What the HECK happened at the end of A.I.? (spoiler)

So David meets the aliens. Got it. Oh, but why did he shut down in the sub/copter if he could just come back to “life”? Just from the cold?

How did David “die”, as I assume they were implying? How could he shut off permanently? He’s a bunch of super-sophisticated mother boards and PCI cards or something. He can’t choose to never be re-bootable. Or did the aliens just let him go? But he already said he couldn’t sleep.

Did anyone really understand that nonsense about space-time having a memory so that the clones only lasted one day? Why would they last even one day? Horrible sci-fi holes. Even worse than most Star Trek.

Tangential question: Why couldn’t S.S. just have the aliens give him his perfect life in his head as an illusion, which would have saved that awful Thank-you-Mr.-Exposition scene with the alien? My girlfriend and I spent the last 15 minutes just waiting for the darn movie to finally give up and end.

This always irks me, so I’m just going to comment on it alone…

THEY WEREN’T ALIENS.

They were the advanced form of robots that “evolved” over the course of 2,000 years. The idea was that humans begat robots which begat humans again (or, rather, it’s implied that they WILL)… that was the significance of the discovery of David at the end.

What happened at the end of AI? Kubrick was dead, so Spielberg ran out of vision and tacked on his usual smarmy, feel-good ending! Movie shoulda ended when the little dweeb got pinned under the ferris wheel, staring at his beloved blue fairy!

And 2000 years is not long enough to go from global warming to a new ice age!!!

Qadgop the Mercotan writes:

That’s exactly what I thought. And the only other person i have discussed it with thought the same thing. I think this will be the general consensus on this. I’m not familiar with Kubrick’s story or the original story, but perhaps that is really how it was MEANT to end and the rest is a Spielbergism?? Which is weird because the extra ending looks too good to not be Kubrickian.

Let’s say that the humans had a big nuclear war. Bigger than even all of our current nukes together. EVERYTHING dies: no more animals and only some plants and robots survive. Plants eat remaining carbon dioxide: when that is gone they die too.

Without at least SOME carbon dioxide, the world would freeze up, real quick. If the earth behaved as a blackbody it would only have an average temperature of around 40 degrees F, which I believe it would quickly (well within years) drop to if there were no more CO2.

Not to say this is what happened, but it IS possible to get an ice age so quickly.

read cervaise’s explination in this thread.

This part has already been addressed.

I’m not so sure it’s dumb. I think it’s a way of not letting David have everything he wants. It would have been too pat of an ending for Monica to come back permanently. During the end, David points out that he “never forgets” anything…he apparently has a perfect memory, which makes since, since he is a machine. David would therefore always be able to recall the day he spent with Monica. I think it’s perfectly fine that the future mechas’ technology is not limitless. Technology without limits has always struck me as unrealistic.

**

In other words, why not give David the perfect life, instead of bringing back Monica for only one day?

Because giving David perfection wouldn’t have helped in his evolution. I think this movie has many strong parallels to 2001: A Space Odyssey, but instead of being about the evolution of man, it’s about the evolution of robots.

In an early scene, David asks Monica how long she would live. Her answer is about fifty years. This seems to disturb him greatly, as we see by his reaction, and by the question he poses to Teddy in a later scene when he asks Teddy, “Is fifty years a long time?” David is now cognizant of the fact that Monica is not immortal. This clearly bothers him in those early scenes. The concept of being alone troubles him.

By knowing about the one-day limit in advance, David is preparing himself for the fact that he will be without Monica again, this time permanently. He has a chance to mentally prepare himself for this event, and is therefore going to make his day count. He is showing that he has now evolved enough beyond his original programming to handle such a large change. In a strange way, I think this one-day limit actually helps him deal with his previous anxiety about the concept of being without any family. And he will always have the memory of that day available to him.

Any “bringing back” of Monica would be time-limited. Whether it is for one day or one year or one century is immaterial. At the end of that day, when Monica falls asleep and thus dies again, David is not upset or anxious. He has evolved to the point where he can handle the idea of Monica not being around forever, and is therefore able to accept the unfairness of it. He has evolved beyond where he was earlier in the movie, when the mere idea of Monica only being around for fifty years was enough to disturb him.

The length of time assigned to Monica’s return is completely arbitrary, of course. It was the writer’s decision. I don’t think that there would have been a length of time that would have been acceptable to all of the movie’s viewers. But by choosing such a brief time, they emphasize Monica’s mortality, and force the character of David to confront the unfairness of mortality.

