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Review: A.I.
michael: Looks like I get to go first. Let's get some basics out of the way. Some reviews by others: Slate, Salon, Wired. You may want to read the short story that started it all. But if you see the movie, you'll find that the short story has less influence on the movie than a famous and beautiful poem by W. B. Yeats, The Stolen Child. Since it's out of copyright, and since it happens to be one of my favorite poems, and since you uncouth heathens could use some exposure to beauty, I'm going to reproduce it here.
The Stolen Child
Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the Lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water-rats
There we've hid our faery vats,
Full of berries
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand
Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim grey sands with light
Far off by furthest rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances,
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight,
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And is anxious in its sleep
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand
Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scarce could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams,
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand
Away with us he's going,
The solemn-eyed
He'll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest
For he comes, the human child
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
From a world more full of weeping then he can understand
--W.B. Yeats, 1889
The poem itself in is in the movie in two places, and crops up in several other places as well - "Till the moon has taken flight" takes on literal meaning, for example. Faeries, yep, we got faeries. And there's no one more solemn-eyed than a kid who sees dead people.
I'm sure one of the other slashdot authors will go into the whole Kubrick/Spielberg deal so I'll skip it. The movie is slow, light on dialogue, heavy on music and long meaningful camera shots. (It reminded me of The Thin Red Line several times.) The audience didn't particularly appreciate the slower scenes (one anonymous coward in the back row shouted out "Boring!" at one point), which makes me think this isn't going to be a box-office smash. The acting is superior - a great deal of effort has been expended in having the mechanicals show a consistent face to the world - they don't break character in the slightest, not even an extraneous eye-twitch. Special effects are also superior - rarely in your face, but always there, and entirely realistic. (I'm going to ignore the aliens.)
One area I kept looking for was hard-coded limits on robotic behavior. These robots have neither the First, nor the Second, nor the Third Laws of Robotics, which seems like a foolish design oversight. Several major plot points would been eliminated if the robots were obedient ... but why would humans make disobedient robots? At the very least, it seems like emotion would come well before disobedience on the robot evolutionary scale.
Anyway, A.I. is well worth seeing, at least once. I don't know if time will call this a masterwork or not. It's certainly a fine piece, worthy of respect, and it will certainly be referenced in the many future movies about artificial intelligence (just wait and see), but it seemed to fall a bit short of master-level.
Jon Katz: In A.I., Steven Spielberg (and the ghostly spirit of Stanley Kubrick) has made one of the most astonishing and original scientific fairy tales of all time. The movie is unlike anything you've ever seen, visually or conceptually. Like so many Hollywood movies of the past decade or two, it doesn't quite know how to end, but that's a minor squawk against the backdrop of a masterpiece of story-telling genius and moral power. Through the life of a lost boy -- an artificially engineered one -- Spielberg has brought a fresh, contemporary eye to enduring questions of moral responsibility and technology, and their impact on human life. Be prepared: this is a very disturbing movie. In cinematic terms, Spielberg has chillingly evoked Mary Shelley. He combines his dramatic flair and his acute sensibilities about childhood with fantabulistic animation and design. Spoilage warning: Plot is discussed, no endings.
This is the story of David (played wonderfully by Haley Joel Osment), a robotic boy sent out into a world ravaged by ecological catastrophe (global warming has submerged the great coastal cities of the earth). Although the future is filled with mechanical beings, David is the first child programmable to feel and need love, and to dream his own dreams. His desire to love a mother deeply, once activatd by a spoken imprint sequence, is irreversible. If the relationship doesn't work, David must be destroyed.
Osment's tormented robot-kid is disturbingly convincing, especially his transformation from a machine trying to learn about emotions into a sentient being overwhelmed and consumed by them. Alternately predictable and inappropriate, endearing and creepy, he struggles to fit into a conventional family. Henry and Monica, the parents who take him in (Frances O'Connor and Sam Robards) have accepted that their biological son, who is in a coma, will never awaken.
Already, the moral lines are drawn powerfully around this family, a stand-in for our morally obtuse society. Henry agrees to bring a robot child into his home as a surrogate kid without even telling his wife, to help assuage her grief. Monica, mourning her stricken offspring, is a sucker for a loving kid, even a programmed one. David is used in the most profoundly unthinking way. At first, Monica is unnerved by this alien creature, then succumbs to his unequivocal affection.
But their son Martin does recover, and comes home angry and jealous. Here, the movie moves directly into Frankenstein territory. In one powerful scene David is so anxious to be like Martin, whom his new mother loves so deeply, that he starts wolfing down food, which nearly destroys his delicate circuitry. Goaded by their manipulative and somewhat unpleasant natural son, Henry and Monica come to believe they have a monster in their home rather than a loving child, and are overwhelmed by what they've done. Just like Victor Frankenstein, they take no responsibility whatsoever for this creature, sending him away into the dark woods.
David's "mother," to whom he is now forever devoted, takes him out for a drive and abandons him -- an echo of countless fairy tales -- rather than return him to the cybernetic firm that will destroy him. The film's lively middle section depicts a world in which thugs roam the countryside looking to torture and hunt down "mechas," capturing them for a "Flesh Fair," a carnival billed as a celebration of life devoted to "demolishing artificiality" and securing a truly human future.
David's creator Professor Hobby (William Hurt), also stands back as this tragedy unfolds, more curious about his experiment and its commercial possibilities than he is concerned for its consequences. It's a scathing rendition of America's ostrich-like attitudes about technology, as it unleashes AI, fertility, genetic and other technologies on an unprepared world, all in the name of progress, health, or convenience.
In fact, as in The Matrix and almost every other movie which deals with AI, the film delineates a world already sliding into civil war: humans ("orgas," for organic) caught between technological and environmental issues, feel increasingly endangered by the intelligent machines that are more adaptable than they are. It's interesting that almost no artist or futurist looks at AI and the future and sees much good.
As a renegade sex robot called Gigolo Joe (the phenomenal Jude Law) explains to David, whom he's befriended, humanity has belatedly come to regret devloping AI machines unthinkingly. "They made us too smart, too fast, too many," Joe says, perhaps presciently.
Dark and ominous from the beginning, the movie now turns wrenching. Wickedly, Martin has urged his mother to read aloud the story of Pinocchio, with which David becomes obsessed. He sees the parallels between his own story and the wooden puppet's, and he sets out at all costs to find the Blue Fairy who will transform him into a real boy so that his missing "mother" will love him as much as she loves her biological son. But by now, David is no witless, gullible Pinocchio. He is obsessed and resourceful, and has evolved in decidedly non-Disney ways.
The shadow of Stanley Kubrick, who conceived the movie based on a short story by Brian Aldriss, falls darkly across this ground-breakingly inventive tale. There are embedded visual and thematic references to A Clockwork Orange, and 2001: A Space Odyssey, along with Star Wars and E.T. There's even a sly homage to Pinocchio's "Pleasure Island." And the story draws heavily from the fairy tale genre, especially all those Grimm's fables about kids being abandoned in dark and menacing woods. Kubrick apparently spent many hours talking with Spielberg about the movie, but died before he could tackle it.
But Spielberg really honors him here. This movie is as disquieting as it is eerie, gorgeous and thoughtful; it dares to take on the serious issue of humanity's pell-mell rush to fiddle with human life -- from AI to robotics to genomics -- without realistically or carefully considering the consequences. You can almost hear the technologists of the future explaining why they couldn't possibly have foreseen the impact of the forces their predecessors unleashed.
When Mary Shelley sounded this warning in Frankenstein, technology was primitive and noninvasive, still a somewhat abstract fear. The world in whic David "lives" is not only imaginable but, by many accounts, is almost upon us, at least in terms of the possibilities of AI and the rapid evolution of computer systems into a sort of species.
Speielberg reminds us that we aren't ready. Not only may many humans get hurt, but so may the new machines, along with nature itself. It's a provocative twist on a big and powerful premise. What are we? What are we going to be?
There's a Freudian twist or two as well. What David yearns for is what the shrinks tell us we all want at some point -- pure, undiluted love from and time with Mom. David's fight for that is heroic, down to a shocking and unexpected series of endings, certain to be controversial and upsetting to many. (Parents who bring little kids to what they think is just another Spielberg yarn will be in for an unpleasant surprise). David develops some less attractive human qualities as well. Spielberg seems to be suggesting that it's all too easy to ultimately create machines that behave like humans, but we might not like the results.
This ability, he seems to warn, distracts us, lets us off the hook, prevents us from asking the most signficant question: What does it mean to be human, and what kind of humans do we want to be? That question doesn't often come up when it comes to technology, where the question is more apt to be: how can we create more cool stuff?
A.I. is shocking and haunting, beautiful and unique. For all his sometimes icky Boomer sentimentality, Spielberg's ability to grow artistically, to make deeper, richer, more inventive movies, qualifies in my book as an epic acheivement. When it comes to science, this movie begins where 2001 leaves off, and then goes a galaxy or two farther.
"A.I. is shocking and haunting, beautiful and unique. For all his sometimes icky Boomer sentimentality, Spielberg's ability to grow artistically, to make deeper, richer, more inventive movies, qualifies in my book as an epic acheivement. When it comes to science, this movie begins where 2001 leaves off, and then goes a galaxy or two farther. " If this film represents artistic growth something needs to be done. The movie contained enough plot for approx. 15 minutes of lame TV crap. I feel as though 2.5 hours of my precious youth have been taken away forever!! I would have walked out 15 mintues into the film except for the fact I couldn't believe that someone could make an entire film that sucked so bad. GAWWD! For the crime of making and releasing a film this bad, Spielbergs lands and cattle should be confiscated and he should be forced to wander the world cold and alone. Or to quote the Simpson's, "Worst movie, ever!" I can't believe you liked it.
Its about time slashcode got some AI to remove all the trolls that make it suck so bad.
Wasn't this concept already covered in a movie from the 80s?
This movie could have been better and held more to the Kurbrik style, if there wasn't that damn narration in some of the Kubrik style scenes. Why do we need are hands held like little babies. There was a rerelease of BladeRunner awhile back were there was some voice over narration put in. I sucked because it took away the mystique of the scene it was narrating over and thus breaking the chain. If Speilberg could have lessened some of the narrative I think this movie would be a lot closer to what Kurbrick had in mind.
I'm sorry, but I definitly not remember *them* referring to themselves as Robots neither as Aliens. In fact they talk about David being specially important and unique as he is the only one who actually had a contact with the original inhabitants ( or some simialr word). Also, they looked more like the aliens in Brief encounters of the third kind, and like the Asguards, with thin bodies and 7 ft heights.
First of all, pacing. There isn't any. The movie drags on, and on, and just when you thought it was done, it drags on some more. I would have been been fidgeting if I'd been an immortal robot programmed to simulate engagement with crap movies.
The soundtrack is obtrusive. Its forever telling you exactly how you should be feeling. (David's in trouble! Sad! The yokels at the demolition derby are throwing rotten fruit at a bad guy! Happy!)
The children are one dimensionally malevolent. Its a common-place that children are monsters, but they're complex monsters. These kids were apparently from the Cybertronics "Damian - finally, a child you feel good about starving and beating!" product line.
There isn't really a clear rendering of how David's mind works. He's emotionally needy, and well-behaved, and, um, hmmn. The movie's vague with regard to where he resembles humans and where he is other.
Cybertronics sensibly keeps its main R&D office in a half-submerged skyscraper in a drowned city. No doubt this makes it easier to attract and retain employees of a certain cast of mind (ie, romantics and those on the run from the law) but I wonder if its really logistically practical.
Spoiler warning:
I had high hopes for the aliens. I thought it would be a good ending if they set David up with a simulacrum of his mother with whom he could spend the rest of eternity, oblivious to the strangeness of his situation. I thought it would be good if the aliens remained remote, curious archaeologists. But no... they turn out to have soft english voices chock full of cloying world-sadness. They're just awfully impressed with humanity and wish they could be like us. Using their essentially unlimited technology they can resurrect the dead but, um, they time-expire faster than a big mac.
In short, as far a golem stories go, rank this not with Frankenstein, Pinochio, or Golem XIV (great novella by Stanislaw Lem), but with "Hawkman versus the Death Droids!!" or the manual for your autonomous robotic lawnmower.
-Zachary Mason
Now, this was a _really_ simple robot, designed to deliver a few different kind of radiation pulses as cancer treatments. How are we going to be able to program safeguards into super advanced robots with emotions and human level intelligence?
Isaac Asimov wrote a lot of entertaining stories about intelligent robots that had to obey people, couldn't kill, and the like. These were fun stories, and I recommend I, Robot to anyone who wants some light reading (though Foundation is better.). Just don't treat it as gospel truth, and remember, other writers have had completely different views of Artificial Intelligence. (My favorite is, Fondly Farenheit by Alfred Bester.)
Uhm, you're right, they are evolved robots shaped like humans (go figure why they did that, i would have prefered if they chose flying sphere or something ;-)
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The story featured in Wired is the original one--it was first published in 1969. He wrote two sequels, "Supertoys When Winter Comes" and "Supertoys in Other Seasons" thirty years later. AI incorporates at least one element from the latter.
I said this same thing in response to another post but since so many people seem be under the same impression (including michael), I've reposted it.
The ending of the movie (after David takes the copter into the water) is not a Spielberg add-on as many people have said. Kubrick had it in the script since the beginning. I'm sure Kubrick would have done it a bit differently but Spielberg didn't just tack it on to give the film a better ending.
Also, the beings at the end are not aliens. They're super advanced robots. Gigolo Joe alludes to this when he says that robots will be the only ones left when the world ends but Spielberg does a very poor job of communicating it. I believe if you listen closely they say David is their ancestor but I can totally understand the confusion since they chose for some reason to make the future AI look a lot like the idea of aliens that we all know.
The ending (after he goes into the ocean) has apparentlly been in the script since Kubrick started developing it. It went through various revisions but it's not a Spielberg add-on, as much as it might seem so.
Also, they're not aliens. They're super-advanced robots. Spielberg does a horrible job of communicating that but it's a fact.
David was real for me. It may seem lame or ridiculous that David, the AI, could become a real boy. But I was caught in the illusion. The movie haunts me still. It was so well executed, and yet in some ways so understated. Isn't that the signature of a great film? The ability to haunt it's viewers with the moral issues the film stirs up? My dreams the night after watching AI were profound and deeply disturbing. A poor boy, abandoned by his mother, but keeping his love. I wonder what an AI/2 could continue the story.... Wouldn't there be any interest in how the human race became extinct?
I could post this in response to about 500 messages talking about how "one earth day" is stupid. It had nothing to do with one earth day. The point was that once the person goes to sleep, and loses consciousness, they're gone. If you wanted to sit there with coffee and stay up for a really long time, you could. Yeah it was sorta lame, but not as bad as people here are making it out to be. It does make sense on some level.
You're full of it. So you did CS and philosophy at uni, now you're qualified to make a bunch of blanket statements about what is and is not possible 200 hundred or so years from now, based on how you think AI works ? I did a degree in AI, and all I really learnt was the depth of our ignorance. AI doesn't work at all yet, almost everything known in AI today is useless at predicting how "real" AI will work.
Your arguments are like some caveman saying "hah, they could never make flying machines that go over 200 miles an hour - if you tried flapping a wing that fast it would break, unless it was too heavy to even get in the air in the first place".
You're "facts" are too stupid to delve into in any depth, but just as an example, doesn't it bother you that your arguments to support #1 and #4 are completely contradictorary. If an AI would have to be based on a neural net, then maybe it would be hard to make it "love" someone.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
you silly fuck. they used the word "mecha", not "robot". go fuck yourself.
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I checked the f--king box and that means no Jon Katz! Ever! Not even when that commie pinhead michael sneaks in on weekends! Got it?
No pinko whining about technology.
No global warming sky is falling rubbish.
No false maudlin techno worry-warting that implies that if we don't have pseuds like Katz fretting about it it will soon destroy the ecology, all public schools, Salon (whoops)... and we'll all be eating red meat and GM fries served by a single large MicroMcDonaldsLockheedSoft conglomerate run by Newt Gingrich.
I wrote parts of this stuff
...if I ticked the box I would NEVER see anything by Jon Katz again!!!!
Actually, I don't believe there is ANY DNA in hair, unless you pull it out by the roots and get the living cells that create the hair. That kinda pissed me off, although at that point, the movie was just a waste of film anyhow.
-- Raven
What, you mean that aside from some ham-handed changes by spielburg, it's 100% an *UNFINISHED* kubrick film? Let's face it, about the biggest change Speilburg made was to turn alcohol into coffee. Note the wierd obsession with "making coffee". The original was about an alchoholic mother and a robotic son who learned to mix a drink exactly how she wanted it... pleasing her and destroying her at the same time. Turn it to coffee and you're left scratching your head. "Huh?"
His other big influence on the film was that pathetic batman 4 neon chase sequence. I highly doubt stan was looking for something quite that... garish. It clashed so badly with the rest of the film.
The whole thing screams "rough draft". The fact it works at all is because he's been writing at it since 1969! But he could never get it to "work" the way he wanted it... so it got shelved again and again.
The ending(s) especially could use some work. His story-advisor was dismissed because she was adamant that the final ending (losing his mother forever) made for a horrible story. The fact that the plot hacks needed to MAKE him regain his mother for one day were horribly ugly lend credence to the idea that it was a quick idea that hadn't been well thought out.
Kubrick tackled an idea that got too big, too unwieldy. It might have made an interesting collaberation, but he was too enamoured with certain 'scenes' that he invisioned and kept trying to hang a movie around them. "It has to have this scene. It has to end This way." (which it did... them in bed together... hello oedepus) to the exclusion of a coherent story. He asked for help from many people, and dismissed them if they trod on any sacred cows. Arthur C. Clarke got dumped for his "Hey, let's take them out into the galaxy and have robots colonize known worlds... Rightfully so, I think. The last segment was already too overloaded with changes from the underwater fade-out that it killed the suspension of disbelief.
Speilburg did kubrick a great disservice by filming A.I. "as-is" and not finishing the unfinished parts. He did an even greater disservice by using "John Williams' Patented Emotional Glue" to patch together the disjoints, leaving a rather nasty taste in my mouth as I left the theater. (I hate when they use formula-stock tone sequences to cause emotional response. Forced tears are doubly ugly when someone else is doing the forcing.)
--Dan
I saw this movie basically the same as michael did. Even with the obligatory suspension-of-disbelief, I couldn't fathom why these robots weren't hard-wired to do, or not do, the very basic things named in the 3 laws of robotics (of which I was previously unaware). It pretty well ruined the movie for me, because nearly ever significant plot event is absolutely preposterous.
/was/ a prostitute), and Teddy, who I felt was the real hero of the story, and to me represented the only success of this mechanized future.
As for Katz's perspective... Well, you'd think this movie made him go out and join the neo-Luddites. I can see him hanging framed copies of Bill Joy essays right now.
My original thoughts...
Geez, isn't that little kid IRRITATING or what?! After seeing this, and Sixth Sense, I'm likely to avoid any future movies with this kid in a starring role. In fact, every character in this movie was largely a reprehensible fellow except Joe (who anti-freedom types might not have appreciated either, being that he
MoNsTeR
Well, the future civilization is neat, and not entirely happy, if you think about whose civilization it is. I agree that there was no point to giving David what he wants. In fact, realizing that you can't always have what you want would have been a good moral to illustrate.
Before reading the comments here, I never thought the thought. They just scream 'greys' in form. But I agree that the ending makes more sense when you think of them as future robots. So if that was the intent, then it was just a horrible mistake in visuals. I mean Really Really Horrible.
I guess there's no point in not talking directly -- anyone reading the thread has seen the movie or doesn't care about spoilers.
Why do the robots look like stereotypical aliens? For the same reason why aliens are depicted that way -- the slender body and big head are signs of beings that are specialized for thinking rather than physical activity. With their antigravity tech or whatever it is, there is no need for them to do physical work.
As an append, the movie should be watched as a >robot's< fairy tale. It makes much more sense and is thoroughly enjoyable in that context.
* As is generally the case, my opinions do not reflect those of my employer.
I'm about to reveal my stupidity: I missed the fact that the beings at the end of the story were evolved from (indigenous?) A.I.s and were not extraterrestrial in origin, if indeed that's the case. And that distinction certainly puts a different spin on the story. So take anything else I have to say in such context as you deem appropriate. One of the problems with telling this kind of story is pacing -- sometimes the dialogue and the underlying ideas are carrying the freight, not action and noise. If you think you're suddenly about to see the pace pick up and, in fact, it winds up slowing down even more (as happens in this movie toward the end), it's distracting and disappointing to have mentally prepared yourself for one type of situation only to be confronted with the opposite. I think this shortcoming is probably a first for Spielberg, who maintains pretty even pacing through a story but has never tried to follow through on another director's creative vision so thoroughly. For me this movie has proven very provocative intellectually in a way Spielberg has never managed before, and after I chew on it a while longer, I'll almost certainly go back and see it again.
