Perhaps it would be in bad taste to point out that the World Trade Centers are still standing 2000 years in the future? I’ll do it anyways.
Not a fair anachronism to be sure, considering the timing.
Who says they’re the originals?
I really loved the fourth ending(out of the five endings the movie had). If the movie had ended with the lines. I’m paraphrasing: “This mecha actually lived with humans. From him we will learn about humanity.” I would have forgave all the other crap. But… it had to keep going for 15 more minutes!
I just call them MECHA/ALIENS in my mind in that 2000 year gap the MECHAS had left Earth and traveled through space and were now just returning to Earth having found it devoid of human life. David is the first, probably only mecha they’d find that actually new anything about humans
( who would have been almost mythic Gods to the Mechas by this point ) We don’t really know what caused the earth to enter another iceage so you can assume that not just humans were destroyed but mechas possibly as well.
Maybe I’m too dark, but I thought the perfect place to end would have been with lines “and the day after that… and the day after that.” when David is on the bottom of the ocean asking the Blue Fairy to help him.
Well, Steven Spielberg and Kathleen Kennedy were wrong.
They were obviously aliens, on a dig, just like ET was on a biology field trip. Stands to reason…
[sub]valium kicked in yet mate?[/sub]
Redboss
Yes, the valium kicked in, Reddy. Ahhhhhhhhh. I love you guys!!!
I saw A.I. last weekend. Being an ornithologist, I was highly amused, in the scene where Monica leaves David in the woods, to hear a Screaming Piha calling in the background.
Screaming Pihas are robin-sized gray birds that live in Amazonia. They sit around in the forest canopy all day long giving extraordinarily loud three-note calls (wheee wheee wheee-it!). The call is one of the most typical sounds of the South American rainforest, and is often heard in the background of movies filmed there.
My first reaction was to think it was just another careless movie mistake, but then I realized, since it was supposed to be a global-warming world, it was perfectly appropriate for a tropical bird to be calling in a North American woodland.
Does anyone know if Spielberg’s production crew was actually smart enough to have inserted a joke so subtle that would only be caught by a tropical ornithologist?
Also, where was that scene actually filmed?
(BTW, ornithologists make a game of this sort of thing. One of the ornithological societies has a contest at their annual meeting for the “greatest range extension” documented in a movie or a TV show. I’m sure this year the winner will be that tropical Troupial in Charlie’s Angels, identified as a Pygmy Nuthatch in the movie.)
Colibri, you’re a wild man. Someone needs to hose you down.
This press release from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology seems to imply that the call of the Screaming Piha was chosen simply because it sounds “peculiar.”
Not in bad taste, just remarkably idiotic and whiny.
Whatever happened with that underground bunker you built for the Eugenics Wars of the 1990’s?
The most glaring thing to me was that although David is introduced as a huge leap forward in robot technology he is in almost everyway inferior to the teddy bear robot that the real kid had as a toy and was produced years before David. The teddy bear shows just as much love and devotion to David as David does to the mother and he is much less creepy.
Also at the flesh fare they put David and Joe right below a large leaky bucket of acid and then when the crowd turns they rush to untie them and totally ignore they could be killed if they jostle the bucket.
That’s nothing. You shudda seen how bent out of shape I got at Mary Poppins when they used an American Robin instead of a proper English Robin. 
yeah puddleglum that struck me too.
The teddy bear seems to be smarter than almost everyone around him - human, AI or whatever.
He shows:
- Empathy
- Foresight
- Devotion
- Intelligence
- Cunning
His intelligence is almost human-like in that he seems to understand underlying meanings behind questions he’s asked. Like when David and the real son are both calling Teddy to them to see which one he’d come to and Teddy just runs out of the room rather than make the choice.
If they could have put teddy’s cpu inside a boy-shaped robot they would have done the trick. He appears to be superior to David in almost every way.
Yeah, but Teddy sounded like Goliath from “Davy and Goliath” and the whole time he was on screen, I kept thinking about the parody of “Davy and Goliath” that Mad TV did called “Son of Goliath” where Goliath tells Davy to “purify the city” (ala Son of Sam) and was waiting for Teddy to tell that to David.
Oh, and it seems to me that there should have been a wink at 2001 with Teddy saying something like, “What are you doing, Dave?” or some other line of HAL’s.
I was wondering myself, how come the robots couldnt just, after being hunted for a while, learn that the SIZE of the moon determines if it is the real one or not? after all, if it were not the real moon, it would have to be MUCH larger than the moon in apparent size to be close enough to catch the robots.
however, my theory that either
A) people learned that the robots are, for some reason, incapable of learning this fact (that the moon is always the same size, and when its too close, its the hunters,) or
B) the creators deliberately introduced learning defects in order to make them more tractable.
they arent too dearly-held theories, but they’ll do me for now
I think it would have been better if it was a trilogy. The whole movie sucked because they rushed each story. The interaction between mom and AI was laughable. It would have been better if they had time to elaborate. It was obviously 3 stories in 1.