And as for those who feel the movie should have ended with David pinned under the Ferris wheel, my answer is this: I seriously doubt that was Kubrick’s intention to have the movie end this way. For one thing, it would leave the development of David’s character incomplete, and the movie is about the evolution of robots. I have the nasty feeling that if the movie really did end at that point, we would be seeing threads here at the SDMB saying, “Why in the hell did they leave him there?”

And yes, do check out Cervaise’s interpretation in that thread linked above, although I do believe that the Monica Swinton in the VR simulator is real.

I wonder under what kind of super-cynical worldview an ending in which David is pinned in ice for 2,000 years, only to be awoken and told that there is no Blue Fairy, that he can never be a real boy, and that he can spend exactly 24 hours with his mother before she is lost to him forever qualifies as either “smarmy” or “feel-good.” If anyone felt good about that ending, they might want to consider whether or not they understood it.

Hear, hear. The ending isn’t as sentimental as some might think. David achieves his goal, which is to find love. I can feel good about that. But Monica is only around for one day, though. Bummer. That sucks. Not fair.
[Grandfather from “The Princess Bride”]
Who says life is fair? Show me where that’s written.
[/Grandfather from “The Princess Bride”]
The one-day limit may not sit will with a lot of viewers. But as I said in my earlier post in this thread, I think it works.

TheNerd has already posted a link to the other thread, where I discuss the end of the film. I’ve just posted a whole bunch more stuff there, which addresses most if not all of the questions here.

Bottom line: You don’t have to enjoy the movie, or even like it. But it’s unfair to dislike it based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what it’s actually about.

Anyway, go check out the other thread for more information.

I did a search for A.I. before posting this, just to let you know. I’ll go read the other one now.

I still think this business of space-time having memory and a narrator appearing out of nowhere is pretty dumb. They could have sped up the ending too.

To me, the whole ending smacks too much of “deus ex machina”. I’m willing to suspend a certain amount of disbelief, but I (and perhaps my seat bottom) passed that limit a bit earlier. Especially in view of the assertion in the movie that the kid is programmed to be imprinted on mom and noone else, and would need to be deactivated (read destroyed) when mom got tired of him, or died. Nowhere in the movie do I get a hint that he can ever be more than a 7 year old robot/boy, unable to grow, and unable to bond to anyone else. The ending seemed to flip the bird to that whole concept. Suddenly, he can never be a real boy, but he’s happy 'cuz he gets a day of mom’s undivided attention?

I re-iterate: A feel-good ending that completely disregards the profound problems and conflicts set up earlier in the movie, that is an emotionally dependant robot-child who can not change or grow.

Actually, I strongly disagree that David never changes throughout the movie.

In the beginning scene, Professor Hobby (played by William Hurt), announces to his production team that he feels that they have plateaued in their progress on the development of artificial beings. He states that the mechas still have one flaw that still separates them from behaving like a human: they have no emotions, no feelings, no sense of self. He proves this point by stabbing a mecha in the hand and asking how it felt. “How did you feel when I did that? Were you shocked? What did it do to your feelings?” The mecha replied, “You did it to my hand.”

Hobby believes that this flaw is an opportunity for creating the next step in the evolutionary development of the mechas. He wants to build a mecha that can feel, that can experience emotions, and he believes that the foundation of these emotions is love. He states that by developing a mecha that can genuinely love and experience love, that this emotional interaction will be the way that a mecha can do things no mecha has ever had before: develop a subconscious, from which a personality can gradually emerge. He says that this could even lead to a mecha being able to dream.

David is the first prototype mecha built with this goal in mind. In the first act of the movie, David is definitely not quite human-like. He sits ramrod straight in a chair. His smile has a strange, forced quality to it. He rarely takes the initiative, always reacting to what others are doing.

As the movie progresses, David becomes more and more human-like in his emotional affect. The way he talks gradually becomes more natural. His outburst during the killing of his doppleganger is the first time we see real anger. This scene is perhaps the most important one in the second act. Earlier in the movie, David is told during the Flesh Fair sequence that he is unique, one of a kind. David incorporates that into his vision of himself, and sees his sense of uniqueness as a justification of why Monica would love him. The sight of another David that looks like him and sounds like him threatened that sense of uniqueness. Unlike an ordinary mecha, however, David has developed emotions, and now he is experiencing a new emotion for the first time: anger. He has developed the emotion of jealousy, and uses it to destroy what he perceives as a rival for Monica’s affection. Because this killing was based on his own sense of self, it can be said that David’s actions were based on having developed a strong sense of self. This scene is the first solid evidence that David has become more than just a mere mecha.