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
There's another sci-fi story out there somewhere, not necessarily by Aldiss, but possibly, it's been a long time since I read it, featuring a boy (a real one) and his robot teddy bear, but its plot goes in an entirely different direction.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
If they'd stayed true to the original story there wouldn't have been a character for Jude Law to play, or at least not that character.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I miss the mindless ranting of the Taco Lord....
--- http://foo.ca
I found the movie enjoyable, but not nearly as thought provoking or as well executed as it could have been.
.." and I am horrified that they think "this movie begins where 2001 left off, and then goes a galaxy or two farther."
Despite the strong presence of Kubrick's influence (the movie would have been horrible otherwise), there were countless episodes of Spielberg-isms akin to those things that made me dislike Jurassic Park so much. Gratuitious tear-jerkers, cutsey-laughs, and all of the other crap that's thrown in to make the movie more marketable to the typical McDonald's customer and general-purpose merchandisers.
I was also disappointed with the trivialization of Kubrick's role in forming this - it's quite clear from the movie that his role was much more than "talking [about it] with Spielberg".
And I totally disagree with michael and JK's conclusion at the end that this is any indication of "Spielberg's ability to grow artistically
No way. The movie was decent, and I'm glad I saw it, but to even compare this to achievements like 2001, or even Speilberg's real achievements like Jaws, Close Encounters or E.T. is nonsense.
It's a good flick, but it's no epic. Get over it, boys.
I gotta say that you missed the entire point of Starship Troopers (the movie) - as I viewed it anyway. It's not a retelling of the book, it's a parody of it. Heinlein's book, at one level anyway, is an advertisement for an anti-democratic, military dominated state, and the film neatly skewers this with such deadpan subtlety that I'm still not convinced that the actors were in on the joke, let alone the studio execs that funded the film.
I found Heinlein's book repulsive, myself, but I'm aware that this isn't a universally held opinion. Paul Verhoeven, the movie's director, certainly seemed to think so.
Go you big red fire engine!
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
A.I. - Ho hum, Asimov's Frankenstein complex is in full force. Despite nearly every robotics (a word Asimov coined), despite every robotics major ANYwhere having read his robot novels, somehow they forgot the laws of robotics. D'OH!!
You know, this constant harping on the "Laws of Robotics" every time someone writes a story about robots really bugs me.
First off, Asimov wasn't doing research into robotics, he was writing stories. FICTION stories. His conclusions shouldn't be the be-all and end-all of artificial intelligence research. The three laws are flawed, as even Asimov himself admitted when he was forced to create a Zeroeth Law for his own stories.
Secondly, were we to decide that the Three Laws were indeed necessary and sufficient, that doesn't guarantee that we could implement them in any meaningful way, or that we'd do so bug-free. A robot's program is going to be incredibly complex, and no human endeavor that complex will be free of mistakes.
Hell, if nothing else, can't a story be good because it serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers of NOT following Asimov's train of thought? We made them too smart, too fast, too many to properly restrict them? We needed them *NOW*, not after perfecting Asimov circuits?
David was obviously built to not deliberately hurt humans, he says that he'll "get in trouble". When he pulls Martin into the pool, it doesn't look like he's trying to hurt him; it looks like he's unaware that doing so WILL hurt him. Asimov circuits won't help a robot not cause inadvertent harm, even if implemented perfectly.
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I thought it was going to end when, stuck
in the helicopter/submarince thingy, david was repeating the same sentence over and over again to
the blue fairy. There is something beautifully melancolic about that kind of eternal yearning.
Maybe i'm just a weirdo...
When the next ice age returns (we are still in the
ice age era), the oceans will fall as they
acculate in ice sheets, and New Your City will
be dry inland again as it has been several times
the past million years.
"the idea that a robot boy could neither eat spinach nor get wet without having some kind of short-circuit is simply stupid"
No, it isn't actually. From what I saw, David is almost (if not totaly) built using optical technology. There's nothing to short out! The reason the spinach caused so much trouble was because it jammed up physical joints and may have blocked some optical signals.
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What the heck happened to his father? His mother is all he talks about. It is so oedipal, it's rediculous. The movie even ends with his mother and him in bed. He calls his mother "Mommy" after he is imprinted and completely ignores the father. He pays more attention to his mean brother. Wouldn't his programmers make it so he was imprinted to 2 people? Thus his father becomes a static character that is quite flat. David calls his father "Henry" the whole movie.
As far as I can tell, this was all intentional. David is attached to his mother because Henry never went through the imprinting protocol. I think David was supposed to be brought up in a two-parent family, but since Henry never imprinted, David assumed the only parent he has was his mother. Henry treated David as nothing more than a machine on several occasions and it was pretty obvious to me that he was the one who had the real problem with the idea of a loving AI. And what's all this about David ending up in bed with his mother? That's a pretty normal thing for a kid David's age. He was just lying there! Geesh.
David breaks easily from a little spinach and yet he lasts 2000 years frozen in the water. He dives into water twice and that doesn't hurt his circuits at all.
If you looked carefully while they were taking the spinach out, it would appear David is almost all (maybe totaly) optical. Water doesn't matter. The only reason the veggies didn't agree with him was likely because it jammed up some joints or blocked some signal paths.
Also how, exactly, are the robots powered? This is a small issue because this is sci-fi and you have to suspend your belief but come on!
Possibly with a small nuclear-type of thing. That would work pretty nicely and last a terribly long time without refueling. Also, I think the robot who discovered him actually charged him up or something when he touched him (remember how David jerked suddenly?). So the power supply may not have lasted 2,000 years.
Anyway, I loved the movie. I admit I was a bit bored while actually watching it, but on the drive home my friends and I pulled it apart and linked it all together. As far as I'm concerned this may be the best movies since 2001. And I suspect that, like 2001, it will be very very highly regarded in a few years even though right now most people seem to hate it.
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
I sympathize with people who are into computers and scream about the computer scenes in movies like, say, Mission Impossible. However, saying that basic CS knowledge makes some commentary about incredibly advanced artifical intelligence look silly is just stupid. You, I, and the rest of the world have no idea how that stuff actually would work inside. Sure, maybe they can reinstall his software, and in the process reduce him back to an infant with no memories, effectively killing him. Or maybe something else. The point is YOU know nothing that says what they show in the movie is impossible, or even unlikely.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
There is significant evidence that ice ages have begun on a much shorter timescale than 2000 years. I believe the last one went from a climate that was warmer than today's (we're still in a little mini ice age now) to a full-blown ice age in something like 100 years.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Are you kidding? The ending, though a bit too long, is way cool, and absolutely heartbreaking. Besides, if they leave at that point, they'll miss the stunning Coney Island sequence, as impressive a bit of filmmaking as Spielberg's ever done.
Hiawatha Bray
Tech Reporter
Boston Globe
Didn't you at least find Doogie Himmler just a little disconcerting? You should have!
I seem to have gotten a bit off the topic of A.I. I have one pet peeve about all these reviews for it - people keep on blindly bringing up Asimov's "laws of robotics", as if they were some immutable thing in the Real World.
1. His laws of robotics were solidly based in his series of *fictional* stories.
2. *THINK* for a second! You have this A.I. that you're programming, and you decide that the three Laws of Robotics need to be ingrained at a basic level in your piece of hardware. How do you write these requirements? To just say them in English is one thing, but to make them as basic to the Robot's being as possible you need to *code* this up, in no ambiguous terms. Anything less gives robots wiggle room. I say the Three Laws Of Robotics cannot be implemented as written. Period.
3. Don't get me wrong - David's reaction pulling Martin into the pool was a sign of incredibly bad programming. I'm just saying don't call it a Three Laws failure.
echo Prpv a\'rfg cnf har cvcr | tr Pacfghnrvp Cnpstuaeic
The narrator does say that his power supply dies out between when he goes into the infinite loop and the time the robot archeologists come upon him. You see them explicitly do something to power him back on.
The Doctor pretty clearly states that David has passed a test at this point; they made it difficult to make it a good test. Also, note that it wasn't just a random building in Manhattan. Dr. Know's poem very clearly pointed him at the building "where the lions weep" - and that's how he chose the building, finding that landmark.
You missed it. They're David's own descendants, not aliens.
No they didn't. There was a *huge* cavern dug out in the remnants of Manhattan, and they had just come across David's remains there under the ice.
I agree that this is almost pure bullshit, although I could see some law of nature being connected to when a person goes to sleep--if the future society had somehow discovered the true nature of the human soul. This would also get around the whole "memory doesn't work like that" problem... But it still felt contrived while I sat there, and that's almost more important than whether the idea can be explained in the lobby outside the theater afterwards.
They were almost certainly doing it to associate the image of the moon with fear of capture in robots' minds. Note that later on in the movie they explicitly show this effect in action - "is it the moon? I can't tell... let's go the other way." It's a terror tactic, and that scene finally made me feel ok about them having used that funky airship thing. As for the idea that robots should be able to tell the difference, keep in mind that they're mostly still learning about the world... I get that impression, anyway. It seems like they don't stay fugitives very long, basically.
Not if the country they lived in had extremely strict population limitations.
This is weird. I came out of the movie thinking it was sucktacular, but the more I read this forum and other reviews and think about things, the more the things that seemed annoying get explained, and the better the movie seems.
echo Prpv a\'rfg cnf har cvcr | tr Pacfghnrvp Cnpstuaeic
That's quite, quite true. Having seen many of kubric's films, the only two that have anything intertaining in them is Dr Strangelove and Clockwork orange. Lolita does have a "wacky cot scene" in it, but that's about the closest that it gets to entertainment.
Of course, kubric never actually raised an interesting issue in any of his movies, so I'm inclined to regard them mostly as a waste of time. (If I want to contemplate the beauty of the universe set to Wagner, I'll get a CD of wagner's music and go to the beach and contemplate the eternal pounding of the waves, or something like that).
But I do agree with you, kubric spent quite a lot of time making movies that don't entertain at all.
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- C. Sagan
Precisely. They talked about David as an "original" robot, which made it seem to me that the robots we were seeing weren't created directly by humans, but instead were created by other robots who were created by other robots, who somewhere down the line had been created by humans, but none of these original robots had survived, so there wasn't any lasting direct contact or knowledge of humans.
Umm, you must have missed it but A.I. takes place many years in the future. I do not refute your argument that it is extremely difficult to replicate the human brain. That is a no brainer. Your argument, however seems to assume that our knowledge of the workings of the brain and our computing power will not advance in the next hundred or so years. No I cannot tell you how to imprint, but I am sure the scientists that designed David IN THE FUTURE could.
If you cannot accept that something we cannot do today will be possible tomorrow then I suggest you NEVER watch or read sci-fi again. That is the whole point of sci-fi.
Q.
Don't trust him at all.
BIG SPOILERS - don't read until after seeing the movie.
The ending has all the answers. I think the ending should have been the beginning, and then have all the movie shown in retrospect as the AIs of the far future try to put the puzzle all together. Like the book CITY by Clifford Simak.
There were some very cool ideas in the ending, especially the concept that our beings belong to a time and place, and thus they can't be reproduced. This is why I've always thought an afterlife can't exist. Our personalities exist in relation to the details of the time and space in which we live. Without the familiar, we'd go insane.
Also, I've always pictured AI/robots being our descendants. I think the far future AIs know that David is too strongly programmed for one purpose, and they can not overcome that programming. So they provide him a merciful ending.
But that says something about us too. I think one reason why mankind hasn't rushed out to explore space is because the programming really isn't there in our genes to be space explorers. Oh, there are individuals that want it, but the drive doesn't exist in the crowd. The amount of money we've spent on Stealth bombers and fighters could have let us colonize the Moon or Mars. The technology, money and resources are there, just not the will.
If you look at the movie you start seeing that all the beings, expect the far future AIs, are severely limited by their programming. We don't see enough of the far future AIs to know about them, but we have to assume that it is a limitation that they have overcome.
Jim Harris
I got the exact same impression, so I had absolutely no intention to see this movie. I guess it just goes to show that Hollywood deception isn't due one-sided malice, it's just random incompetence.
Or maybe that's what I'm supposed to think now.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Totally off topic, but just in case you want to hear a beautiful rendition of "The Stolen Child" check out Heather Alexander's album Wanderlust Some very nice fiddle work on it as well.
rark!
C'mon, Michael, don't try to pretend you knew that the "aliens" were descended from mecha, but nevertheless chose to use some weird semantic distinction. I missed it too, but at least I can admit it.
We all know Katz is an AI, or at the very least a rather messy and verbose Perl script. Sure, with Katz there's something of an emphasis on the A, not so much on the I, but still. Having the Katz AI review a movie about AI is too perfect an opportunity to pass up, so they sneaked it onto the main page. I can live with that, can't you?
The last peice, 2000 years ahead, was one of the most emotionally charged and draining points of the entire movie. That was the ending that Kubrik wanted, though he probably would have made the new mechas a bit different.
I was really astonished by Speilbergs ability to imitate Kubrik's style. The entire movie looks and feels like a Kubrik, from the sudden 270 degree plot twists, the slow, long visuals, and the entertwined plots.
I won't argue that the movie could have ended with the Blue Faerie and been great, but the last fifteen minutes was an emotional rollercoaster that made it hard for me to get out of my seat.
Chris
-- I need more coffee. It's Monday. There is no such thing as enough coffee on a Monday.
It is a shame that Stanley Kubrick didn't live to make this movie. This is not Steven Spielberg's style. He ruined a potentially great movie.
Jon Katz liked it! Nuff said.
No, I would suggest leave it when David later returns to the sea floor. When the camera pulls back and the narrator kicks in again. That's when you should leave. The rest is a ridiuculous attempt at a happy ending with no regard for the theme of the rest of the movie.
Sorry, Spielberg, but not everything ends happily.
Anm
Just because the mother couldn't doesn't mean it wasn't possible. I'm sure Cybertronics would have had piles of tests a tweeks ready and waiting for David, had he ever showed up.
Before reading the comments here, I never thought the thought. They just scream 'greys' in form. But I agree that the ending makes more sense when you think of them as future robots. So if that was the intent, then it was just a horrible mistake in visuals. I mean Really Really Horrible.
Anm
SPOILAGE
Not only would you have the aspect of "can't always have what you want", but you'd leave room for etenral hope. The boy is praying forever. How beautiful, yet sad, is that?
Anyway, after reading some comments here, I'm now thinking of the future beings as future robots (2000 years hense), and I am much a bit happier with the ending. I hope the producers meant it that way, and just made Horrible choice in visuals. It would make sense, in being foreshadowed by Joe. But it still doesn't add to the basic theme.
Anm
A bigger problem is--- why does spinach break David, but being under water does not? Could David have been drinking all the water he wanted to?
(I'm going to ignore the aliens.)
Those weren't aliens. They were mechas. It turns out they do outlive the human race.
"There are no cool guys in musicals." -- Coach McGuirk
This movie was okay... but not as great as I would expect it. First
off, I honestly believed that Spielberg was going to give it that
Spielberg touch, as seen in "E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial" and his earlier
films. I mean this was right up his alley... (it's a fantasy film,
centered around a robotic small boy, on a quest to become
human... this story had Spielberg written all over it!!!) But
unfortunately, he didn't uses his genius in this case. He pretty much
tried to become Kubrick to create a Kubrick film!!! And I honestly
think that was the major mistake of the film. Now, i know that the
film was originally intended to be done by Kubrick. Matter of fact, I
heard about this film 8 years ago, anticipating to see it done by
Kubrick. Also, I know that Spielberg and Kubrick were great friends,
which I'm sure influenced Spielberg to do what he did. But come on.
Spielberg and Kubrick are downright opposite of each other in
cinematic form and technique! Imagine E.T. if it were done by Kubrick
and Clockwork Orange done by Spielberg! Spielberg did archive to
convey a Kubrick feel, which was intriguing to see at times, but overall it seemed forced. This movie would have been great if
Spielberg had been Spielberg. But, unfortunately, it ended up OK and
confused...
-slams
Personally, I thought it was a beautiful film, well shot, well directed, and well acted. Haley Joel Osmont will have a good future for himself, if he doesn't end up getting tossed aside when he's no longer cute (MacCauley Culkin, anyone?).
I found that much of the film would alienate an audience, with the somewhat eery ways David learned to integrate himself into the family. Watching him constantly strive for affection and love was exhausting. The ending, while not exciting, was the most emotional part of the movie.
Normal American audiences like it when the story is told to them, and this movie, unfortunately, did that with narration. Like I've heard from others, Kubrick probably wouldn't have wanted that, but considering the number of children that were in the theater when I saw the movie, perhaps it's a good thing it was there. Besides, I doubt most of those kids will understand what much of the movie was about.
There were a lot of similarities to other Kubrick films -- musical score reminiscent of 2001, awkward silences reminiscent of 2001 and Eyes Wide Shut. Spielberg has said in the past that he really likes doing movies like this, but has to do the Jurassic Parks to pay the bills.
Here's hoping we can get more interesting cinema like this from Spielberg.
"What's with that garbage about space/time, not being able to clone for more than one day, etc. hooey? Couldn't they clone her every day? It's not like they had her memories anyway."
the whole point of the space/time hooey was to explain why his mother _did_ obviously have memories of David and the house, etc. A mere clone wouldn't.
"David was poorly designed."
_exactly_. he was a prototype. A test. David was an extremely flawed model because he is so dependant on his emotions. Think about how devoted he would have to be given the transition to the third act. His need for his mother's love became so crippling to his electronic psyche that it precluded every single other concern.
Whether or not they were mechas or aliens I'd like to give you one point of comparison.. Mission to mars, that *lovely* *wonderful* [/sarcasm] movie where we meet the very sad alien at the end.. *that's* the alien these mechas reminded me off, and it took me completely out of the movie.. and hey, they ended up doing exactly what the one in the mission to mars movie did, that is, whine about the dead race, and wait for a [descendant/survivor] to show them what they had lost.
:)
it wasn't a matter of me not "getting it".. it was a matter of me not caring after that point.
and through the whole movie, the cgi was great.. as soon as that flying half-cube showed up, the rest of the cgi looked way too cartoonish.
Anyway, I dont want to bitch about this movie anymore
- Marooned
------ Poo-tee-weet?
I would pick when the narrator comes again, and you zoom out/in on the ice. Man, the first thought that crossed my mind when the next scene began was "Oh jesus what the f*ck is this, the borg?!"
first words out of my friend's mouth: "Oh great.. f*cking aliens"
Commentary heard from the people in front of me (a bunch of 10 year ol' boys): "finally something cool happens!"
honestly, I've never had such a good movie ruined completely by its ending.. I mean, there's been some terrible endings in a lot of movies, but nothing where the ending just destroyed the whole movie, even the good parts, because it makes you focus on itself so much.
- Marooned
------ Poo-tee-weet?
And they were indeed big ETs running around.
The Spielberg ending of the movie was pathetic, and if it weren't specifically explained (in long, boring, overwrought detail) that they weren't magical ET's and were instead magical robots, well then you wouldn't have posted that meager defense of the worst hollywood ending I've seen in a long time. But they were obviosly ET/close encounters of the 3rd kind rip-offs. What does it matter if Spielberg calls them robots??? He could have called them ducks or goats, but THEY WERE ALIEN RIP OFFS!
And the pseudo-psychological-metaphysical-nonsensical bullsh*t where it's explained that a day and/or that sleep has some connection with the universe at a fundamental level... Blah Blah F*cking Blah...
The movie was good, and had a decent ending. I just should have walked out when the aliens showed up.
-Ben
Because you are a computer scientist, you think David is a "computer" in a robot suit. You also think that David has been "programmed" to fall in love with his "mother" and that "mother" is a variable which can be set at a specific point in the program.
,and an important point, "Love" is his motivation (computers don't have motivation currently, but could be programmed to have one and to self-evolve to this goal).
But David is robot, not a computer, and is obviously part evolving hardware. Just like humans and ducks. And just like humans and ducks, they fall in love with a certain thing at a certain time (first living thing after they hatch or person who takes care of them and whose voice they recognize before they are born.) There's no set list of actions which David must do, just a couple guidelines to follow (don't do this, it isn't safe/right/ etc...)
David is more like a hard-wired machine in this respect than like a general purpose computer. It's like a continuously re-written imprint, that's evolving as david learns. Which is why David cannot be re-written... without being effectively destroyed. The analogy is to ducks, but there's no reason a robot couldn't be this way. It's just that general purpose computers aren't built that way NOW.
-Ben
Facts of the movie are:
1. They were robots from 2000 years into the future, who had inherited the Earth from humans, but humans no longer existed (for one reason or another).
2. This is supposed to be a deep part of the plot, telling us that in the future, robots will be the only things left of human origin on the Earth. And they will look nothing like what we would have built.
But goddamn, they looked like close encounters mixed with ET, acted like them (notice the strange way they "touched" each other like ET) and they were magical (notice how they talked about the psycho-consiousness-space-time sh*t).
Just like ET.
Thus, look like a duck, act like a duck, quack like a duck, and you can call it a robot all you want, but they were aliens indeed.
-Ben
Okay, first, mine. Then, a link to another review which may be a bit beyond the average Slashdot readers full comprehension. Both are filled with spoilers.
