world, and…that’s it? NO ONE looks for him? Not his creator? Not the police who were looking for Gigalo Joe? Wouldn’t he have some sort of tracking device in him?
And David was the first one of the advanced mechas that the really advanced mechas found, 2000 years later? How did they find him? Presumably humans continued to exist for some time after David’s entombment under the sea, and they would’ve built more advanced mechas than him, which would’ve been distributed widely. Why was David so special, then?
Nanook, they were robots. I was surprised after seeing the movie for the first time at the numbers of people who thought they were aliens. I suspect it was because of the appearance of the supermechas.
It’s been a long time since I saw the movie last, and it’s going to be at least a few more months before the DVD is released, but here’s what I’ll say with my recollections.
I suspect that David is simply the first advanced mecha that the supermechas find in the course of their excavation. I would suppose that if they excavated in other areas, they might find other advanced mechas that were constructed after David.
The movie never suggests that David has some kind of tracking device within him. If he did have such a device built into him, he would have been found much earlier by the Professor, before he even encountered the Flesh Fair.
By the way, when the movie came out, there were a number of threads about it on the SDMB. I’d search for them…they are worth reading.
Maybe they just like tactile contact, the same way that humans do.
As to how long the human race lasts, there were indications in The Game (the viral marketing technique used to promote the movie) that humanity wasn’t gonna last a whole heck of a lot longer.
For the one millionth time on this board, they were robots! There is no debate. Steven Spielberg and Kathleen Kennedy(producer) both have said, on the record, that they were mechas and that they never intended it to be open for debate.
I posted the link to the site where this was all explained in several other AI threads.
I tried to find it again, but couldn’t. Gosh, this has been brought up so many times that it’s becoming like “All Your Base”. They were mechas, Spielberg said so, and that’s that.
Although, if people honestly made the mistake of thinking the advanced mechas were aliens, it’s Spielberg’s own damn fault for making the mechas so closely resemble the “gray”-type alien popularized in Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
That rail-thin, big-headed alien look has become so ubiquitous as to be a cliché, so if Spielberg made the mechas look like that he really shouldn’t complain if people make that mistake.
This would be ridiculous given the context of the film. Aliens had never entered the story at any time so to suddenly introduce them would have needed some kind of explanation from the narrator. Or at least would need to be explained from the plotline of the movie.
It seemed obvious to me that they were advanced AI robots that survived the ice-age.
I don’t know why anyone thought they could be aliens (I admit they did look like the conventional image of aliens).
It was interesting though that the mother initially gets the robot kid to satisfy her own wants but then, at the end, the robot kid recreates the mother in order to satisfy his wants.
Whilst searching through other threads about this, I came across this remark from obfusciatrist:
"I like that the Blue Fairy didn’t make David into a real boy, but rather made the real Mom into an artificial being.
David was created as a tool for the mother’s wish fulfillment and in the end the mother was created as a tool for David’s wish fulfillment."
Wow. I thought they were aliens. This totally changes the ending for me. I was getting all pissed off at Spielberg for tossing in such a ridiculous deus ex machina, maybe now I should watch it again when it comes out on video to see if the ending is any more believable.
Well, Sublight, it never occured to me that they weren’t aliens either, but the ending still doesn’t make any more sense. Actually, now knowing they were mechas, it makes even less sense to me…
Given how ridiculous the film got at that point anyway, it would have just been par for the course.
The part that made no sense to me was the Flesh Fair resolution. The crowd’s turning on the fair organizer just made no sense at all, and seemed absurd to me. They’re full of bloodlust and then suddenly change their minds because Haley Joel Osment is cute?
Perhaps that was a little overdone, but yes, the fact that Haley Joel Osment is cute is exactly the reason the crowd turned against the fair. People couldn’t enjoy such a barbarism as the fair unless robots had been systemically dehumanized for a long time, like we did to the Japanese in WWII and are doing a moderately good job of not doing to the arabs today. David looked so real, the crowd couldn’t maintain their illusion, and their standard moral code came into play. It’s another example of the primary theme of the film; namely, humans are stupid.
Don’t know if it was intentional or not, but there was a real-life parallel to this which occurred during the Reign of Terror which followed the French Revolution.
Most of those who faced the guillotine did so with resolve and even an aristocratic aloofness. However, the guillotine began to fall out of favor when a beautiful woman who was to be guillotined (can’t remember her name) was dragged to the device screaming and pleading for mercy. The crowd, which had been boisterous, fell silent upon hearing her piteous pleas, and seemed to have an epiphany of the sort portrayed in A.I. The execution went forward, but the empathy this woman generated had drained the bloodlust from the mob.
I can’t remember all of the details of this story, as I got it from a television documentary (probably on the History Channel), but having seen that documentary, and then watching A.I., I was struck by the parallel. As I say, I don’t know if it was intentional.
(I tried searching for more info on the internet, but type in “guillotine” and “mercy” on a search engine, and you have to wade through a lot of really sick S&M stuff. Not worth it.)