The look of complete despair on his face when he sees the room full of Davids indicates that he is experiencing that emotion for the first time. During his scene with Dr. Hobby, he is slouched in the chair, a pose that he never adopts earlier in the film. (And of course there is a line during this scene that perfectly foreshadows David’s discovery in the next room: David asks, “Am I one of a kind?” Hobby replies, “My son was one of a kind. You are the first of your kind.”)

During the final scenes, which is the day David spends with the revived Monica, the quality of David’s interaction is markedly different from the beginning of the movie. His smile is natural. The way he talks to Monica is more natural. The way he laughs is more natural. He takes the initiative and prepares coffee for Monica. For all intents and purposes, he finally becomes indistinguishable from a real human boy.

I’ve already mentioned how the character of David changes with regards to dealing with the mortality of Monica. The third act deals with the earlier issue of David’s anxiety that Monica has a limited life span. By the end of the movie, David has shown enough development that he is able to handle the concept of Monica’s mortality.

The final scene shows Monica passing away in her bed after falling asleep, and then David falling asleep for the first time in his life. We are informed by the narrator that David does something else for the first time in his life: he dreams, and thus fulfills the final part of Hobby’s ambition…to build a robot that dreams.

He changes plenty, and that’s consistent with the movie’s overarching story of the evolution of robots.

Oh, and Steven Spielberg and Haley Joel Osment deserve every bit of credit for handling the nature of David’s changing throughout the movie with such subtlety. I like it when a movie doesn’t spell things out for me. I know then that the movie-maker is assuming that the audience can figure these things out on their own.

Despite it’s messy origins this film is a work of genius, penultimate genius perhaps but genius nonetheless, and one day will be regarded in the same league as Blade Runner and 2001 et al as a seminal and inspired work. The movie poses a question about the nature of love. This movie is not about the cruelty and hopelessness of love. It is about the transcendent nature of what love is and shakes our comfortable notions about it being a distinctly organic phenomenon.

The point about David’s search to become “real” is that he evolves emotionally and becomes “real” through his love and devotion. He emotions may have been “artificially” programmed along certain lines but his leap of faith to believe that he can become real makes him “real” despite his origins. To dismiss the speculative true depth of love by and for something that is “humanoid” but not “human” goes to the root of science fiction as a lens with which to perceive ourselves and the world.

Preview is our friend!

Despite it’s messy origins this film is a work of genius, penultimate genius perhaps but genius nonetheless, and one day will be regarded in the same league as Blade Runner and 2001 et al as a seminal and inspired work. The movie poses a question about the nature of love. This movie is not about the cruelty and hopelessness of love, but rather the transcendent nature of what love is and shakes our comfortable notions about it being a distinctly organic phenomenon.

The point about David’s search to become “real” is that he evolves emotionally and becomes “real” through his love and devotion. His emotions may have been initially “artificially” programmed along certain lines but his leap of faith to believe that he can become real and his struggle toward that goal makes him “real” despite his origins. To encompass the speculative true depth of love by and for something that is “humanoid” but not “human” goes to the root of science fiction as a lens with which to perceive ourselves and the world.

Atreyu, I’ve read your post, and it has given me some things to think upon. I’ve seen most of Kubrick’s other films, and enjoyed them, and recognize that the viewer is expected to work, and that things are not spelled out. And I really did enjoy the movie, with it’s flaws and technical points which one could nit-pick to death. That stuff doesn’t really bother me. But after reading this and other threads on the movie, there is still something engendering dissonance within me over the way the ending was handled, specifically the whole “2000 years later” sequence.

I really can’t put my finger on it squarely at this point, but my initial response is still that it was a bit too pat, a bit too contrived. Perhaps it merits more reflection, re-viewing. If this were a purely Kubrickian film, my default assumption would be that the flaw is within me. But the Vox Populi’s opinion of the ending notwithstanding, a number of critics whom I respect also have voiced difficulty with it.

Anyway, that’s a lot of thinking and typing about something that doesn’t bear much on my day-to-day life at the moment. So I think I’ll leave it alone for a while, and go watch “Oh Brother, Where art thou?” again.

Thanks!
Qadgop

I’m glad my post has led you to consider some things, Qadgop. I haven’t seen all of Kubrick’s films, but I’ve seen enough of them to get a feel for his style.

At the very least, we have to give the makers of A.I. a little credit for attempting such an ambitious and thought-provoking movie. Too many movies in recent years don’t even try to have any significant depth.