WARNING: Plot is discussed. This is more of an analysis of aspects of the movie, not a review. You should probably read this after you see the film.
Rating: 1 out of 3 thumbs up.
AI can be summed up in one word: cute. If you've seen ET, you've already seen AI, only AI is worse because it tries to do more, but fails. For example, when David becomes frozen in ice, that would have made a fair ending; not the best ending, but a decent one. Speilberg, though, is not content to let the viewer consider such a bleak, realistic fate, but gives the audience something that is beyond reason. As I point out later on, it only makes sense that David end, frozen in ice forever, but Spielberg wants a feel good ending that will keep Joe Average coming back for more.
The problems with the film really begin in the opening scene. An AI 'scientist' is explaining how he plans to make a more human Mecca, by making it love. He believes that if it can learn to love, then all other human characteristics will follow. Aside from the silliness of this proposition, the problem is the same problem Asimov's bots had: adversarial human attitudes. The humans want to make the AI love because they believe that will make sure that it will stay in line, not harm humans, and such. Spielberg, either by accident on purpose, doesn't state this explicitly, which hides this error from the smart but underinformed viewer.
You may be saying, what's so adversarial about keeping AIs from killing and why would such a thing be bad. The problem is two folded. On one hand, no system you try to implement is going to be fool proof. The AI is a lot smarter than any human (or at least can get a lot smarter) and can use what would look like magic to us. Secondly, regardless of smartness, the AI will face a philosophical crises that will probably be the end of it. For example, David is taught to love humans, but humans, from the start, did not love him by forcing him to love rather than trusting him.
BTW, this love thing is his undoing. Much like Asimovian bots that become stuck in logic loops, David becomes stuck in a love loop. The end of the film lets him out of it, because that's the happy ending, not the one that makes the most sense.
Okay, so if you can't be adversarial and lay down some Asimovian laws or something, what can you do. You can create Friendly AI. There is quite a lot written about this topic, but the best place to start is here. Please, click this link; don't just post like an idiot that I have no clue about AI. For many of you, this will also dispel myths about Classical AI and lead you to new ideas. Just in case you missed it, you can learn about Friendly AI here.
Now, I did mention that the movie was cute, which means it has some interesting parts. For example, Dr. Know was an interesting information retrieval system, though pretty dumb considering they could create David and Google gives back better info. Also, the Transhumans at the end of the film look cool, but act far too much like humans. BTW, that's Joe at the end of the film who talks to David, not an alien. My friend who went with me to the movie seemed a bit confused about this, but hopefully she'll get it later.
For those who you who have read 'Super Toys Last All Summer', the short story this film is based on, you'll notice when the story ends and the film begins, and at that point the plot shifts to a different story: Pinocchio. The parallels are almost embarrassing. Also, there is a hint of Wizard of Oz in there (think about what is said about Dr. Know at the end and you'll get it). There are probably more, but I haven't caught them yet.
So, to sum up, is this an SF classic: no. Does it make you think: only if you don't know what AI is. Is this a cute summer movie to take Grandma, the kids, and Fluffy the dog to: yes. Or, do like me and take a date; you'll have more fun (even if you're both smart and see problems with the movie)! ;-)
You can also find this Online at this place. Now, check out this more in depth review of the movie for those of you very knowledgable, seed AI type folks at, nope, sorry, no link available yet (it's on a mailing list). Well, I've pasted it below. This is by Eliezer Yudkowsky:
Isaac Asimov once observed that there are three types of robot stories;
robot-as-pathos, robot-as-menace, and robot-as-device. A.I. is a
robot-as-device story, and a fairly good one. There is pathos, owing to
David's emotions, but David's emotions are depicted as the deliberate
result of a deliberate design effort.
Most of the reviewers of this movie will undoubtedly say that the AIs are
more human than the humans. This is probably the single least accurate
statement it is possible to make about A.I. The AIs are more *humane*
than the humans but are *substantially* less human. A few behaviors (for
the embodied chatbots that were the previous state of the art) or a few
emotions (for David) have been selectively transferred over, and
naturally, they tend to be nice and neighborly behaviors or emotions,
because that's what the designers would want to transfer over. But the
AIs are visibly not playing with a full deck. Evidently Luddite movie
critics cannot tell the difference between "human" and "humane" even when
slapped upside the head with a double dissocation.
The very first thing that struck me about A.I. was the rather extreme
stupidity of the AI *researchers*. The consequences of this stupidity are
depicted with the same realism, attention to detail, and lack of
anthropomorphism that characterized HAL in 2001, but even so, the amount
of human stupidity I am being asked to accept is rather extreme.
David is beta software. His emotional responses are real - we are told so
in the movie - but they show a binary, all-or-nothing quality. We see the
first instance of this where David bursts out into extremely loud
laughter, laughs for a few moments, then switches off. Be it emphasized
that this laughter is both realistic and genuine. David is the first in a
line of robots with genuine emotions. The embodied chatbot that we see in
the opening scenes of the movie - the female android whose hand is hurt -
may have more gentle laughter, but only because it is preprogrammed.
David's genuine responses are as raw and as alien as might be expected of
a "child" who is, in fact, an infant, only a few weeks old.
Then the AI researchers had the bright idea of putting this beta software
into a human body, adding in those emotions calculated to produce maximal
emotional attachment on the part of humans, and giving it as a human
surrogate to a mother already in an emotionally unstable state because her
own child has been in medical cryonic suspension for five years.
>From this single act of stupidity, and the correctly depicted
consequences, the plot of the entire movie flows. Within a day of
imprinting, David realizes that his mother will someday die, and that he
will not, and wonders if he will be alone forever - foreshadowing the end
of the movie. His mother, for whom David is allegedly an artificial
surrogate to be disposed of when no longer needed, naturally feels
enormous emotional stress at the thought of returning David to be
incinerated. Nobody thought of this back when they were building a
loving, lovable, naturally immortal, allegedly disposable child?
(One of the genuine, oft-overlooked ethical questions this movie
highlights: "Is it moral to create an AI that loves you if the AI has to
watch you die?" The prospect of voluntary immortality in our own near
future creates similar present-day issues. If you plan on bringing a
child into the world, you should plan on choosing to live forever if the
option becomes available, because a child shouldn't have to watch its
parents die.)
When David's brother, Martin, returns from suspension, we see a darker
side to David's genuine emotions. The first near-catastrophe occurs when
David nearly kills himself competing with his revived brother, by
attempting to eat; the second catastrophe occurs when David nearly drowns
his brother. In both cases, the events that occur are excellent
robot-as-device scenarios; they are the consequence of the reproduction of
certain specific geunine emotions in a beta-quality infant psychology
taught certain preprogrammed complex behaviors and placed the body of an
eight-year-old. When David's pain response is triggered by a pack of
curious children, his raw fear, like his laughter, goes from binary off to
binary on. His fear manifests itself in the only behavioral response
David knows; hiding behind Martin. The fear continues to manifest,
preventing Martin's escape, even as David and Martin sink to the bottom of
the pool.
Again, realistic; again, the AI researchers should have thought of it.
Monica, the mother, is afterwards in a hideous position; does she endanger
the household by keeping around beta-quality embodied software, or does
she return David to the manufacturer - that is, give up her child to die?
Monica's emotions are also run ragged because she is being asked to react
without anger to David's near-drowning of Martin. Again, someone at the
mecha corporation was being damn stupid and deserves to be sued into
bankruptcy. You do not give embodied software with beta-quality genuine
emotions to a human mother and ask her to treat it as her own human child.
(Call it "personality abrasion". Personality abrasion may turn out to be
a very real problem for humans dealing with any AI capable of real
thought, even if the AIs don't have human-architecture emotions or
human-looking bodies. Only AI researchers, or other people who understand
the risks and are willing to expend effort in dealing with them, should
ever come into contact with raw AIs. A Friendly AI conversing with
ordinary users should have enough knowledge to fake taking 'offense' at
insults, just because an AI that genuinely doesn't care at all about
insults may be more alienness than an ordinary user should have to deal
with. In A.I., we see the effect of personality abrasion on some poor
shmuck of a human mother.)
The penultimate consequences of the AI researchers' stupidity is visible
when, following the near-drowning of Martin, Monica (the mother) tries to
return David to the manufacturer for destruction. Of course Monica is, by
this point, too attached to David to watch him die, and tries to abandon
him in the woods instead. David's extreme response, when he suddenly
realizes that his mother is abandoning him, is the movie's greatest
moment. I choked up myself. David is an AI with a few genuine emotions,
and the strongest of them is love, and now his mother is leaving forever.
(Genuine, affecting pathos in a robot-as-device story. Realistic,
theoretically accurate AI scenarios with powerful drama. All hail
Kubrick. However... am I really supposed to believe that nobody at the
mecha corporation saw this coming?)
Later: David, wandering the forest with only his supertoy
babysitter-in-a-box teddy bear as companion, comes into contact with a
group of androids who are scavenging spare parts from a dump. This, I'm
sure, is intended to be creepy and disturbing vintage Kubrick, but I
myself immediately started wondering how this social phenomenon occurred.
It's the same question that occurred to me when I saw Gigolo Joe carving
out his identity tag on the run from the police. Why do these
nonemotional androids want to survive? We see in the opening scenes a
female android who is stabbed in the hand as part of a demonstration; when
the lead AI researcher asks "Did I hurt you?" she responds "You hurt my
hand." Am I supposed to believe that this chatbot in human form would go
and scavenge parts if she were abandoned? Am I supposed to believe that
Gigolo Joe, on realizing that he has been framed for murder, would go
rogue out of self-preservation? Having androids scouring the countryside
for spare parts is a rather disturbing social phenomenon, as is having an
android flee a police investigation, and the embodied chatbots that are
supposed to be state-of-the-art are primitive enough that the programmers
could easily have prevented both responses.
And what's with the Flesh Fair bounty hunters who attack the scavenging
robots? Did these bounty hunters come through a wormhole from
_Bladerunner_? This is what happens when Spielberg rewrites a Kubrick
movie; you have cyberpunk grunge-neon motorcycle bounty hunters chasing a
lovable android and his animate teddy bear. At any rate, David is dragged
off to the Flesh Fair, where humans watch the destruction of androids for
fun... is this where the path of "Battlebots" leads?
(At this point in the movie, I must admit to a minor objection at the
Flesh Fair robot who asked another robot to 'disconnect my pain circuits',
mostly because this is a fundamentally human way of looking at the world
and any robot who makes this request may well have crossed the border, not
just into personhood, but into our particular kind of personhood. But
expecting Hollywood to know that is asking far too much.)
At the Flesh Fair, the embodied chatbots make a few conversational pleas
as they are loaded into the cannons and the acid platforms. David's
screams invoke greater sympathy, but I'm not sure the Flesh Fair audience
made a logical conclusion. I know that David's response is genuine only
because I was told at the beginning of the movie that David has a wholly
novel cognitive architecture designed to support humanlike emotions.
David's response is genuine, but it is not humanlike. A human child,
brought into that cage, would have been almost catatonic with fear; would
have been screaming and crying long before reaching the stage; would have
been struggling long before the first drop of acid fell on him. As at the
side of the pool, we see the binary, unpolished quality of David's genuine
emotion; his fear goes from off to on as soon as the first drop of acid
falls - and manifests in his screaming requests not to be burned.
And the crowd rises and boos the ringmaster off the stage - "Mecha does
not plead for its life!" - but their decision is correct only by
coincidence. From what they saw, David really could have been just a more
advanced chatbot. David's emotions were real, but David's behaviors
weren't the responses of a genuine eight-year-old except on the surface.
Shortly thereafter, the stranger half of the movie begins. David, in the
company of Gigolo Joe, wanders the world looking for the Blue Fairy. Even
for beta software, I'm not sure this fixation is realistic - surely an
advanced AI knows what 'fiction' is, and an AI boy knows that bedtime
stories aren't true. On the other hand, perhaps David's humanlike
cognitive architecture has unexpectedly given rise to the phenomenon of
self-delusion (flinching away from hypotheses which make unpleasant
predictions), or perhaps David knows the Blue Fairy's existence is
tentative but he still sees no more plausible path leading back to his
mother.
After Joe and David leave Dr. Know, the movie has its first real "Damn,
they blew it!" moment. (Though in Spielberg's defense, an AI movie that
starts at 8PM, and gets to 9:48 before messing up, has done extremely
well.) The moment to which I refer is Gigolo Joe's speech about how
humans resent robots because they know that, in the end, robots will be
all that's left. Where did *that* come from? Joe's speech is as out of
place as Agent Smith's speech of self-justification in _The Matrix_. It
has undertones of repressed resentment, of an entire underground society
of secretly rebellious robots, and other things that have no place among
chatbots and sex droids. Even David is only a fractional human; he has a
few selected genuine emotions but certainly not a full deck of them.
Apparently the Humans Are Obsolete Speech is simply mandatory for AI
movies, no matter how ridiculously out of place. The Speech is most
certainly not justified by "foreshadowing", since it sucks at least half
of the emotional impact out of the ending. If anyone creates a Phantom
Edit of A.I., the Speech should definitely be the first thing to go (and
the second thing, of course, will be everything after the Blue Fairy
Fadeout).
But I'm getting ahead of myself. The next major scene of significance is
David confronting David-2. David's destruction of David-2 struck me as a
little strange; it involved a bit more humanness, a wider behavioral
repertoire, than had been previously depicted. I suppose that some degree
of jealousy was visible earlier in the movie, so my immediate reaction of
"Why would they have ported *that* emotion over?" may be misplaced; even
so, that kind of directed, coherent-conversation destructive tantrum
struck me as being too complex for David.
The lead AI researcher's total lack of reaction to the destruction of his
own genuinely emotional surrogate child, and his revelation that the
corporation has been directing the entire course of events since the Flesh
Fair for publicity purposes, shows again that the AI researchers are the
least humane people in the movie.
Later on, David confronts the vast hall full of Davids, a scene that was
intended to creep out the audience. But again it gives rise to questions
on my part. If there are that many Davids, why are they all designed to
have the human emotion of wanting to be unique? Was it an unintended
consequence? For that matter, what possessed the idiots in Marketing to
produce a batch of identical AIs all named David, instead of giving them
individual faces and individual voices and maybe some quirks of
personality? Do these people think that no two couples with a David will
ever meet? I'm not a parent, but I know that I'd be creeped out if I went
to a barbeque and every couple there had a copy of my little sister.
Finally, after David realizes that he is not unique, he deliberately
topples off a window ledge into the ocean. Uh... why? How is that a
means to the end of getting his mother to love him? Or alternatively, who
drew up the design specs and added in a requirement that David feel
suicidal despondency under certain conditions? Ordinary despondency I can
see, but not suicidal despondency; not in an expensive, partially human
being that parents are supposed to grow attached to. Plus, David can
operate underwater, and he knows that. This scene makes no sense.
Later, when David seeks out the Blue Fairy, and begins repeating his
eternal request, and the screen fades to black, I had the same reaction
everyone did: "Okay, movie's over! Please tell me the movie's over...
damn, it's not over." The Phantom Edit version of A.I. should end here.
After the Blue Fairy Fadeout, we see what I can only describe as Spielberg
messing up Kubrick's movie. To start with, the aliens - pardon me, I
meant the Successors - are Spielbergs. "Spielbergs"; that's the only
thing I can think of to call them. They are classic Spielberg aliens and
they don't belong on the set of A.I.
Lest I be too negative, however, I'll take this time to focus on an
example of what A.I. does right. David, revived by the Successors, leaves
the aircraft and heads for the Blue Fairy. He touches her, and she
shatters. At this point, a *bad* movie - which A.I. is not - would have
shown us some breakdown, some feeling of despair on David's part.
Instead, nothing happens - there isn't any emotion in David's limited deck
for this occasion. Three cheers for whoever wrote that scene! It's this
refusual to take the easy way out that puts A.I. into the class of science
fiction rather than space opera.
However, we then move directly on to the second "Damn, they blew it!"
moment in the movie, occurring at 10:28, when one of the Successors begins
spouting gibberish about yada-yada space-time yada-yada pathways yada-yada
DNA yada-yada only one day yada-yada. I'm sorry, I don't care how
dramatic your plot device is, you need to think up a better way to justify
it than making up totally arbitrary rules on the spot. Plus, if you can
bring back Monica for one day, you can scan her memories into permanent
storage; and, if they're retrieving Monica's immortal soul from 2000 years
in the future, they should be retrieving an old Monica from just before
the moment of her death, not the one David remembers... oh, forget it.
Finally, David gets his one day with Monica - being a little too human
throughout, it seemed to me, especially as he watches her go to sleep for
the last time. He goes to sleep with her, and - according to the final
voiceover - for the first time, begins to dream. Dream *what*? Why? I
wasn't really happy with this movie's ending.
One of the basic issues at the beginning of the movie is one that the
ending totally fails to resolve, even after going to all that plot-effort
to bring David to the one place where the question can be answered. David
is a partial human. He is both immortal, and fundamentally incomplete.
David was created without the potential to grow; he is forever young...
but on the other side of time, he can be improved and extended. David
could become a real human, if he wanted to be. Except that David doesn't
want to be human; he wants to stay with Monica forever, and being human is
only a means to that end.
The Successors could easily have given David a full deck of emotions, or
could easily have created an immortal virtual Monica that was real to the
limit of David's limited perceptions. Why didn't they? Was David, by
their standards, citizen enough not be lied to? Citizen enough not be
'improved' without consent? I know how I would have solved that problem;
I would have made David human for the course of the one perfect day he had
with Monica, and at the end of that day, he would have experienced great
grief... but he would have healed, and moved on, as complete humans have
the potential to do, and eventually joined the Successor civilization.
Both the moment of David becoming human, and the moment of his grief when
Monica faded, would have been a fine conclusion to the movie.
The ending I saw left me feeling incomplete because this basic issue went
unresolved. From the beginning, there were only four possible resolutions
to the movie: David dies; David lives forever with Monica, eternally
happy; David lives forever without Monica, eternally lonely; or David
grows beyond his limits. The ending we saw doesn't tell us which of these
events has occurred! Did David effectively switch himself off? Did David
go on forever dreaming of his last perfect day? Does David's dreaming
indicate that the Successors have gently begun to improve him out of his
cul-de-sac? Are David's dreams eternally lonely because Monica isn't
there?
I know there is a certain style of filmmaking that holds that the viewer
should be allowed to pick their own ending, and I hate that style with a
fiery passion. For me, a vague ending can ruin the impact of an entire
movie, and that came very close to happening with A.I.
Oh, well. A.I. is still a good movie. It's just that, as with many good
movies, A.I. could easily have been so much better.
And that's it. I hope you learned something.
-- Gordon Worley
But then I go home thinking. And continue thinking all through the next day. And at least at one point I think about going to see it again. Because I realize that taken as a whole (and not as beginning/middle/end), it is a complete picture, and it is very good.
The best part of the movie is the supertoy. I think every geek will want one.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
The reason the ending - which I agree gets drawn out too long - is there is because the story seems to forget all about morality about 3/4 or the way through, and becomes interested only in bringing some sort of conclusion to David's life.
The story neatly lets all of humanity off the hook by fast forwarding through all the real moral issues involved. We would have had a MUCH stronger story here if the emphasis at the end was on what it means for science to get so ahead of itself. Where's the public outcry against the mass-manufacturing of loving mecha's? Where's the debate on if it it ok to have even one loving mecha?
Instead we're focused on a boy stick in a while true do loop. If only the last 1/3 was as focused on morality as the first 1/3, then we'd have a true masterpiece on our hands.
Well, I haven't seen the movie yet, but I'm curious to know how David was created/designed? Does the movie explain any of this? For example, for a robot to feel emotion, actually feel it, not just react to situations/words/etc, then that robot would have to have been made differently than the robots we have today...Not just more advanced or whatever, but totally different. Take for example John Searle's Chinese Room Argument. No matter how advanced the program that runs the robot is, it only reacts to stimuli - it can't really think for itself..ie: it has syntax, but not semantics. Humans have both..
So back to my question, does the movie explain how these robots were/are created/designed? I imagine not as that would be too much for most people to comprehend, but still, I would be curious to know.
~Steve
--
~Steve
--
"<r-xr-xr-x> Just try to edit me" -- www.ircnews.com
David: "Please make me a real boy"
Teddy: "Shut up"
David: "Please make me a real boy"
Teddy: "Oh God, just shut up"
David: "Please make me a real boy"
Teddy: "I'm going to kick your f*cking ass if you don't shut up"
David: "Please make me a real boy"
I said to my wife as we walked back to the car after seeing AI that the Kubrick story was clearly the first 2/3, and the Speilberg influence was unmistakable for the last 1/3.
And which bit, pray tell, was the original author, Brian Aldiss?
Sheesh. It takes MUCH more than a director to make a movie. Any director with an "A film by XXXX" who didn't do the entire thing himself is conning himself.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
2. *THINK* for a second! You have this A.I. that you're programming, and you decide that the three Laws of Robotics need to be ingrained at a basic level in your piece of hardware. How do you write these requirements? To just say them in English is one thing, but to make them as basic to the Robot's being as possible you need to *code* this up, in no ambiguous terms. Anything less gives robots wiggle room. I say the Three Laws Of Robotics cannot be implemented as written. Period.
Even Asimov acknowledges this; a lot of his stories deal with the results of the laws and how they can be bent, broken or confused.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Precisely. They talked about David as an "original" robot, which made it seem to me that the robots we were seeing weren't created directly by humans, but instead were created by other robots who were created by other robots, who somewhere down the line had been created by humans, but none of these original robots had survived, so there wasn't any lasting direct contact or knowledge of humans.
Everyone should take the time to run, not walk, to Amazon and pick up a copy of Brian Aldiss's short story collection "Super-Toys Last All Summer Long" (taking the name of the 'story' that AI took its plot from - it's actually three stories). Other stories in the trilogy actually deal with this - IIRC, they were indeed aliens, picking through the ruins of human (and robotic) society, after the robots had died out (after they had built a society after the *humans* had died out).
The 'original' reference refers to the fact that this was a robot made by *humans*, not by other robots.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
They weren't alians (even if they DID scream 'Close Encounters'. They were evolved robots. Remember Gigelo Joe's line something like "in the end, only the machines will remain"?
I'm still not sure how I feel about the ending. It was definately well done, but I was expecting the credits to roll while he was talking to the Blue Fairy, even if the ending did prove the point made earlier.
If it ended before the second half of the end it would of been cool. There is just something about a movie that goes on a little too long for it's own good. This is one of them. It would of been more "Kubrick" if it ended before the second half. But the second half was cool in and of its self, but it just really didn't add anything to the movie I though.
Well, it IS a Speilberg movie... And it was initially a Kubrick project... I imagine it'd be cheaper to realize that it's a bad plan to begin with and not waste the $7.
Itachi
It was not the worst film I've seen in a while. My first comment after viewing was "Wow, that was the best android-centric movie with Robin Williams that I've seen all year!".
The good:
Well, I did get to see Ministry in a Speilberg flick. Never expected that one in a million years (confirmed in the credits: Even if it wasn't 'officially' Ministry, it was Al Jorgensen and Paul Barker, which is darn near close enough. )
The character I found the most believable was the ueber Teddy Ruxpin. It was the only one with believable lines.
I really enjoyed the score. It didn't carry the film, no matter how hard Speilberg hoped.
The bad:
I found most of the dialogue to be downright lousy: So the mecha know that they've got some serious advantages over the orga. Note that they do absolutely nothing about it other than be able to hang around in an icecube until the really lousy cgi aliens show up. It surprised me to see that every single android shown had no qualities that put them above humanity. No speed advantage. No memory advantage. No strength, no brains, nada. (exceptions: 1) the aliens harvested all of david's memories out, so the retention was there, but david never used any of it 2) Gigalo Joe and spasm radio)
The ugly:
The aliens. Awful. Lousy. Everything about them was worthless.
Chris Rock as the comedian android. At least it only survived for a minute or so of the film.
Robin Williams as Dr. Know. Horrible.
I finally got to see the LoTR trailer, but the exciter bulb went out on the projector, so no audio. I still blame Speilberg for that one =)
-transiit
2001. Honestly though, I really want to throttle Spielberg for re-using the 'close encounters' aliens body shape for his super-advanced robots. And I want to take out a full page ad in every major newspaper saying "There were no fucking aliens in 'A.I.'"
Jherico
Jherico
What can the average user can do to ensure his security? "Nothing, you're screwed"
The story is at wired.com's web site. The Salon movie review linked in the story has a link to it.
Wir mussen wissen. Wir warden wissen. I am a wuss
If all the icecaps melted, sea levels would rise about 90 meters. In the worst case that is remotely plausible (the Greenland and other Arctic island icecaps melt; the Antarctic ice cap shrinks a bit), sea levels would rise 5-10 meters.
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
I thought that AI was disapointing. When I watch a Kubrick movie (which this would have been if he hadn't of died) it makes me think of interesting things about life. This movie on the other hand was totally manipulated into Hollywood crap by Spieldberg. It was based on trying to make you cry and feel sorry for the robot. Sorry. Didn't work.
Basically, this story was a remake of Pinochio. " I want to be a real boy!" Blah, Blah, Blah. If I hear Haley Joel Osment whine like that anymore I will not see his movies until he is past adolescense. In some scenes he was creepy which made up for some of his bad acting (he's a child actor, I know, but I can still be a critic).
The movie was far to mystical and there was not enough scientifical fact to back up what it is to be a robot. The robot is suddenly in his new home. Things are awkward. This scene lasts for about 30-45 minutes. Total overkill. I guess I wish there was more to the film. The scenes were all cheesy.
Overall, a descent waste of two and a half hours. You have to see it if you liked any of Kubricks movies but the movie is sappy and will leave you empty and unfulfilled when you leave the theatre.
Peace
But my big question is, the ice. It couldn't of just froze like that. If the planet cooled itself over time, the poles would start to freeze again and weather patterns would slowly drop more precipitation on the poles where it would then refreeze again. All this meaning the water levels should go down first and then an ice age would begin and the ice flows would descend down from the poles. Correct?
And of course, if so, none of those skyscrapers would still be standing. If an ice flow can sheer off a mountain, the World Trade Center isn't going to be able to resist it!
You missed it. They're David's own descendants, not aliens.
Apparently, I wasn't the only one who thought that the beings at the end of the movie were aliens. Check out this review which panned the film: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2 001/06/29/DD239232.DTL&type=movies
Yes I saw AI this afternoon. Combine pinnochio with bicentennial man, close encounters, and an oedipus complex and you've got yourself this movie.
There are 2 things that I will mainly comment on: the ending and the plot holes. How many endings were there to this movie anyway? It could have ended when he reaches Manhatten and finds his creator. It could have ended after he jumps into the ocean. It could have ended, albeit sadly, during the 2000 years he spent watching "the blue fairy." How many themes was Speilberg/Kubrik really supposed to bring out in this thing?
The plot holes are many. What the heck happened to his father? His mother is all he talks about. It is so oedipal, it's rediculous. The movie even ends with his mother and him in bed. He calls his mother "Mommy" after he is imprinted and completely ignores the father. He pays more attention to his mean brother. Wouldn't his programmers make it so he was imprinted to 2 people? Thus his father becomes a static character that is quite flat. David calls his father "Henry" the whole movie.
David breaks easily from a little spinach and yet he lasts 2000 years frozen in the water. He dives into water twice and that doesn't hurt his circuits at all. Also how, exactly, are the robots powered? This is a small issue because this is sci-fi and you have to suspend your belief but come on!
Also, when his creator tells him to wait while he rounds up the people, he never hears from "the creator" again. Why isn't there a big search for David?
Why do they bother leading David to New York anyway? Who would expect that he would steal a helicopter and make his way to a particular building in the abondoned Manhatten. If you're gonna lead him somewhere, lead him someplace easily accesible at least.
The last thing is with the aliens. I can't believe that David is the only "living" remnant of humans. If one robot survived, couldn't others? Sure I could suspend my belief that aliens came to study Earth in the future. But how would they detect him anyway. They went directly to him like they knew he was there. And they can bring somebody back but for only one day and only once. How stupid is that? Exactly one day. No more, no less. So some law of nature depends on when somebody goes to sleep? Crazy.
Other than that allusion to the poem, why would anyone fly a ship that everyone could see and run away from? That giant balloon was so bright that the robots could run away from it. There is a full moon 2-3 days per month. I think somebody would get the idea that it wasn't a moon if it was 10x as big as a real one anyway.
Little things: What engineer thought a 3-wheeled car would work? 4 wheels is the most efficient and stable design. 3 wheels looks cool and futuristic though. Also, if half the world has been engulfed, what is David's family doing living in such a luxurious and large house? Wouldn't there be space limits?
I suppose it does takes more than a little talent for a little kid to hold an entire audience's attention for 2.5 hours.
Yes, it is something you will want to see but it will never have any replay value. I won't buy the DVD. I can suspend my belief for a lot of it but there are just so many things wrong with that movie.
I agree, I think the movie diverged from standard 3-act stucture, and as allways, that's not the best of ideas.
better ending: as soon as the voice starts talking about ice and a fairy, leave. I'm pretty sure that's where Kubrick would have ended the movie.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
Yeah, i think they were future robots, but man they sure looked like that dumb thing from Mission to Mars.
P.S. I love how the Slashdot Anti-Troll technology punishes you for reading and typing quickly.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
no.... it deals with similar themes and exists within the same realm of sci-fi convention, but its hardly a ripoff. The movie certainly owes a lot to Blade Runner, but if you watch it there's some subtle tributes to blade runner. (as well as 2001, a Clockwork Orange, Dr. Strangelove, Thunderdome, Planet of the Apes, Star Wars, Close Incounters, and probably others)
Really, catching clever references are half the fun in the movie.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
The ending reminded me of a (sniff sniffle, nostalgia...) SimEarth game I played once, where after I had a civilization evolve to the point of Nanotech and mass exodus of the Earth, a population of ROBOTS overtook the entire world, driving everything else to extinction.
It only happened once.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
Riiight ... recommend fast & the furious -- a movie with bad dialog, bad plot, bad fx, really innacurate technical data -- because you couldn't get over the pinnochio parallels and the possibility that mankind might become extinct.
it's not that they cannot clone humans for over one day, it is that they cannot bring back a human who once lived for over a day -- because their time-space pathways were used up or some crap. i'm sure they could clone a human and not bring back their memories and stuff, in which case they'd be able to live for over a day.
The point that both Kubrick and Spielberg were trying to make is this: in the future, you won't have to put up with your bitchy girlfriend anymore, because there will be a "Lover Series" of robots.
You guys go ahead and argue about Robotics Laws. Go ahead and spend money on DVD burners and 1.7 GHz Athlons. From this moment on I'm saving up my money in hopes that before I die the Lover Series will hit the streets. You guys feel free to invite each other over and show off your latest tech toys.
Meanwhile, I plan on being the first on my block with his own robo-harem.
I agree with you about the beings at the end of the film. To me it was clear that they were not aliens, especially when one of them made a comment along the lines of "He's unique. He has actually seen a real human." That line combined with the title of film and what appeared to be the circuitry inside of the beings led me to conclude that they were in fact robotic and not aliens. However, most of the people that I overheard coming out of the theater seemed to think they were aliens who had come and taken over the planet.
---- Yay! I have a sig!
I agree... at least, I feel that where Kubrick would have ended it. The lasst 10 minutes were neat from a sci-fi and special effects point of view, but just seemed way to cheesy in the context of the rest of the movie.
----
---- I made the Kessel Run in under 11 parsecs.
I doubt that whoever coined the phrase "artificial intelligence" and the primitive Japanese who developed the sound "ai" to represent love were in cahoots.
Joe
From a fictional point of view, it's not out of bounds obviously.
I can't believe nobody has introduced RoboCop into the discussion (at least the first one). Here was an attempt to integrate the human psyche with computerized control (his prime directives). The parallel is in having human emotion while having a glass ceiling. They did a half decent job in that movie exploring the complications involved. I don't believe that this movie really wanted to explore these complexities. As justification, the makers were "trying so hard to see if they could, that they never stopped to see if they should". In fact, all the emotional trauma that was caused was ultimately encouraged.
Thus, in agreement with you and in start contrast to the previous poster, asimov's laws had no place in this movie.
-Michael
-Michael
maintanence? He definately has air-passages and vocal devices. Even if the food didn't go to his stomach, certainly these devices would be vulnerable.
-Michael
-Michael
haha.. laughable. We're hard-wired for sexual desire, for fear of danger, for blinking when things approach the eye, or for mothering rage. So why don't we react like a programmed interrupt controller when certain conditions arise? Because the main point of our nuerons is that they're programmable. We have both actuators and inhibitors. They both battle over the initiation of events. Yes there's a hard-wiring to put into motion a response for a given perceived action. BUT, we also have the ability to surpress those hard-wired reactions.
You could go to great lengths to encode the reward / punishment / reaction system within a neural net, but the fundamental nature of neurons is that they can be super-ceeded (and the super-ceedings can become the new nature, only later to be super-ceeded by something else). A tough man learns to not blink, and to restrain his anger. Most men learn to supress their sexual urges. Most people learn to control their need to excrete.
The only way they could do it would be to have an external response mechanism that doesn't allow over-riding (which would defeat most of the point of being alive and having an adaptive neural-net).
Obviously they do this, because of the activation code; that's something that is rather important to not 'over-ride'. But notice how little of that sort of activity is actually used.
-Michael
-Michael
I'm not really going to try and explain such an open-ended cop-out, except to say that most recounted experiences with "time-travel" or more simply temporal e.s.p. leave one in a sence of a dream-state.
From what I got, everything in the universe leaves it's imprint on the analog universe, much like ripples in a zero-resistance ocean, or what-ever analogy floats your boat. They speculate that the physical piece of matter (possibly the complex DNA strand, but also possibly the matter itself) is like a finger-print that can be used to searched in the cosmic ocean to reach-back for the rest of it's constituent parts. It does suggests that time-travel isn't possible (or they wouldn't really need to ecscavate, nor would it be a problem to bring her here).
I don't quite know if they're mearly finding her personality / her essence, or if they're projecting esp to or fro.
As a good master, you don't explain the details, but try and find some high-level analogy that describes the functional parameters. Details can be depressing. Something Lucas should be-retaut.
-Michael
-Michael
Dudes,
The funky alien-like creatures at the end are not aliens. They are the "evolved" mechas. Sure, this is really open to interpretation, but just because they look like the "classic" aliens we've seen in recent movies (including Spielberg's own Close Encounters of the Third Kind) does not mean that they are aliens. Watch it again for the first time.
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. -- William James
I enjoyed the movie a great deal, but I could have done without the constant narrations explaining detail that we could have figured out on our own. I'm sure some dumbass movie executive forced these changes late in the movie's production. How would 2001 have been if the monolith could speak and it explained blow by blow that movie classic's ending?
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. -- William James
In your otherwise admirable rush to correct the impression that the entities at the end of the film are aliens (of course they're robots), you've all missed the way the film picks up on themes from the first third of the plot from that point on. David's situation in this part of the film parallels Martin's toward the beginning: he's a broken little boy in frozed suspended animation who's revived and brought home to his family. The film's ending takes on much more significance if you take a few moments to think about it in this light. Those of you who are calling it tacked-on and superfluous are missing the boat completely.
It was slow, boring, and it was VERY apparent that the writer/director had a huge soapbox to stand up on and "make me think" or to push his own views.
The beginning was the best part, but even the beginning lacked any interest and passion. It went down hill fast from there getting slow and not losing my attention (which is hard to do).
I think the SuperToy bear was the most interesting thing in the movie.
Lousy movie.
Too much agenda and politics and soapbox and not enough interesting plot stuff.
The price we pay for immortality... is death. Narnia The Great Fall
For one thing, the "aliens" were semi-translucent and circuitry was visible inside them.
Got any concrete reasons why they're aliens? Nah, just that they've got big heads and wispy limbs. Really, the movie only makes sense if they're mechas.
Besides, that NYTimes article states that in Kubrick's original vision, when David is awoken millenia later, only evolved robots exist -- no humans. It didn't mention aliens.
I'm glad that at least some of the /.ers were clueful enough to realize that those are mechas, not aliens. If there is any doubt, read this:
m -R eview-AI.html
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts/AP-WKD-Fil
This was written before Spielberg ever got his hands on the movie. It's interesting how much of Kubrick's vision actually made it into the movie, including a world populated only by machines.
I got to see A.I. Thursday night at a preview screening here in Chicago. As someone who's been following the project since Kubrick was going to do it, I've posted some of my initial impressions below, with no spoilers:
I think A.I. would have been a brilliant film had Kubrick been able to produce it, but in Spielberg's hands the results are mixed. You get
the feeling that Spielberg understood about 90% of the story, but there's still another 10% there that he didn't know what to do with, particularly in the film's third act.
Several film critics have talked about Kubrick's use of "non-submersible" units - constructing a movie out of five or six sequences that support the argument of the film and tying them together with narrative links. In most of Kubrick's films, he ties together these units with such skill that a casual viewer doesn't notice that they're there. In A.I., which follows this (for lack of a better world) "Kubrickean" narrative structure the bits are all there, but they feel disjointed and clumsily put together. The transition to the third act in particular, is particularly clumsy, and it becomes clear that Spielberg doesn't completely understand all the
ramifications of the final scenes, because they aren't thematically consistent with the rest of the film.
I think one of the problems is that Spielberg is not an experienced screenwriter, and has trouble with some of the finer points of narrative storytelling. Additionally, his films tend to fall more into the traditional Hollywood narrative structure, so making something outside of that is a challenge for him, especially when
working a much faster schedule than Kubrick would have.
The other thing I missed was the acute sense of irony that fills Kubrick's films. The story of A.I. is really one of a huge cosmic joke, and I didn't get the feeling that Spielberg got it. There is certainly humor in the story (a welcome diversion from some of the film's emotional intensity), but it's "cute" humor, rather than
satire.
Spielberg does get credit for capturing the look that Kubrick probably intended for the film - no doubt the numerous storyboards provided by the Kubrick Estate helped. Also, the performances by all of the lead actors are fantastic, particularly Haley Joel Osment.
The John Williams score is very overbearing in parts - one of the great things about Kubrick's films was the economy with which he used music - here it's a constant presence, and when Spielberg is trying to make a point, he just cranks up the volume.
Despite it's flaws, I think it's a movie worth watching, however, if only for the little nuggets that shine through. It's one of Spielberg's most ambitious films, and I think he did very well with it in parts.
Interestingly, I actually think Kubrick may have been on to something by proposing that Spielberg direct and he produce. It's well known that Spielberg has no patience for post-production, and leaves most of those duties to his long-time editor, Michael Kahn. Had Kubrick been in charge of post-production on this film, and taken the time to get it absolutely right, I think it could have been a masterpiece, even with Spielberg directing.
Anyway, those are just my initial impressions - I will probably see it again, although I don't plan on paying more than matinee prices....
Then if she had her memories, why wasn't she freaked out at the whole prospect at what was happening? (And I mean more than a small look of horror when David tells his story - i.e. recaps the movie A.I. in child drawings). Why wasn't she wondering where her husband was, where Martin was, where humanity was?
The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone else when we're uncool. -Crowe
http://www.nytimes.com/library/film/071899kubrick- ai.html
The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone else when we're uncool. -Crowe
Article about Kubrick's original ideas.
The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone else when we're uncool. -Crowe
This is true (about Kubrick devising the 2000 years later bit), but let's be honest, he would have done it differently and more enigmatically.
I think one of the worst moments in the film is when David answers the door in the fake house, lets in the advanced AI, and we cut to them sitting on a bed, legs crossed, discussing this awful new-agey science crap that reminded me a little too much of metachloreans. What's with that garbage about space/time, not being able to clone for more than one day, etc. hooey? Couldn't they clone her every day? It's not like they had her memories anyway.
I didn't mind the concept of the ending so much as the execution. Kubrick wouldn't have had that awful conversation. Kubrick was known for his scientific accuracy (just watch 2001), and as a computer scientist, I was plainly ashamed at the pseudo-science that Spielberg was spinning.
Anybody with the tiniest bit of common sense would not program a robot that could harm, that would eat spinach, that would even have an esophagus whose sole purpose is apparently to deliver damaging edibles into its most valuable circuitry.
David was poorly designed.
And I'd like to think that Kubrick wouldn't have made the same mistakes.
If Kubrick had made this movie, people would still be angry at the film (like Eyes Wide Shut, which I think is an excellent movie with some flaws possibly due to his untimely death), but twenty years from now it would be greatly respected. Now, except for the visual effects, it will mostly be mocked.
The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone else when we're uncool. -Crowe
David, in the end, is the last remnant of a humanity that drove itself to extinction, but he isn't human; he is just a few miles of fiber-optic cable acting on the impulses programmed into him. In the first part of the movie, he didn't sleep, but laid quietly with his eyes open. In the final scene, as the camera pulls out, he finally sleeps with his eyes closed, and the narrator states that he, for the first time, dreams, ie has reached a state of "humanity". So what this ending is saying (rather succintly, I thought) is that the thing that defines humanity is that we dream.
On another note, this last section is very powerful for those of us who have lost a family member that we were close to, because it answers the question, albeit for one person, of "What would you do if you had just one more day...?" Would you make that phone call you put off? Would you apologize for an argument? Would you have a birthday party? Again, this works to humanize David more than anything else in the movie and give the audience hope that humanity is not quite dead.
I'm not going to talk about my opinion of how good the film was (I seem to be on par with a lot of people in here in my views).
:)
But did this movie remind anyone else of Blade Runner _in atmosphere_? I'm not talking about plot (someone mentions that up above, but I don't really agree other than one general parallel between the two). But from the commercials on through the actual movie, I found myself thinking of Ridley Scott's film.
I wish I was more awake so I could provide examples better, but once you get past the beginning (which was anti-blade-runnerish and closer to Hollywood than Kubrick) to "David in the woods", the atmosphere suddenly changes to one which reminds me of the dark, sometimes-overwhelming, sometimes-desolate future world of where Deckard lives.
Anyway, just a thought -- keep in mind this was just an oberservation, and not a criticism. I liked the atmosphere of the film, and a great fraction of the film itself.
-Puk
** SPOILER WARNING**
... That is also a good subject. Is it appropriate to use mechas, sentient machines as slaves and explosive material ? That's a really good subject ! You really feel that this is gonna be a great movie! The giggolo is sublime, you feel this is going to lead to a superb epic story of rights freedom and love.
For one thing the acting of the boy and the scientist are really bad, something here doesn't work. At all. The boy, beside saying i want my mummy to love me, and please make me a real boy, he doesn't do anything interresting, neither does the scientist.
There is NOTHING profound in the way this story is treated.
Take the main subject, can human love machines ? can machines love humans ? That's a wonderfull subject, yet the implications of such questions are barely addressed. Oh yes, mummy cries a lot and this culminates in this (truely) awesome scene when she leaves david in the forest.
Yet, what do we have here ? mummy could not live with that, so she left david in the forest, now david wants to be a real boy so mummy loves him. Ahem...
Then on with another subject, mechas are used as cannon balls in an all american show. Well
The entire matter of mecha rights can be resumed to two sentences the Giggolo (i don't remember his name) says "They made us too soon, too smart and too many!", that was a great quote, this should have been the basis for a great leader speech! and "I am, I was" before he dies (or is caught, who knows). Don't expect anything more of this.
At this point everthing breaks down in the viewer's mind. A sense of "What am i doing in this theater watching this movie?". In short, something doesn't work here, people start to laugh at the story, this gets weird.
David is underwater for 2000 years and discovered by nice aliens of light... Ahem...
Again, this is an interresting idea on its own, but does it belong in this movie ? People can argue about that a long time. I think it's a great idea but the way it was done (it totally comes from NOWHERE at all) was stupid.
To end this rant, here is what I think: this should have been a trilogy.
The first movie should have really explored what love is between humans and machine, there was a great subject here that was spoiled by the lack of time.
The second movie should have been the rise of the epic struggle of the mechas for their sentient rights. Again this could have been awesome if well done, and not resumed to two sentences and a stupid vulgar fire show. This would have ended with david in the icy water.
The third movie would have begun with the aliens (in my view they would have been of a much more biological-type). And we could have followed the influence of david (and the human memory) among the thoughts of the alien population. They would have created people (and they would not have died stupidly one day after being cloned), They would just not have their memories, like clones should not. The alien civilization would have revived the human civilization as a gift for introducing love and compassion in their set of concepts.
Or something.
To make it short: It sucked because it tried to address too many issues. In the end it adresses none.
lone.
And the aliens made his mummy out of virtual hair.
Ahem...
lone.
The movie should have ended at the dive, clearly having reached a point where a nice happy ending was not readily available. It didn't.
But even ending it there would not have changed the fact that the movie spent a lot of time setting up moral dilemmas and sociological issues, but then refused to address them. They even spent the time in the first few minutes of the movie asking the question of whether it is moral to create a machine that can love but will not be loved back. But all that is completely ignored past the point of the dive and it just comes down to a bad re-telling of an old fairy tale, going as far as killing off the entire human race rather than having to face the orga/mecha conflicts so wonderfully built up in the first two acts.
While taking itself a lot less serious, Millenium Man, IMHO, did a much better job of facing most of these issues.
--ether
This movie lacked genius and direction. It shyed away from posing the questions that Katz seems to think it does and hides them under an extraneous forty minutes of wandering. When movie critics are surprised by a plot twist and a movie doesn't go where they expect, they herald this as some mark of genius. This was just a wandering, poorly thought out, anti-climatic, weak movie.
If you were expecting this movie to be epic, or to ask the really tough questions about what it is to be human and machine, then you won't find that. If you expect this to parallel Frankenstein, you'd be better off reading Frankenstein. The classics did it far far better than AI could ever hope to hold a candle to.
120 characters isn't enough to explain it.
That's what I at first thought, too. But according to this part of the Kubrick FAQ, the ending is pretty much what Kubrick wanted ... (SPOILERS AHEAD):
So if you don't like the ending, blame Kubrick, not Spielberg.
Free Hans!
Even the ending which everyone seems to hate so much is attributed to Kubrick.
Free Hans!
The short story -- or rather, the vignette -- is not fleshed out at all.
AI blew. Horribly. Why?
Kubrick couldn't do it, figuring that he had to have a robot play the role of David. However, this is a side issue -- if you try to stretch a sliver of a story as far as the movie did, can anyone really be surprised when the plotline suffers as a result?
Spielberg's main problem as I see it is one of over-compensation: he's been slagged for treacle and sentimentality so much that the entire middle third of the film just looks and sounds like a total mess (cue 'I'm being serious and sinister' noises from the soundtrack). With the Flesh Fair idea, he swipes a part from the Mad Max films, and then has a totally unbelievable cop-out as a dramatic device.
In regards to the last third, good God, it's even worse. All the sentimentality Spielberg attempted to avoid forty-five minutes earlier returns, and makes the movie into a great big steaming turd. The coda made me so angry I was ready to walk out. I've sworn off Spielberg films -- regardless of the film's heritage, it sucked, sucked, sucked.
Finally, as far as the Yeats poem 'The Stolen Child' is concerned, that guy from the Waterboys covered it better. Even *with* the twee penny-whistle and hokey musical score.
Christ, that was an awful film. For heaven's sake, don't waste your money, wait for it on video.
========================================
Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
I'm not sure an AI could be programmed with these and stay sane. Existence means that at some point someone's going to get hurt. Besides, if you're going for a purist's viewpoint, such rules conflict with free will, which is what any artistic programmer is going to go for. So the bots have to be able to kill the meat monkeys, then they can decide not to kill the meat monkeys (Er... or not, in which case you have a bit of a problem, but no guts no glory, right?)
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
through a sort of peaceful and very gradual transition
Or maybe a quick and violent transition, with the robots wiping out all traces of the humans. Then, a thousand years later, they are embarassed by what their forefathers (umm... forerobots?) have done, and with no real humans around they start to idolize them, and believe that humans (as their original Creators) must have all the answers they seek about the meaning of existence.
They weren't aliens. They were Mechas, created by Mechas, created by Mechas.
They were archeologists of sorts, trying to discover what they could about passed civilazations that they derived from.
It is too bad that you thought they were aliens, you might have liked it more had you caught on.
Ironically, your borg thought wasn't too far off...
Maybe if spielberg hadn't made the new Mechas look so fluid, more people would have "gotten it."
Actually the ending was kubrick's, done in storyboard.
Yeah, I can see your point. I didn't see Mission to Mars. I don't think I would have made the Futuristic mechas look like they did. But their task was pretty straight forward.
And seeing as how the whole movie is about a mother's love, it even made sense for the movie to bring her back temporarily. For those of us who have lost our mothers, given the choice to bring her back for a day isn't a hard one to make.
I think a lot of people were hoping for a movie about technology more than emotion.
absolutely heartbreaking, but utterly pointless. maybe you can explain it to me, but it seems entirely unrelated to the rest of the movie. d/
in any film? what about terminator?
*scnr*
but anyway. that thing strikes me most... that the rules can be circumvented by a sheer stupidity of the ais in i robot. the robots are described as much more intelligent than humans BUT they are kind of stupid.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
I don't know if he always was, but he is parodying himself.
Buck Teeth + Big Eyes = Talent
Dead Guy's Name + FX = Vision
did the teddy bear have a red dress?
yeah, drama's usually have shit effects, if any at all
Was there any other point in the movie where everyone in the theater was not absolutely clear what was being presented?
Kubrick died *before* eyes wide shit. And Jaws and ET confused the hell out of me.
To understand the movie just imagine asking William Gibson to rewrite Pinocchio. The movie started very Spielberg, started to get interesting, the went Spielberg to the end. To sappy, too much of the kid doing his patented look from Sixth Sense. Like E.T. you have the kid and sidekick robot teddy bear. The beginning of the movie was to short choppy with the parents loving the kid the suddenly turning on him, especially the father. The movie might of been better it it was about thiry minutes shorter. the movie was like this review, disjointed and no flow.
enjoy
Heres something along those lines. If you fear its a link about goats then you don't know how to use a web browser.
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
I said to my wife as we walked back to the car after seeing AI that the Kubrick story was clearly the first 2/3, and the Speilberg influence was unmistakable for the last 1/3.
--
For those of you who didn't turn on the Sci-Fi news slashbox, here's a link to another review.
- W. Blaine Dowler
http://www.bureau42.com
Well, I would have put the ending slightly later but still short of the actual ending. Simply roll the credits after the narrative with David frozen in the next ice age. But I guess Spielberg wanted a "happy" ending.
I have difficulty believing any of that alien ending was Kubrick's, he would have had the guts to deny David his happy ending.
ChodaBoy
ChodaBoy
- The preceding statement is the product of a deranged mind and the sole property of the voices in my head.
There is a spoiler in here, be forewarned: I can think of at least two other otherwise good movies that were ruined by the introduction of "Shiny happy aliens" as a friend of mine puts it.
The Abyss: diver considers his fate as he plunges to the depths of the ocean and learns life's lessons too late only to be saved by an alien vessel that's been hidden under the ocean for millenia and physics gets thrown out the window (everyone is raised to the surface in seconds without explosive decompression or even a nasty case of the bends).
Mission to Mars: Astronauts shipwrecked on Mars discover alien artifact and are miraculously saved by alien entity.
Now we have A.I. and its aliens/advanced robots sort of giving David his dream. Frankly, the one day thing was just plain silly though, it really didn't make sense other than as a means to wrap up a story that already ran a half hour too long.
ChodaBoy
ChodaBoy
- The preceding statement is the product of a deranged mind and the sole property of the voices in my head.
The biggest is this: the linchpin of the entire plot is that the robotic boy can never stop loving and longing for its "mother" owner, despite being destined to outlive her. This is absurd -- not being able to reboot his software, or at least reinstall it, is really contrived.
;-)
Thank you, I thought that was one of the sillier points of the movie myself. Granted, the story couldn't have taken place without this apparently permanent bonding, but I wondered to myself as I watched the movie, "what, have they forgotten how to format c:?"
Especially after an earlier scene shows Hurt's character removing what appears to be a CPU with a massive heatsink from the female "mecha"'s forehead.
Apparently, David is just another poorly designed beta or alpha model unit unleashed on the world
ChodaBoy
ChodaBoy
- The preceding statement is the product of a deranged mind and the sole property of the voices in my head.
Unfortunately, it ended later - it almost looked like a test audience had demanded a somewhat happy looking ending. Bah.
Now I don't need to post anything to this story, you summed it up nicely. :-)
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
I saw the movie yesterday. Christ was I pissed at the end.
It started all well. It was creepy. Haley Joel Osment was excellent. William Hurt was good. Photography, soundtrack, everything was right and fit, except for the stupid teddy bear, a shameless reference to "Ewoks".
Then the second third of the movie came. It was "E.T", "Schindler's List", "Mad Max 3: Beyond the Thunder Dome", "Wizard of Oz", "Waterworld", "Blade Runner", all mixed together. But it was still tolerable. The movie could have ended right there, with the boy locked forever in the bottom of the sea. It would have been a sad, bittersweet ending, like the endings in Kubrick films.
Then the final third. God was that awful! The aliens with heads looking like Philco Predictas! The hair and DNA thing, argh! I felt like I was watching "Glen or Glenda": now it ends! No, it doesn't! Now it will end! No, it still doesn't end! My God, can't Hollywood stand a sad ending???
If and when you decide to see this movie, walk out of the theater at the precise moment when David (Haley Joel Osment) jumps off the building into the ocean. Trust me on this. I won't spoil the ending because I've forced myself to repress it.
I'm really hoping someone pulls a "Phantom Edit" with this film..
-- "The reward of suffering is experience." - Aeschylus
They weren't aliens. They were the highly advanced AI's that were left after everybody else had gone. They were searching to understand their creator -- much like we often do.
Finally, an insightful comment.
illegitimii non ingravare
I thought the film was pretty well done. Yeah, the ending seemed a little stretched, but I never got shifty in my seat, or found myself looking for my watch. I'm not too familiar with Kubrick's work, so I can't compare it with his other stuff (though I thought Eyes Wide Shut was a huge joke played on the audience). Spielberg did his typical "light shining on dust particles through the trees" effect that he uses in like EVERY movie.
I think my favorite part of the movie (except the excellent set design and mechanical designs of the robots) was the teddy bear. The friend I saw the movie with put it best though, "it should have been voiced by Mr. T".
I ain't havin none o' that spinach foo!
Upgrade your grey matter, cause one day it may matter
> This is absurd -- not being able to reboot his software, or at least reinstall it, is really contrived. Nah, they just used single-burn PROM to save on memory costs.
Those were totally robots, not aliens!
They looked very mechanical. They were even translucent and you could see some "high-tech" looking parts moving around in there!
BTW, I thought they were aliens at first too and when I said something about them one of my friends said "I thought those were robots". We decided he was right. I think the only thing that made them seem like aliens was that their basic body shape fit with what we often see as aliens in other movies.
--
I am very split on this movie in a few areas: 1)I also was expecting an Artificial Intelligence movie. The theme of "love" was a perverted twist to the plot. Instead of actually wanting a mecha who *could* love, we are bombarded with pictures of dead children for whom these mecha's will be replacing. I will not credit Kubrick or Spielberg for this, but it certainly seems Kubrick-ish; humanity is so overwrought with its own desire to love/be loved that it creates the perfect robot to fulfill the needs: Nanny/Caretaker, Perfect Enamourous Lover, Perfect Adoring Child. Thus so, I found it perfect that the "Flesh Fair" would exist. It is important (to me) that the opposition be shown in stories, and the "Flesh Fair" was extreme enough to get across a few points. Firstly, that not everyone enjoys mechas; Secondly, they are willing to destroy them just as long as no pleas emerge from the mecha. If the darn thing gets "too" human, then what distinguishes it from humanity, but only by its hardware (or other fruity ideas)? Thirdly, when David smashes "David," I was pleased. It is extreme enough to get across the point that a robot can snap and destroy even other mechas. This, also, is a very human trait; however, I saw it as necessary in the task given to David. He was programmed to "love." His mother told him he was "unique" and "one of a kind." He saw another of his kind, which would undoubtedly alter the "unique" love his mother has for him, and therefore this obstacle must be removed. Perhaps this was too extreme, but I thought it was perfect. 2) I thought it was a pretty good movie. I'd like to buy it and analyze the heck out of it someday. Of course there are "Frankenstein" references, which I was very happy to read in other Reply's. I thought it was interesting that there is no middle ground for creating aritficial life: In "Frankenstein", the Dr. created his monster and deserted him unloved and uneducated. In "A.I.," David was left unloved and uneducated, but with a mission. The Monster also had a mission, but it was one of his own free will (work with me here), to kill Frankenstein's family. Contrarily, David only desired to be loved. Let me change that: David was only programmed to be loved, and he failed. He waited 2000 years (and didn't know it?!) to fulfill this task. Do I think he really loved his mother? NO. NONONO. That was his planned mission, and although I see Dr.whatshisface's point that "no other robot has made decisions on its own," and David was again "unique and one of a kind," I find it hard to believe that something programmed could somehow break away and *actually* love. This, my friends, is impossible, but good for a Sci-Fi movie. 3) The Ending: Ohmygosh. Ok, I thought David "became a real boy" when he gave up his desire to live and fell off the building. I also thought that this was a good marker for the end. But a prophecy by Whatta-ya-know-Joe earlier in the film prevented the credits from rolling: "in the end, all that will be left...is US." So, 2000 years later, apparently "the end," robots have taken over the earth, and some archeologists have found David and have a party. The ending was a closer for a few things, however lame it was that David "went where dreams are made": 1. He found the Blue Fairy and became a real boy, 2. He fulfilled his programming needs, and was loved by his mother, 3. The world was taken over by freaky robots, 4. We entered an unexpected ice age, but instead of the waters receding back to the poles, it just stayed in New York. I ultimately found that David "slept" to be a silly ending. He never desired to sleep before, so this is an unfounded conclusion to David's quasi-epic. Water won't destroy him (but spinich will..), time won't kill him...how exactly does David go? ...
Good Movie? Bad Movie? I say "interesting, but more Kubrick would have been better." It was a little too fuzzy for a Sci-Fi. Reminds me of another fuzzy Sci-Fi movie..."E.T." Hmmmmm....
I find myself liking this film more the more I think about. I was uncomfortable several times during the actual viewing - forced to distance myself from my emotional reactions more than I am used to in movies. But I think I loved this robot fairy tale. I keep waiting for some reviewer somewhere to mention the writer who understood how machines could aspire to souls and how humanity could escape the confines of homo sapiens. It may be that no one remembers the strange fables published under the name Cordwainer Smith, written by psychological warfare pioneer and orientalist Paul Linebarger. I heard strong echoes of his writing all through this movie.
- mecha boy's parents are neurotic messes who create mecha child for their own benefit, not that of the mecha boy
- mother inevitably creates unhealthy, unbreakable bond between her and mecha boy
- father and brother obstruct mecha boy's relationship with mother, causing mecha boy's suffering to increase
- mecha boy's desire for greater closeness as well as fear of being hurt leads him to inadvertently cause harm to others
- mother inevitably abandons mecha boy for selfish reasons, but leaves him a chance for survival and thus a faint but real chance to find happiness
- mecha boy immediately finds his own kind: other damaged mecha people fumbling around for their missing pieces in the dark, neurotically stuck in their own self-limiting programming/conditioning
- mecha boy finds the strength to continue by blindly holding onto his idealized notion of mother, as well as his own childlike perceptions of his uniqueness and special qualities
- unable to get what he needs in the real world, mecha boy develops magical thinking, believing a fictitious supernatural force will help him meet his needs
- mecha boy ultimately finds that he is neither special nor unique and will never get the love he needs from his mother--then he tries to kill himself
i left out "mecha boy gets therapy and feels better" because that doesn't always happen, but i thought it could have worked."I thought I could organize freedom. How Scandinavian of me."
I personally believe people went into this movie with a lot of expectations which were not met. Did Spielberg try to become Kubrick to pay homage to his close friend? I think the answer would be a resounding yes, but people need to look past that and many other "plot" points and look at a few of the ideas which have never been wrestled with very well in the past. Such as when a robot becomes sentient (define it as you must) what are societies moral obligations to it. Perhaps David surpased what a robot truly is and in some way had a "soul." Also I thought the robots (loose definition) of 2000 years in the future revering humans as gods was quite interesting. Perhaps this is similar to how man views god. Despite everyone saying they did not like this plot line or that scene we must look at the movie as a whole. To look at Clock Work Orange or 2001 and not consider the ethical questions tackled is quite a shame. See past the idea that "Spielberg is not Kubrick and he was horrid in his attempt." The movie is much more then what is on the screen. Kubrick has always asked us to think outside the film, and if we do not do that with AI we are just dismissing what Kubrick's true legacy has been.
Bingeldac denies any responsibility for the
spelling and/or grammatical errors above.
I don't go to movies for a challenge, nor do I go to sleep; I go for entertainment. In this case I wasn't up to the challenge so I had to settle for the sleep, which royally SUCKS.
As an easy-to-please movie-goer, this was one of the most wasteful experiences I've ever had in my movie-viewing history.
Spare yourself.
<bart
Bad Science #1: It is hard to make an AI "love". On the contrary, this is the easiest thing to do. In its simplest state, its just a variable that you set, i.e, Emotion = CONSTANT.LOVE, or Emotion = CONSTANT.HATE. The real tricky part is giving that constant meaning. But to build a robot with the capabilities of AI's David, love would be one of the first things you program. Without love, hate, and a host of other emotions, it would be impossible to make a robot learn all the things they need to know to be human. Emotions, along with basic needs for survival, are the building blocks of motivation. Without motivation, nothing has reason to learn.
Bad Science #2: It would be easy to create innumerable copies of David. False. David isn't something that you could just straight-out program. There is simply so much information that goes into being a human that it would be impossible to list it all. Even if you could, it's too dynamic to represent with simplistic "if then" clauses. No, a being such as David would have to be programmed to program itself, either through evolutionary or neural programming. This process of programming would not be able to start at 5 or 10 years of age. It would have to start from birth. Think of how long it took you to realize the basic functions of society. It was a very long time. I'm 23 and still learning. There may be things we could do to speed this up, but it would not change the basic process. Furthermore, this process would not be replicable: each "David" would have it's own unique personality based on it's experiences. Personality similarities would be about what we see between human twins, no more that about 50%.
Bad Science #3: David would get stuck in a rut and sit there by the Blue Ferry for 2000 years. Bzzt. For the reasons mentioned above, the mere amount of intelligence that went into David would necessitate him not being able to get stuck in a "mental rut" like this.
Bad Science #4: Irreversible imprinting. It would be impossible to program something like David to magically change alter its mind to fit our primitive notions of folk-psychology. You wouldn't just be able to open up an AI's mind and cause it to "love" someone, any more than you could open up George W. Bush's mind and cause him to be Democrat. The representation at that point in David's life would be too complex to even understand. Our scientists would only know enough to get the mental learning process going, not to alter it once it's long on its way. Thoughts such as "love for mommy" are not a switch in the brain that can be turned on or off. Similarly, to program something of this complexity would necessitate at least a roughly isometric representation, which would imply the same, that you could not alter something as simple as "love for mommy" with a switch, or a sequence of random words.
Bad Science #5: "We can only bring a human back for a day, because once a space-time path is explored, it can never be explored again." This is just pure bullshit, intended for a tidy ending. I did like the robots at the end however, they were really cool.
But overall, the movie was good. The acting was realistic enough to make me suspend disbelief, despite all of the above.
Well since people that like to post on /. just prefer to slag everything I'm going to post something different.
I really liked this movie even with this shoddy ending. Like every other movie if you go in expecting nothing and looking for nothing you will be entertained. I know for sure I was. This is one movie where I'm not jilted at the absurd ticket price.
I especially enjoyed the "I'm afraid it will hurt" scene. The "client" was all to human for once and Gigalo Joe was well, plastic. A very convincing scene that is one of those "disturbing" elements other are talking about.
Although the ending wasn't that great and was more about showing off what can be done in modern renderers, it had a point (if not well stated). If we are remembered by what we leave behind who or what will think of us when we've left this place a rotting ball of dirt where there obviously at one time was beauty.
Blah. For anyone needing to waste a few hours or are just board then go see this movie. It should tide you over until Final Fantasy is released on the 11th.
"Survival of the fittest Max, and we've got the fucking gun!" - Pi
There could of been a major disaster, such as an asteroid crashing into the planet, kicking up enough dust to make the planet cold.
As for the 2000 years of discovery, look at how much advancement there has been since the birth of christ until now, that's about 2000 years.
Just checking - we all do realize those were robots at the end and not aliens. The concept of our own creations outliving us seems pretty cool to me. When the Earth gets back to a good climate for humans it seems they would be able to clone us and humanity can survive its own extinction. While the ending was drawn out the ideas are worth it.
Just another TV drama on the wide screen. Dropped some tears - yes, but that's all. Nothing new. Is SF only about replaying worn out myths with robots and aliens for a change? Don't think so...
Have you never heard of Pinnochio?
You mean Pinocchio?
a rip off of the original version ... The real one, not the disney one.
You can read (or print) the original novel by Carlo "Collodi" Lorenzini at PinEight.com. Thank goodness it was written before 1923, as Di$ney steals from PD to make its stories and takes deliberate steps (Sonny Bono act) to make sure it never has to give back.
those machine alien-type creatures
Echoes of the land of busy-bees from Pinocchio ?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Not Star Trek
Pinocchio was on Star Trek: TNG, and his name was Data. (Or at least that's what Roddenberry thought.)
Will I retire or break 10K?
Oddly enough, if you look at the conversations, they never mention being from outerspace. The one that talks with David mentions an interest in humans. Those aliens are the evolved MACHINES. Remember when Joe said, "When the end comes, all that will be left are us!" When the first machine scanned David's head, and then more did, it wasn't ESP, or anything. How can you have a mental connection with something that doesn't have an organic mind? It was an Uplink. Those aliens are robots.
micheal, what movie were you watching? there were 0 (ZERO) aliens in this movie. (an absolutely great movie, in my opinion. of course not without its flaws, but ABSOLUTELY great.)
The REAL sam_at_caveman_dot_org is user ID 13833.
The biggest issue is that in Asimov's books, the "Law of Robotics" would not have been formed till after the David was frozen for (heh heh) 2000 years.
There is no spoon.
Oh, my humble pacemaker,
one heartbeat from the throne,
keep that son-of-a-bush healthy,
my battery is running low.
My heart companion runs java,
version one-point-oh-dot-two,
i can feel the pressure building,
cuz there's memory management to do.
the doctor say i'm healthy,
my pounding friend beats true,
he checks on it remotely,
using linux network tools.
But what's that sinking feeling?
could my worst nightmares be true?
it's those russians and the chinese,
hacking in to turn me blue.
They got my damn IP,
from the whitehouse tour bathrooms,
well, that's it for your VeePee,
the floor approaches...boom.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
just saw A.I. Call me insensitive, but it took all my willpower to not shout "Use the Force!" during that one scene. You'll know the one. It's really quiet, too. I probably would have, if it weren't for the higher-than-usual odds that, if I were thrown out, I'd be recognized and denied admittance to that theater in the future. And while there are probably ample opportunities to yell "I see dead people", wait until the very end. Also, the theatrical trailer is right about the initial premise of an artificial child. He doesn't age. He is an artificial son. Now, call me insensitive a second time, but that sounds like the worst idea ever. Every parent would tell you that the best thing about having a child is that you're raising him, watching him grow, and building a future for him. Take all that away, and all you have left four-foot-fall Tamagotchi. Instead of growing old and dying after six weeks with careful attention, he lives forever and apparently runs on a perpetual motion device. Imagine a future where there are 80-year-old couples who have had an 8-year-old son for fifty years. There is only one reason a corporation would spend millions of dollars to develop such a contraption: to lure millions of moviegoers. The child has still more examples of bad design. The imprinting being irreversible, for one thing. Suppose after 20 years, having a child running around the house with its emotional neediness begins to wear on you. There is no painless way to end the relationship. Even a pet dies on its own, but this child must be driven to the nearest Robot Shack to be destroyed. I'll bet they even have a little observation window where you can watch them put him in the guillotine. Were this robot released to consumers, this is probably the first question people would raise. The question of love was raised at the beginning of the movie, but the Tamagotchi already answered those questions. The board member that would serve as the conscience of the meeting asked that if the robot could love, what responsibilities would the parent have to love a robot? At least some Tamagotchi owners loved their pets, and many of them mourn their death. But won't there also be people who bring the robot home, imprint him, and then abuse him? The Sims and Black and White allow you to abuse the residents of their particular dollhouses, and many people do. And when Monica imprinted David, he started calling her "Mommy". Did he start calling his father "Daddy" and start asking to play catch with him? How long was it before anyone in the household referred to Martin as his brother? Did anyone raise the question of whether our robo-child would go to school, or whether it would make any of its own friends independently? I suppose it works as a metaphor for how people bring children into the world without any consideration for the consequences.
they aren't aliens at the end; they are super-futuristic androids. Or, at least that is what I drew from the movie. BTW, I thought the movie was incredible. I absolutely loved how bizarre it was.
I dont have a
It was strange and quite interesting to see new york city under a frozen ocean, although the aliens or super robots or whatever could have been better done. They reminded me of the ones in close encounters.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
but why would humans make disobedient robots?
D$%* it! Why won't this print???
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Then I -know- it sucks.
*Scratches 'See A.I.' from his list of to-dos.*
To take the purity of logical computer thought and to pervert it with emotions is in itself evil. I refuse to believe that such a horrible thing as FEELING machines would ever take off. I hate the very thought of the mathmatical logical haven of computers being horribly maimed by emotions.
Going to see it tomarrow, but still, I am _ALOT_ less ethusiastic about it now.
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I think the movie was great. It was trying to do a lot, and although it was a bit long in the tooth, I think it did it! But I did laugh at the first sign of the maple syrup aliens/robots/whatever.
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What you'll get instead is a sappy, sentimental, "I'm-Spielberg-and-I-wanna-make-a-dumb-movie-seem- important-and-artsy-by-adding-some-random-Kubrick- style-stuff-but-it-has-to-appeal-to-the-ordinary-i diot,-'cause-I'm-fucking-...- Spielberg -and-I'll-be-damned-before-I-film-something-that-a pproaches-anything-like-a-sense-of-subtlety" movie
Any questions/surprises? My ticket was a shameful waste of my girlfriend's money.
"Special effects are also superior - rarely in your face, but always there, and entirely realistic. (I'm going to ignore the aliens.)"
Those were not aliens. I don't think anyway. They were the descendants of the robots.
Aide: Grant drinks too much to command an army. Lincoln: Find out what he drinks and give it to my other generals!
Well yes, for robots he is.
When you speak the word "robot" you automatically speak the invocation that calls up the God, like it or not.
KFG
Hear, hear! THEY ARE NOT ALIENS!!! sheesh people. no wonder no one likes the ending if all thought they were aliens.
How could anyone miss the analogy of humans creating imperfect robots in the first of the movie, and robots creating imperfect humans at the end of the movie? Maybe you needed a blinking red sign or something. The movie really does end where it began, only the roles get switched. The ending is entirely necessary to complete the analogy, IMO. Teeleton
I agree. I just saw it this weekend. I cried for most of the film, but they were tough, manly tears, I'll have you know. Actually, the whole existential, ironic mess of self, identity, and consciousness is staked out in a very bright, hot sun with this movie. That's why I cried. I cried for us! I cried because there is no Santa Claus--of any kind, anywhere, for anyone, ever! Super ouch! The fact that the white trash/Luddites actually rioted to save David is a double-whammy, triple reverse psychology mind-blower, even though the preacher/bounty hunter dude is undoubtedly right. The scene where David sits for 2,000 years begging a statue is straight out of all the village churches of the RC world where people pray to the Blessed Virgin Mary all their lives, ferchrissakes! These ideas have been dealt with by many before, but AI puts a mighty summation sign in front of the whole topic. (I'm about to cry now....)
--- WWSD? What Would Strider Do?
A much more insightful review can be found at the New Yorker web site.
Mike
How can people possibly mistake those things for aliens? I'm pretty sure that at one point they even say they are decended from the mecha of David's time. Now while when they're introduced they look similar to ET-ish aliens, when they restart David and Teddy and then download his memories, it should be obvious that they are robots, or else they should require more time to know what to do...
Robots that look like walking ice sculptures, but robots none the less...
--
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
You should also remember that the "aliens" were able to download David's memories (and then download them from each other) as well as restart the frozen robots (remember when the "alien" reaches its hand over David and David jumps to life (and then breaks the Blue Fairy), and again to resurrect Teddy)?
Not only that, but these "aliens" where excavating Earth to discover their origin and learn about their creators, if I recall some of the "alien's" dialog correctly.
Personally, I thought it was fairly clear after they rebuilt David's home that they were decended from the mecha of David's time.
--
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
It's about forty-five minutes too long; I'm convinced Spielberg simply wanted to emulate Kubrick as much as possible, and therefore threw a nearly nonsensical completely gratuitous and most especially pointless ending on the movie -- nevermind that it takes up nearly a third of the running time. I would've considered it a masterpiece if they would've just rolled credits after Joe hit the "submerge" button.
Does anyone know much about the "Supertoys" short story? I figure I'll go snooping with Google in a bit; but the short story that Wired reprinted at the link in this article doesn't seem complete. A recent issue of Playboy had two short stories by Brian Aldiss that had "Supertoys" names -- did he just write a whole bunch of short stories about David-the-neurotic-robot, or are all of these excerpts from a novel?
The ending was obviously entirely Kubrick. Dont forget that this is the guy that ended 2001 with a glowing baby, and Full Metal Jacket with grunts singing the theme to the Mickey Mouse Club.
[[Spoilers Ahead]]
If it was up to Speilberg, I think he would've ended it with David staring at the Blue Fairy. Spielberg isn't afraid to leave the audience in tears.(Check Schindlers List and Saving Private Ryan). And When was the last time he made a 'family picture'? His last few have been filled with suffering and anguish.(again, check Schindlers List and Saving Private Ryan).
D
Mad Scientists with too much time on thier hands
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Oh my god! JonKatz wrote an intelligent, interesting article and DIDN'T MENTION THE PERSECUTION OF GEEKS! /me thinks someone hacked his account and wrote this review for him :-)
This
You must think the movie is about Human beings.
To me, the real vision begins when he jumps into the water. The beginning of the movie has been done many times.
Imagine the Earth 2000 years from now. Because stupid people refuse to change we will have faced the same disaster as those in the movie. The oceans will rise. We are just making it happen at an accelerated rate.
After that you have an advanced machine life form explaining their discoveries of time and space and consciousness and that we are all connected. That is vision. Most of you have zero spiritual abilty and are 100% consumed with materialism. Lucky we have FILM to help educate...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_U.S._Election_c
how much kubrick like horror did spielberg allow himself in this movie?
"Sorry, but I don't there's anything charming about ignorance and carelessness." -LordNimon
we need to make a perl script that compares the average high school graduates reading speed against the lentgth of the article/time that the user took to press reply. crack addicts beware
"Sorry, but I don't there's anything charming about ignorance and carelessness." -LordNimon
The initial part of the movie was interesting and explored several moral issues involved with such technology. It had my full attention. Then the movie abandoned that plot completely and ran of on 500 tangents without exploring any of them to any extent. And when you start to pray that it will end on a given note.. it goes on and gets even worse... then you think your suffering is FINALLY over, and again it continues and finds some way to get worse yet. I put this as my number 2 worst film, beating out Water World and a close second to Battlefield Earth
This movie was so bad, that I couldnt even leave because I had to hold out and just hope that the movie would redeam itself at some point. It never did, and during the last hour or so it found a way to get worse and worse every 15 mins... it was literally painful and ruined 4.5 hours of my day. 2.5 watching it and 2 more trying to recover from the horrid event
Riiight...except the first thirty minutes where there was no music, and all the other parts where there was no music. He played the Blue Danube Walz and Thus Spake Zarathustra -- not constant music. Try this: see the movie.
Like Clockwork Orange and 2001, this film is more about exploration than entertainment.
And yes, I realize Spielberg directed it, but it is Kubrick's vision.
Why do story-tellers always portray emotions (especially love) as the test of humanity, and then equate humanity with personhood? No love==no personhood? But, I always though Spock was a great guy!
An idea flowing out of the cognition field is that a human brain is mainly one big collection of pre-computed things to spare the mind from having to deal with everything.
Imagine you are in a dark cave and you hear a growl. You could determine logically that it's unsafe and leave, or you could become afraid and leave. The result of emotion is often the same as the logic--just pre-computed and generalized. Every emotion from love to greed to lust to charity can have this generalized logic applied to it--so it's possible that's all it really is.
But if you could create a faster mind capable of dealing with logically deducing if it's unsafe in a cave, you don't need emotion--and not only that--it's superior logic may often cause it to act in ways consistant to that of emotional beings. You might call logic "real-time emotion" instead of "pre-computed emotion"?
I'll take Spock over Kirk any day!
Didn't you guys love the symmetry of the robot's "human" desire to understand humanity? That he already had what he was looing for but didn't even know it? Well, it was probably just me
:)
Actually, I just thought it was a really bad Star Trek: NG episode....
Steven Spielberg's new movie is really, really, really bad. It's bad in almost every way...
My friends and I saw AI this past friday and we all walked out with mixed feelings particularly about the ending. The alien-like creatures seemed more of a plot device than anything else. But then someone made a suggestion that maybe they weren't aliens but super advanced AI mechas. Mechas that had evolved (if you can call it evolution) beyond humanity and survived. It would explain a great deal if you take it from that perspective. Their curiousity becomes more genuine. The way they act and look, which is remarkably human-like, makes more sense (Ok so almost every alien created is human like, but that's just because we humans are so full of ourselves). They even sort of look like advanced mechas with what appear to be circuitry in their bodies, plus there ability to access David's memory and even power him back up would be much more easily acceptable if they were indeed advanced mecha. Just my $.02
D'oh! Looks like I posted a little late about the idea. Glad to see others were coming to the same conclusion about the ending.
Not spinach, evidently. Say what you like about dodges like "fairy tale" or "symbolic," but the idea that a robot boy could neither eat spinach nor get wet without having some kind of short-circuit is simply stupid.
I've seen a lot of this lately. Filmmakers and artists have this tendency to overrate the big picture and forget that the details are also part of the big picture. When I talk about the can't-eat-spinach scene and otherwise intelligent people snarl, "Don't get so hung up on the details!" I feel like I'm the one talking to robots.
Sure the details matter. The details make a lot of difference, even in a story that's supposed to be a fable. Calling your story a fable does not mean you have the license to cavalierly ignore things when they don't suit you. If you want to make your characters fly and dodge bullets, then you come up with a story that supports those things.
"The Matrix" built nicely up to its allegorial rebirth ending (trying not to give any spoilers here). "A.I." just has senseless stuff like the above dropped in all along the way with no real explanation. The "fairy tale" credentials seemed largely due to it simply quoting "Pinnochio" directly (the "Blue Fairy") -- and for that matter, not quoting it with a great deal of insight or intelligence.
Try this experiment. If the names "Steven Spielberg" or "Stanley Kubrick" didn't appear anywhere in this movie, would it have been anywhere nearly as interesting? I asked friends of mine to try the same experiment with "Episode 1" and they responded by merely getting angry. Most of the reason for the interest in the film is because it consists of a story that was never completeted by one very famous director and has since been completed by another. For that matter, "After the Rain" was pretty mediocre, too.
At best, the movie is a failed experiment. At worst, it lapses into the kind of precious, pretentious sentimentalism that passes for emotions these days.
Honorary Member of Jackie Chan's Kung Fu Process Servers
Somehow I blame Michael Chricton for that space-time continuum drivel, with his quantum-foam explanations in Timeline. Not to ascribe that explanation specifically to a borrowed Chrichton (sp!?!) line, but I think Spielberg has a capacity for rip-off genius rivalled only by the Beatles. This isn't a bad thing, but you get the feeling that many of his ideas are already floating out there in the collective unconscious in a way that you would never get that feeling for, say, a David Lynch movie. Or a Kubrick movie, for that matter.
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From a programming perspective, I didn't like the fact that he was homicidically dangerous. I mean, by the time kids are that age, they are sensitive to a siblings drowning death throes, if not completely aware that 'Mommy wouldn't approve of me killing my brother.' And then toward the end when he was walking amongst all his 'clones' (an excellent, eerie scene reminiscent of the Shining kitchen scenes, and not the Jurassic Park kitchen scenes, btw), um, just before that he gets into a rage and beheads one of them??? I agree: Isaac Asimov should have showed up in a cops uniform and written David a ticket for violating some principle of the Robots Creed. That would have been a funny scene...
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I agree with several on this board on the ending. I was so ready for the camera to simply pull away from the submerged David, praying in the dark to the deaf Blue Fairy. For all of the minor disappointments throughout the film, I was ready to forgive Spielberg. My heart was sinking, my mind was reeling and I wanted to walk out with an urge to ponder and discuss.
But then... Ben Kingsley starts his "2000 years later" speech and we are flying somebody's half-ass concept of an airbus over the surface of Hoth. Dang.
Now. Accepting the movie as is, and realizing that we could all do our own Phantom Edit just by hitting "stop" twenty or so minutes earlier, does anyone else have any issue with the "bring mom back" ending? It is saying something about love, or at least Spielberg's concept of love, that we might be missing. And what it is saying seems rather selfish and disturbing, and not in a Kubrick way.
David is programmed to love. David specifically loves Monica. So the mega-mechas bring back Monica with the caveat that she will live for only one day. David knows this, knows that his mom will have to die a second time, but insists on her return. Now, here is where it gets creepy, and maybe this is a point (perhaps unintentional) we are missing.
Monica wakes and the first person she sees is David. She seems to have no concept of anyone else, no husband, no son, doesn't ask about either of them. There is only David, a mirror image of David's tunnel-vision concept of Monica. In essence, the mega-mechas have only provided David with a Monica made in his own image. But is that love? It is more like Midsummer Night's Dream when the spellbound Titania falls for the donkey-headed Bottom simply because he is the first creature she sees.
If we are meant to leave with the impression that David was finally able to become "human" through the receipt of human love and affection, this is not the way to do it. If anything, Monica has been brought back as a similacrum, capable of nothing but an obedient love, a programmed love. David ends up with a dehumanized mother, and perhaps that is the only kind he can ever have.
And that is the sick feeling I took away from the theatre, undefined until a week later. If only I would have known to leave when the ferris wheel fell....
grabbingsand
"Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you mad."
"Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you mad."
-- Aldous Huxley
Finding clever references would be interesting if the story was original and clever references were intermittently mixed in. Instead, we have a movie that pretty much is 60% Bladerunner, 15% other non-speilberg movies, 10% Pinocchio short story, 10% other Speilberg movies, and maybe 5% originality. I didn't find anything new in this movie that has not already been presented in other movies.
Because sometimes, free will (or at least an independent line of reasoning) is the only way to find an answer. Attributed to Patton: "Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity."
If an artificial intelligence was not capable of being disobedient, would you really consider it intelligent? In other words, if all it were capable of doing was that which its (possibly myopic) creator/controller had said, then how useful will it be?
Asimov's laws of robotics were an interesting idea, but I would not expect to see them in the real thing. They are too simple as stated; for a robot (or AI or whatever) to understand when it might be breaking those laws, it would probably already be smart enough to disregard them. The answer? A bright, red, easily accessible kill switch. And a remote kill switch in case the thing gets away.
Teddy himself. They didnt make him to life like, just like a toy.. He was the best thing I liked about the movie.
I thought the end was a bit overdone. But Kubrick and Spielberg tried to capture the essence of the whole story, the journey of a robotic child to become human. Was kind of ironic since all we could see now, are people who tend to be like machines, being more and more infatuated and dependent on technology.
I thought it was a bit too dragging, but I am willing to forgive them on that. There were a couple of moments, when I even had a lump on my throat. But Spielberg wanted to make this movie infinitely sad, coz we do have the knowledge, that no matter how much "David" try, he could never be a human. Its that infinite sadness that he never come to terms with. And I found that truly sad.
It was a good movie. It had a couple of Kubrick moments (when he is put back in to his old house), and a couple of Spielberg ones. All in all, something I would recommend, but not necessarily keep in line with "2001 : A space odyssey".
Rapid Nirvana
For somereason when i read the title AI i thought computers, guns, take over the world. Instead kept thinking "I see dead people" through out the whole movie.. horrible flick. dont waist your time. *mental note to self* - read the reviews before watching anymore movies.
Sweet, so you're talking in fold comp sci examples as to how software can kill...
good job...
As I read this from my textbook in intro to cs (where the example is cited) I see that the problem wasn't a machine or a robot or safety limits. it was that you were allowed to type in the dosage. and if you hit enter and then delete because you messed up the dosage level, it would combine both dosages. but it's good that you got it correct.
if you're wondering.. I looked it up in my textbook, java 101 Ken Goldman 1999. I'm to lazy to trace the reference to the study that it most likely came from...
but it's good that you were half awake when they talked about software killing people in your cs class.
cool, can we argue about somthing that has no real importance and probbably was never decided by the writer/director at all? good... I now feel better
I too was put off at first when the "aliens" appeared. However, I soon realized that they probably weren't aliens; I'm pretty sure they are evolved mechas. This explains how they can control and interact with David. It also explains their keen interest in finding a "link with humanity" in David-- humans are their creators.
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
I went to see this movie with my fiance and my best friend. I think, perhaps, I was the only one of the three that could see the genious in the movie, masked though it was. In a word, the movie is disturbing. From the opening, your sense of morality is attacked, but it's done in a tasteful way that challenges you to re-evaluate your previous stance.
There are some spectacular laughs, though, to offset the deep nature of the film. Luckily, for the majority of dumbed-down America, these laughs permeate the work, and are distributed throughout the film so as not to lose (many) people before the end.
Not to lose many people before the end - this is important, given the length of the movie - 2.5 hours, nearly, is very tricky. Quite a few walked out from my showing about an hour and three quarters through. Granted, it was a 10:30 PM showing, but it was Friday night! I could understand their frustration, though, if that's indeed what it was. The movie would have had ended well when David decided to take the plunge into the strangely calm waters that were Manhattan island.
Actually, there were a few points immediately prior to the "suicide" scene where the movie could have ended on an acceptably Kubrick quasi-ending. I felt that the story dragged out unneccessarily after this point to leave the audience feeling generally good about themselves - essentially, the last thirty minutes of the film is the fairytale part. In fact, it reeked of Disney. I got the feeling that this last piece was not in line with Kubrick's original view of the movie; it seemed to lack his personal touch, which Spielberg did a tremendous job of emulating through the first two hours.
On a final note, the visuals are high quality, what we've come to expect from Dreamworks SKG. Unfortunately, it's what we've come to expect from them, not anything truly ground-breaking.
In summary, I give AI a fair review. Not my favorite movie, but I may watch it again. It satisfied my requirements - I laughed, I was challenged, and I left with having experienced something worthy of discussion and critique. Remember, not everyone really likes the Mona Lisa, but nobody argues that it's a unique and a tremendous work of art.
main(){char I,l,O[]={'-',1-1,0,(1<<5)-1,0+'-',-10-1,-10,11-0,
I don't think the batteries actually lasted that long. The Super-AIs did something Highly Advanced (TM) to revive him and Teddy.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
Don't waste your time, and don't listen to these bufoons heaping praise upon it.
It has approximately 30 minutes of decent material, and even at its best is a cheap Bladerunner ripoff.
The ending, rather; the last fourty five minutes of the movie is trite garbage, comparable to Mission to Mars. It contains some of the worst pulled-out-of-ass- dialogue I've heard in years. I can see guys in the editing room with Spielburg going "Yo, Steve. This is costing us money, man. This isn't funny. Come on."
News at 11: Kubrick's corpse found rolling over in grave.
This is Spielburg at his fucking _worst_: the camera floats all over the fucking scenes, something Kubrick would have never done. The dialogue is garbage, reminscent of poetry I wrote when I was fourteen. Everyone involved with this effort except for Jude Law and Teddy should be ashamed. Okay, Haley Joel is okay, but is given vomitous lines to work with.
Avoid this trash at all cost. If you really want to watch transparent psuedo-sci-fi, you can go rent Mission to Mars.
Spielburg, fuck you. I want my money back and I'm sure Kubrick probably wants his legacy back.
Avoid this!
jack's bicycle is music to my ears
Maybe "trash" is too harsh for my taste. But is was struck when at the end of the movie I cared more about the Teddy than David. Teddy seemed more human and able to love than David. Why is that?
Yea I got that and much more. The problem is that the director didn't seem to get it. If the robots in the end think we are the creators does that mean we are gods? Oooooo.... Yawn
At the end robot boy is in ice that covers NYC. What's being said above is that if a ice age came on the polar caps would grow again and thus NYC would go back to being dry like it is now.
I can't see any fast-food joint wanting to pick up the merchandise rights to this film. Besides the Teddy, and maybe the cars, what is there to market? And the film is unquestionably not intended for children--"killing" robots with cannons, "parental" abandonment, red light districts, gigilo robots, murder and death. There was far more non-cutesy than cutesy in this movie.
It's a good flick, but it's no epic. Get over it, boys.
While I agree that there wasn't anything groundbreakingly "first" about this movie, that doesn't mean it's not a great tale. Summer blockbuster addicts who went to this film expecting lots of action, adventure, and eye candy are going to walk away disappointed, and there's nothing anyone can (or should) do for them. But anyone who wanted to see an intriguing story in the true science-fiction vein -- not like Hollywood sci-fi, but like Issac Asimov sci-fi -- will walk away pleased.
I dislike the closed-minded idea that only films like Spielberg's Jaws or Close Encounters or E.T. will be remembered in the decades to come. Each of those films stood out from their contemporaries because of their F/X as well as their stories (well, except Jaws, which was all effects around an overused monster story). A.I. has outstanding effects, but to be honest, they're nothing the audience isn't used to seeing these days. However, they deserve respect for the way they were so seamlessly blended into the movie. Very few effects stood out. The Teddy looked like a toy, the car looked like a car. Everything looked wonderfully, invisibly real.
The story, meanwhile, is very different from your typical summer fare, and that's probably throwing everyone for a loop. The thrust of the film is a philosophical question: what makes humans "alive", what gives us a soul, that the robots lack? The professor at the beginning posits that the missing element is the abstract quantity of Love. The rest of the movie explores whether or not this is true.
There's no "bang" in this film, and I'll agree that there's nothing too terribly novel about the story. Nevertheless, it's a rare story well-told, and deserves recognition for that alone. Hollywood is so packed full of high-adrenaline monsters and spaceships that everyone's forgotten what science fiction is really about.
The part that got me was in the first few minutes: We can design a robot that loves, but can people love him back. That's what the film was all about. More specifically, we can make a movie about a robot that loves, but will the audience love him?
You've got to give kudos to the filmakers here. David was robot. He is irrational, he does'nt follow logic, and ultimatly, he NEVER strays from his programming. All he cares about is getting his mother's love (even at the expense of her). But it still makes him loveable.
I hated the plot holes. I hated the fact that any rational person watching this film has to, at least a few times, go 'uh... what?' with the way the characters interact. But, I still like the movie.
On a side note, Man, the 'supertoy' Teddy was the coolest sci-fi side kick in years. If only George Lucas would watch this and give us the personalities of Teddy instead of JarJar, I'd be in heaven.
The Internet is generally stupid
It only happened once.
It can happen again. In SimEarth, robots evolve when atomic weapons are used on a Nanotech-age city. They do tend to be quite rapacious, having no climate in which they do not thrive.
I believe the point is that robots survive the destruction of the city, and, without their organic masters to rein them in, spread unchecked, much to the detriment of any pre-existing life forms. So yes, A.I. does incorporate this sci-fi chestnut.
FreeBSD - the power to serve.
Artificial Insemination? Insert rant about "stuff that matters" here... What? Oh, "Artificial Intelligence"... Never mind :)
--
Did anyone else see the Wizard of Oz parallel? That's all I could think of throughout the movie - yet my friends think I'm crazy.
It is possibly long enough. Depends on what was going on climactically. Not sure it's long enough to freeze the ocean down to the depth that it did, but who knows...
What I find MORE interesting is how well everything held up after being under water for 2000 years (and under ice as well... the freezing process aparently didn't damage anything). Think two thousand years back, and how few relics survived. Now imagine the skyscrapers being surrounded by ocean, being pounded by water for hundreds of years, and then ice-bergs, and then being frozen... and tell me they'd all still be upright and more-or-less looking like they did 2000 years ago...
But inspite of all that... I consider the movie to be a 'Robot's fairy tale', and as such, am willing to not nit-pick. It's not supposed to be taken literally or to be real. It's a fairy tale for robots. And if you view it as that, it's a decent movie.
- Spryguy
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
i think that i will have to go see this movie again. it touched on some very good points, and yes, it had its moments of insight. it also had some idiotic parts, but looking back, i think they are outnumbered by the amazing ones...hm. there really was alot, ALOT going on in this movie. i think the thing that gets everyone is that it could have been better. and, looking back, i think the ending is...fair, good even. if only there wasnt a fucking narrator.
"Cornflakes are not the innocent critters they seem"- Sterling Morrison
Even though I appreciate the disturbing sentiments expressed in this film (and very well-documented by others in this thread), I have to say that they're somewhat immaterial. That's because this future is not going to occur. I harken back to an old view of the future, expressed in wild visions at past World's Fairs or in the early sci-fi flicks. This is the future where technology advances continuously without ebb into a perfect flowering of what we now reckon as our technological achievements to date.
What's wrong with AI is not in how the story is told or how it's presented as much as in how the story is based on old preconceived notions of a future that can't be.
The basic problem is that Moore's Law applies to hardware, not software. Jaron Lanier, in his essay One Half a Manifesto expresses what I think a lot of us programmers know to be true. He states: "This breathtaking vista [of unending advancement in hardware] must be starkly contrasted with the Great Shame of computer science, which is that we don't seem to be able to write software much better as computers get much faster." I would encourage everyone to read Mr. Lanier's very compelling thoughts about how the "cybernetic totalists" are so very, very stupidly wrong.
I think the more realistic future will evolve not as robots replacing humanity, but rather humankind finding increasingly optimal ways to create a universal conscience or mind with technology. And the great thing about this technology is that it's a far simpler endeavor to connect human minds than it is to recreate them. The current degree of software evolution will be able to handle this rather nicely. Otherwise, if we keep up the trip of developing a true AI, humankind will be spinning its wheels for a very long time to come, and for what bloody purpose?
Steve Magruder
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
Does anyone else think that the 2,000 year time lapse between the ferris wheel crashing down and the later discovery of David was too short? Could an ice age come about so quickly? I imagine 2,000 years ago that Earth looked pretty much as it did now. Also, did enough time pass for the aliens/robots to do all that discovering, experimenting, and advancement? Oh, and yes... I do know it was FICTION. Of course, if you walk out of the theater when David jumps off the building, none of this really matters. One more thing. If this kid whispers his way through one more role, I think it will be the death of his career. No matter how much talent he has, I for one, am going to start getting really annoyed.
"Those who make puns should be drawn and quoted."
I went into this movie expecting something more along the lines of hard science fiction, with robots, computer science jargon, and some kind of Frankenstein scenario. Sure, the movie does contain stuff like that, but not a lot. It really is more like a modern Pinocchio. Don't go into this movie expecting something very techno-ish like the Matrix. Some have told me how genius this film is and how profound Kubrick is, but this movie simply wasn't entertaining. I was upset that it explicitly drilled the Pinocchio theme into the minds of the viewers. The people at my showing were laughing because the movie was so corny, babyish in its desire to showcase a modern e-pinnochio, if you will. I guess I would say that everyone should see this movie at least once. Some think its a masterpiece, others simply think its garbage.
... It has three distinct parts to it. When the movie transitions from one part to another, it practically severs any relation between them other than the main character and his sidekick. It made the movie seem like three distinct stories sown together at their tangents. Maybe they could have served as three different storylines aching to be completed. One last thing... The third part.. The characters it involves is simply rediculous (back to that childish idea).
By the way, the thing that irked me most was its construction. (Spoiler?)
So, all in all... Maybe it is deep. Maybe I'm just not seeing it. But it wasn't entertaining. Haley Joel Osment was great, he's an excellent actor. But I don't feel this as a box office smash. Try Fast and Furious if you like an entertaining movie with import cars.
Uhh... I know this is going to hurt... But for all the people confused, such as me, would someone please list some hard core evidence that the excavators at the end of the movie were indeed robots?
I always tend to make my initial reaction a conclusion, and I only saw the movie once, so I assumed they were aliens. They looked like the stereotypical kind of aliens. Whats more, its hard to believe that they didn't coexist during the age of humanity or have some kind of record of humanity. If they really were the creation of the first generation AI, then this second generation should have all the knowledge of the first generation. The first generation coexisted with the humans (that's obvious). If I remember correctly, the alien commented as to the importance of David as one of few links back to humanity. This made it seem like they know little to nothing about humanity.
Btw, I've been told that Joe's only-robots-will-exist line foreshadows the end of humanity and the reign of robots, so that might help the they-are-robots side of things...
So, I'm willing to believe anything, but I'd like to have some concrete list of why they aren't aliens. (I'm aware someone gave a link to a NYTimes article supposedly shedding light on this issue, but the NYTimes server isn't playing nice w/ my box).
You are making the basic mistake of assuming that the "computers" you program are Computors in general. This movie has nothing to do with computers. The field that is actually relevant here is Cognitive Science, as David was not programmed in the traditional sense, but does represent advanced understanding of how cognition takes place. It would have been more unrealistic if there were a non-destructive way to program in limits or reset the "software" (which I think does not exist).
Ceci n'est pas un post
There's another review here by Ray Kurzweil, a guy who has been around real-world AI for a while. Possibly a few plot-spoilers, but mostly about the feasability of stuff done in the movie.
Remember first that David was created to fulfill a need in a culture that had witnessed a billion deaths; a culture whose emotional disconnect makes sex with machines preferable to sex with humans.
So watch the film and ask yourself how we might be different from Dr. Hobby. Would we make the same fundamental mistake and see our creation only as lines of code and a research breakthrough?
David's journey is ultimately a human one - a machine seeking the humane.
This is brilliant film-making with a single instance of what Joe would deem magic, in a fairy tale for all of us who may be lost in our machines.
Offer your own self to the film and you will receive back in kind, many times over.
go to speilberg for what I felt was the best film I have seen in a looong time. (I do agree, it would have been a far more powerful ending if it ended when he plunged into the ocean: the ultimate humanity in a machine, the acceptance of a harsh truth and a (metaphorical) suicide, but thats neither here or there. And yet, those are cyborgs, not aliens at the end.) congrats go for an equally good review to JohnKatz, who did the film justice. I guess the only thing I really wish was different was the title (and I suppose the way they have marketted it). I was expecting a crazy, scifi action thriller, but instead I got a far more amazing, intellectual experience. I am glad I paid the $8.50 for this one.
As Michael points out with his "eye twitch" comment, the robots don't blink. Haley Joel O. was on a talk show (can't recall which one) the other night and stated he doesn't blink during the whole movie. I'm reasonably certain none of the mechas do either. (Something interesting/stupid/odd/freaky/etc. to look for...)
Coming Attractions on AI2
One thing that bothers me about this movie was that they were supposed to be building an AI with emotions. David didn't have emotions. His "emotions" were just hardcoded instructions. His love had to be "triggered" with the proper keywords. That's not love. Love, at least the way I understand it, doesn't just switch on and off, it evolves. His love was just a preprogrammed script that when switched on, took immediate and full effect, leaving no room for emotional growth.
>(I'm going to ignore the aliens.) - SPOILER - I think they're actually a race of super-advanced Mechas - playing on the line earlier in the movie where the one Mecha says (and this quote isn't exact) "When they are gone, all that will be left is us" - When the Ice Age came, it wiped out all the humans and the robots survived.
Many people don't seem to get that your not suppose to fully get the movie at the end. Your ment to keep thinking and then see the movie again. Leaving the Boy plumeting into the water or praying is way too simple. You can almost understand that. This movie has more to say.
The movie does have some rough spots but seeing the movie again helps to clear them up. I thought they were aliens too. It didn't dawn on me and I missed it that they were the decendents of the robots. It also explains their curiosity and profound interest in man. It would have helped if that was more obvious but it could have been intentional.
The part about reviving a person only for a day is hokey but go past it; might take several viewings to figure that out. But basicly they can resurrect a persons "soul" in a cloned body for a day.
The decended AI's want the boy to live (even if they know everything in the boys head) but ultimetly the machines have aquired greater compassion than their human foreberrers and they let him go.
but I need to vent, and Katz's idiot remarks have inspired me.
AI was absolute trash. That Katz praised it only leads me to loose faith in Slashdot and the rest of the world.
To quote: "A.I. is shocking and haunting, beautiful and unique. "
I have but one response. NO! This move is not sci-fi, it is not inteligent, it is sentimental button pushing that falls short of even the lowest standards for good film. Spielberg took the greatest time to spell out in the utmost detail the most simplistic and intuitive questions regarding artificial inteligence. My dying cat farts more inteligent films after breakfast. Spielberg has insulted those who are interested in AI, but most horribly of all he has insulted Cubrik by tainting his great name with an association to such utter trash.
Have a nice day. My Karma was never any good to begin with.
If you happen to walk into this movie... Turn around and walk out. It is one of the most idiotic movies I've seen.
-- Sinistar
Troopers was a hard book to read. I started and never finished it even though I am a die hard Heinlein fan. Another friend seemed to have the same problem with not being able to finish the book. It was just a really boring read. I don't know what the subtext was about.
"sweet dreams are made of this..."
"One area I kept looking for was hard-coded limits on robotic behavior. These robots have neither the First, nor the Second, nor the Third Laws of Robotics"
Wow, different authors had different ideas about fictional things. Is that allowed?
end communication
But i agree with computer scientist Hugo de Garis that once we do have a clue, "humans should not stand in the way of a higher form of evolution.... It is human destiny to create them [("godlike" machines)]." (NYTimes Magazine 8/1/1999)
Unless you believe that humans possess some sacred eternal soul, and that these would not exist in a sentient bot, I see little reason to discriminate in favor of carbon based life. Can anyone give me a logical reason to, other than loyalty? On the contrary, it would be a bigger tragedy for the universe to lose all sentience than for it to lose one bested beast, and a superlative crystalline creation has a better chance of outlasting our planet's ruination than us. These artificial creatures are our best chance of achieving a sort of immortality, if we can last long enough to create them.
"Be thankful you are not my student. You would not get a high grade for such a design
I think The Filthy Critic does not read slashdot. Otherwise, slashdot editors would have gotten Filthy's "Quote Whore of the Week" at least once by now. Could we kiss up to some crappy movies a little more?
-N
nt = no text!
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
Recent so-called "science fiction" movies have done nothing to live up to their namesakes.
A.I. - Ho hum, Asimov's Frankenstein complex is in full force. Despite nearly every robotics (a word Asimov coined), despite every robotics major ANYwhere having read his robot novels, somehow they forgot the laws of robotics. D'OH!!
Bicentennial Man - They changed the plot, the assholes. Dr. Asimov is rolling in his grave. His basically optimistic vision of the future of humans and robots was twisted into a bleak and pessimistic one, and Andrew's final decisions on becoming truly human were glossed over. Pathetic.
Lost In Space - I only saw this out of the hopes it might be campy and funny, like the original, ridiculously silly TV show from the 60's. Instead, they tried to make a serious movie out of it! Result: close to 2 hours of excruciating agony in the theater. Ugh.
Starship Troopers - Almost nothing remains true to the Grand Master's plotline. The characters are switched around, one even has a sex change from the book to the story so (s)he can be a love interest. The original POINT of the book, to be R.A.H.'s dissertation on war and government, is completely ignored in favor of changing it into gore-splattering CGI fest. An utter disappointment, in every conceivable way.
(SIGH). Need I even go on about how badly the last two Star Trek movies sucked? Hollywood seems to have totally forgotten that Sci Fi can be a medium of serious insight into human nature and interesting, mind-expanding stories. Apparently all they think it's good for these days is what they call "escapism", and flashy space battles. Bah. I feel justified in speaking for most old-school Sci Fi fans in saying, we are UNimpressed.
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
Although I didn't see the movie, I'd like to comment on the quality of the reviews: higher than I have seen in most major news outlets. Especially loved the writing of Jon Katz, and the opportunity to see a poem I have always loved in print again.
Francine Hardaway, Ph.D. "It's not what happens to you; it's how you come to it." http://www.stealthmode.com
I may have missed some explination, but what exactly did these robots run on? I found it way out the window to see that robot last 2,000 years with out any type of recharging. Also these humans can make these type of power supplies but can't create a type of dome or heating source using the same technology to survive? I liked the movie, but the ending especially was horribly written.
The ending was awfull for a movie that was going so good. The aliens bit was stupid. As a plot twist it just made no sense. I think the movie was MEANT to end when david was underwater and staring at the statue but my guess is that somebody in hollywood said "that is too sad" and so speilberge said "ok- we will tack on some aliens to lighten it up. At least I HOPE that is the justification for that ending and as another poster said "I hope they come out with a phantom edit".
I miss the Karma Whores.
Oh, how tiresome. Yet another geek posting their dismay at someone NOT using something like Asimov's laws of robotics. His laws of robotics weren't that great in the first place because his novels were about robots BREAKING those rules rather than following them and he made up another rule to round out the laws of robotics. Go back to writing about imagining beowulf clusters and masturbating to Cowboy Neal.
Eh, I thought that Teddy was more the "Jiminey Cricket" of the movie than was Joe. My reasoning is that Teddy flat out said things like "You will break", but couldn't interfere otherwise. Joe was just some putz that was used to get David from one point to another.
The beings at the end of the movie aren't aliens. Nobody seems to get this, and indeed I didn't either, at first. My wife was the first to point out that they were highly advanced robots. You can see some of their circuitry through their translucent "flesh", they refer to David as one of the "original" robots, who remember living people, and they fulfill the prophecy of Gigolo Joe, who said that after the humans were dead and gone, the robots would be all that remained. And furthermore, the robot that sits with David expresses the ultimate shortcoming of the robot creations, their lack of genuine humanity. He says that he has always envied humans for their poetry and art. Would aliens really care about soulful expressions of a race that could barely leave its own planet?
Believe me, once you get over the notion that they're aliens, the movie's ending gets a whole lot better.
Ok, why is it so important to have the Three Laws of Robotics in this movie (or any film dealing with AI)? Wasn't that the whole point of I, Robot? That even these supposedly air-tight rules could be circumvented?
Just putting them in there for no reason that to garner some 'cred smacks of egoism (and would have created some loopholes to boot).
Pops always said:
1. There is more than one way to skin a cat.
2. There is more than one way to build a cage.
3. There is more than one way to program an AI.
What is music when you despise all sound?
...in a time of human-like robots, there comes a long a new robot that is very human-like. The movie questions the qualifications we have for being human. I mean come on! Isn't this a total rip off of Bladerunner?
I haven't seen A.I. nor will I. I have a feeling my time might be better spent in watching TNN or QVC. Movies like A.I. and The Thin Red Line, or even 2001 are just so much mental masturbation that hopes to preoccupy the audiance with delusions of superiority to obscure their extream mediocrity. I would also offer proof to those who claim some might lack the requiset attention span to fully appreciate such an effort. Titanic. Need anything else be said? An entirely forgettable movie that was 3 hours long, and made a billion dollars.
In the end, it about the story a movie set outs to tell, and how well that idea is executed. If a movie sets out to tell a "real" story, I damn well expect it. I don't expect long monologues that preach to the audiance. If something just throws itself out there as a thrill ride, I use the appropriate measuring stick. If a movie is directed by Roland Emmerich, and yet I'm still somehow watching it (probably being tortured for state secrets), I compare it to watching paint peel off growing grass while Carrot Top pokes me with a stick. Apples to apples, round fruit to round fruit.
In short, "Me too!"
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
I only wonder which of the movies you have an unnatural affinity for. 2001? The Thin Red Line? Titanic? or do you love the comic stylings of Carrot Top? It is important for me to know, so I do not repeat my egregious error. Perhaps if you're not too busy cowering, you coward, you could instruct me in the etiquette of proper bleating. I cannot imagine a greater sin than failing to blend in with the rest of the heard.
For my part, I appreciate movies on a whole host of levels. The levels are chosen in part by what the movies purport to be. First and foremost a movie should be internally consistant. Its not alot to ask. I'll go see a movie just for special effects, but the better be special. Comedies better be funny. When I see a movie, I want to be drawn in, and maybe escape for a little while into this shared experience with everyone else there, where I almost forget its a movie. Sadly, movies like that are pretty rare, and 2001 isn't one of them. Hell if it's symbolism and heady parallels you want, why not pick The Matrix? It certainly has as many as any other movie, more than even some independent quasi-religious efforts (Pi, Omega Code). Why the morons writing the Omega Code didn't even know where the pentagram came from. (A group of Greeks who worshiped numbers, particularly irrational numbers such as the square root of 5) In fact movies such as those, are in many respects fairly shallow. They don't have as many layers to play with to start, they don't have the money, the talent, and in many cases the concept isn't as polished. Whether some Hollywood blockbuster choses to add additional layers and weave a better tale, well that's different. I like all manner of film. For me, it's all about how well the movie excetutes the story it attempts. How well it entertains. 2001 is NyQuil on disc. It offers prescious little. I would submit Brazil, THX, Andromida Strain, are all much better movies than 2001.
A.I.? It needed a rewrite, Syd Mead, a director in his prime, and an editor. But that's just what I get from having seen the previews. And quite frankly, I've seen enough.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
I'm originally from Sligo, some 8km down the road from Glencar Lake (where Yeats is said to have written this poem).
In an 1888 letter to Katherine Tynan, Yeats said 'my poetry...is almost all a flight into fairy land, from the real world...The chorus to the "stollen child" sums it up - That it is not the poetry of insight and knowledge but of longing and complaint - the cry of the heart against necessity. I hope some day to alter that and write poetry of insight and knowledge'
This he did indeed go on and do. Here's a extract poem which, though I have not seen AI yet, may address the topical movie's theme:
He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
Had I the heavens embroidered cloths
Enwrought with golden and silver light
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
You can see the waterfall in the hills above the lake here
Backward%20compatibility%20is%20over-rated
It is basically a 3 hour jerkoff session with Freudian mother/son issues.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
I remember reading an article about the movie when it was in works.. I guess I don't know for sure, I'm just sort of going on that.
I think you're right about the "creator" thing. I think that's just one of those things I made up in my mind because it made sense in my interpretation. But again I've always been fascinated with the idea of robots replacing humans in the ultra-far future, but through a sort of peaceful and very gradual transition, and the robots admiring their human ancestors.
I really loved the movie. I know that others will disagree and will nitpick at the flaws (which there were), but I think the great scenes made it worth it.
But the reason I posted - those weren't aliens at the end, they were robots! And the narrator was referring to his fasincation with his human creators. Didn't you guys love the symmetry of the robot's "human" desire to understand humanity? That he already had what he was looing for but didn't even know it? Well, it was probably just me :).
DUh. Make porn or snuff films if you are into exploration.
I don't want to argue about the laws of robotics, but lets argue about the laws of plot... more specifically, how the movie couldn't get to the end because there was no way to end it happily. In movies, even if the hero dies, it has to be for the greater good (whether good or bad, this has to be fulfilled, or otherwise why watch it?). The later-AIs thing was horrid... this is what happens when a writer gets himself in a hole and then can't get out. The story is about David, not the fate of mankind (we can figure out what might happen or not, leave that to the imagnation). If a writer gets stuck with the character arcs, and suddenly all sorts of pointless plot tricks happen.... bad stuff for a movie. THERE IS A HUGE GLARING HOLE IN THE MOVIE. David doesn't learn, ever. That is the point of his character, he should have learned about unreturned love, grown stronger with it, became a real person and felt pain... conquered it. He should have gone to Manhattan and met an intelligent and superior AI (a secret mecca, say, I dunno... PROFESSOR HOBBY, HELLLOOOO!!!), and purge his mind of the obsession and make him whole, or tell him a way that suffering and empathy is what makes a person human, and he is now real because of that. It would have been a great ending for a little boy who doesn't age. End of story. Good exploration of what it means to be a person. Roll credits.
Without fail, Kubrick's protagonists are always caught in pursuit of an illusory state of desire that ironically prevents them from achieving true happiness. [...] And that's why practically every Kubrick fan on the IMDB who wrote a review said the movie should have ended there... [...] Then of course Spielberg spread his garbage at the end.
if you look at the ending given (which, it has been pointed out by many, was in fact Kubrick's original ending in the story boards), David does fit the traditional Kubrickean model for a tragic protagonist. His illusory state of desire compels him to ask the aliens to resurrect his mother -- not for her own benefit, but so that he himself might be loved, and feel fulfillment. He fails to achieve true happiness because (1) his mother will be gone when the day closes, and (2) he will have in effect ``used'' his mother to fulfill his own existence. Ironically, he has in doing so achieved one thing he wanted all along -- a human personality. Just like the humans who created him to fill a gap, he had his mother re-created to fill his own gap.
Now is that really so non-Kubrickean? I think of myself as a Kubrick fan, and i walked out of the theater delighted. Kubrick's mastery shown through the entire time, and Spielberg's touches only enhanced the experience.
i think it's interesting how you say the ending is clearly Spielberg's doing, and non-Kubrickean, since it seems so stapled-on for the sole purpose of providing a happy close for Hollywood movie-goers, but then go on to say that if Spielberg really thought this ending was happy, he was a fool. You're contradicting yourself, but if you analyze what you say, it brings a great deal to light. You got more out of this ending than i managed to, and i thank you for enlightening the rest of us, but i think you would be more satisfied if you took into account the fact (pointed out by many already) that the ending was in fact, Kubrick's, from the very beginning.
don't you feel all warm and tingly now?
Bladerunner / picnochio / frankenstein / Wizard of oz / 2001 Mshmash from hell.
I knew as soon as I saw William Hurt replaying Altered States it was gunna blow. I kept waiting for the monkey man to jump out. Was I the only one whao laughed out loud when the future machine race uncovered the monolith er blue fairy and gave us the "consciousness from the space/time continum fer 24hrs nonsense"? It took 200 million dollars for Spielberg to make us feel sorry for some kid without a mother? I think he's lost it.
Boring. Nothing that wasn't covered by bladerunner.
And I also seriously question the notion that this is largely a product of Kubricks work.
The ending was NOT stupid, and only a little wierd (IMnsHO). It makes sense if you use the grey matter between your ears...or the empty space maybe :P
I've never once in my life been so moved by a movie. The story is simply marvelous, deep and thought-provoking, and my wife and I were so touched it took us the hour drive home to get over it. We cried all the way home. It would not have had near the impact on us had we "left early" as others suggest. The ending is critical to the development of the character of David, and the deeper story that Spielberg was trying to relate would be lost! You'd have left satisfied that you'd seen another good Hollywood offering, but you'd miss out on one of the best experiences you'll ever have at the movies!
And as others have noted, they were not aliens. Gigelow Joe said "One day, they'll all be dead and all that will remain is us," referring to humans and robots (respectively). The narrator (fairy teller) tells us that 2000 years had passed, the world is obviously a frozen wasteland, and then we see they mystery people "download" the knowledge-base in David, as well as start him back up. We also learn that they were seeking out someone with contact with real living people.
If you miss this movie, you're doing yourself a GREAT disservice! We're still discussing it and plumbing its depths. I want to see it again (if I can take having my heart ripped again!)
There are other kinds of movies! Ok, as a science fiction movie it sucks. However, as a drama it is pretty good. I haven't seen another recent drama that was even close to the quality of this movie.
So climate's changing. So what? It has always changed. The big news would be if it wasn't changing. - Dr. Philip Stone
However, if you haven't gone and seen it yet, leave when the narrator kicks in.
The narrator starts off the movie.
What I didn't like about the ending was the way it played like a King's Quest (or other Sierra) game. Let me illustrate:
Uber-robot: "What we need to resurrect your mother is some sort of physical artifact, like a bone fragment, or a blood sample..."
Hmm.
Click on "Inventory."
Open the "Teddy" folder.
Yep, that lock of hair we got back in Scene 49 is still there.
Click on it. The cursor turns into a little lock-of-hair icon.
Click on the uber-robot.
Uber-robot: "Yes, this will do nicely! Now you can live happily ever after."
Still a good movie though.
How can I best summarize AI?
Part Close Encounters in the wonder of its visuals;
Part A Clockwork Orange (Kubrick) in its pessimism of human nature;
Part 2001 in its glacial pacing and technology plot;
Part Hook and E.T. in its gushy family sentimentalism with otherworlders.
Naturally, Kubrick and Spielberg don't mix well, so AI sort of splices these together end to end.
Did I enjoy it? Yes. Do I recommend it? Yes, if you like said movies. I really enjoyed Jude Law as a robotic gigolo.
The computer science part of me screamed the whole way though... basic CS punches huge plot holes. The biggest is this: the linchpin of the entire plot is that the robotic boy can never stop loving and longing for its "mother" owner, despite being destined to outlive her. This is absurd -- not being able to reboot his software, or at least reinstall it, is really contrived.
But the photography and special effects are amazing, especially in the hands of Spielberg's admirable ability to have the effects serve the plot and not the other way around.
And if you have any doubt in your mind that John Williams is the most versatile composer working today, this movie will put them to rest. Line up the soundtracks to "Star Wars," "Schindler's List," "Saving Private Ryan," "Seven Years in Tibet, and "AI" and you'll see what I mean.
A final spoiler note: Despite what critics and IMDB commenters say, I'm absolutely against the notion that the beings at the end are aliens. They may be shaped like the "Close Encounters" creatures, but please! "Artificial Intelligence" is the name of the friggin' movie.
Most people don't get Kubrick movies, so what most people think is probably irrelevant. Since this is a Spielberg movie, then there's simply more people that will be confused. So what.
I'm a huge movie buff, and I can find redeeming qualities in just about any movie, however for the first time in my life I was tempted to ask for my money back. 45 minutes of tear-jerking drama that would make the folks who produce Dawson's Creek proud is NOT good art. Spielberg has made some really good movies in the past; this, unfortunately isn't even close. Unless there's a director's cut released, which either eliminates the entire ending, or at least the insanely contrived dialog, I'll never watch this tripe again.
This movie would turn Mother Teresa into a cynic.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
dammit, why are so many people talking about "magical robots" or magical aliens or whatever... i think that they were robots, and if you disagree, go watch the movie again. like someone said before: they are probably decendents of robots who were decendents of other robots who were created by humans... maybe the only robots that survived were in space (that's how they could have survived the freeze) and then started building more robots or something. who knows?
but nevertheless, if you had a little RC car and went back in the past to, say, the middle ages and showed them that... they'd call it magic, wouldn't they? because they've never seen anything like it before... in the same way, those robots (or that one robot) gave David life (power, juice, whatever) so that it can function again. and the memory part, the robots downloaded (as someone said earlier here) David's "memories" and so they all could "see" humans. and yeah, they looked robotic to me, if you looked close enough... and that cool vehicle they used... robots adapt, don't they? they become more efficient... that vehicle was pretty damn efficient if you ask me. but anyway... i hope you guys see what i'm trying to communicate here
No one can put you down without your full cooperation.
Everything that occured happened for a reason. IT showed he wasn't perfect, it showed that he valued striving to be human (or whatever you personally want to make of it) more than his concern for his personal saftey.
The last 20 min aside, this is probably one of the best movies ever made. A wonderful retelling of Pinnoccio.
-Mark
-Mark
Dovie'andi se tovya sagain.
Michael, those weren't aliens... though I would have been fine if the movie had ended when David found what he was looking for. That would have been much more disturbing to the audience where I saw the movie
? This movie: 1. SUCKED. Spielberg is clearly a washed-up pedophilial director who was never all that great in the first place. 2. Sick: this movie's plot basically depended on emotionally twisted yet conciously void humans (how about the scene by the pool... nice to know they're having a kid's birthday party by a pool and NO ONE is supervising the kids AT ALL.) Basically (please don't take too much offense, I'm just ranting) if you care more about Special Effects than Plot (if you liked T2...) you'll like this just fine. Otherwise it's an interesting primer in how Spielberg can ruin what would have been a great Kubrick film.
It looks like the studio spent enormous piles of cash trying to convince me not to see the movie, but they may have been foiled.
AI "That's not a good idea David."
2001 "I'm afraid I can't do that Dave."
Another moment was when the fleshfair guy is taking Teddy to the lost and found and Teddy kept repeating that he "must find David". Kind of in the same creepy way that HAL kept pleading "stop Dave, please st....op....D..aaaave.
I know the context was slightly different, but the voice and the inflection, and the fact that Teddy was unmistakably artificial and knew it, and David was unmistakably "human" (in the sense that he had no firm idea of what he really was). Kind of a human trait if you ask me.
Artificial Insemination?
Homer:[laughs] I don't know. You gotta be pretty lame to make it with a robot.
[Marge whispers in his ear] I knew that.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Instead of telling a tragedy all over again, A.I. weaves in many other elements of our modern life (fairly-tales, apocalypse, and our own search for meaning in a world we have the power to give life or death to...), and in so doing, pulls off something which has much greater effect than would a simple tragedy.
Whatever you do, don't walk out on the last act.
(And only catching the movie today, looks like no one will ever read this....)
The movie is a variation of the "What makes people genuinely human?" theme. The premise is that its love that makes us human gives our existence value.
If you take away our "intellect", we're just machines. How is a cockroach different from a sophisticated silicon bug with an AI program?
The only difference is that we use chemical energy and structures to exert our will over the environment rather than servo-motors.
You poor literal-minded geeks who think that the kid was merely the implementation of an AI to MIMIC the human behavior of love cannot possibly like this movie. How could you? The kid is only a machine. (And don't feel bad, looks like Ebert shares this disdain for machines.) Why do you think Professor Hobby was so overjoyed to see his experiment succeed? Its because his team created the AI that has the functional equivalent of humanity! (...not that the program mimiced it. He believed he passed the Turing Test.)
The movie only works if you can believe that its possible to develop an AI which is capable of love. (...and if its capable of love, its functionally human...) People were crying because it was heartbreaking to see this equivalent of boy experiencing the heartbreak of abandonment by his cherished mother and cruel realization he will never achieve what he so desperately desires. If its just a hunk of hardware mimicing love, then one doesn't give a damn, and miss the whole emotional experience.
An undercurrent theme of what makes us human is the implication that the living are able to perceive of a nature or value beyond what is perceivable by machines (love, magic, God). This is brought out in the scene when Gigolo Joe explains that human hate them. He starts out by briefly alluding to how humans look to a higher being and then quickly uses that concept to contrast the orgas to the mechas. (This is important to the meaning at the end.)
I'm not a fan of the ending, but it brings out the themes the director/producer wanted to convey in the film.
"Oh how selfish it was for the boy to bring back his mother only for a day just to die again, just as she selfishly used him..." Duh, the woman has been dead for 2000 years. There was nothing wrong with bringing the simulacrum back for a day, she's already dead. Note my choice of words.*
Recall when his mother abandoned the mechaboy rather than bring it back to the factory to be destroyed. Why did she do it? Because she loved the boy (but made the ruthless choice of favoring her biological child's safety). She couldn't bear to destroy the boy she loves. So she abandons it, in the hope he would continue to exist. Its pointless if you think its a hunk of hardware! But her act is metaphor for a characteristic of humanity: futilely striving amidst hopelessness for what one cherishes so deeply.
Flash forward to the boy and the robot/alien. He can have what he desires beyond everything, but he can only have it for a day. And he will have to viscerally experience the heartbreak of losing his mother again. A program could only see the futility of the act and know the suffering it would bring. The logical choice would be to avoid the heartbreak. He chooses to do what his mother did, hope beyond all hope, and bring her back. (And goes into magical rationalization that experiencing that moment will last forever.) The AI child acts as only a human mother could do; it is functionally human.
The end is a tableau of the essense of the movie. The boy experiences his reunion, he experiences his hyperbolic perfect moment. Magic takes over. He is human, and does what human beings do. For the first time goes into a dream state (of paradise). Any why leave it? Its an annoyingly, sickly sweet, Capra-esque/Spielberg-esque ending, but its an acceptable ending to the film. Its a brilliant (if flawed) film if you look at it as a allegorical expression of the nature of love and humanity.
* And did anyone catch the fatal flaw? You need the roots of the hair to extract DNA. The visible part of the follicle is just collagen. You cut a lock of her hair, there's no DNA to duplicate!
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
[ sorry, plot spoilers discussed ]
Hello all, I rarely find myself necessitating a response to slashdot posts, but the shear number of mass attacks against the ending of this film truly disturbs me. Now, everyone has the priveledge to share and opinion, but I've seen far fewer true opinions and more intintual herd-whinings about the non-Kubrickness of the ending and how sap-happy it seems. Well, let's just think about it for a moment. For the moralists who claim the ending gives no resolution to the human moral issues of the film I say you are wrong. The opening arguement of the film is "what responsibility does a human have to a loving, emotionally-unique robot" (pardon my paraphrasing). However, beyond giving resolution and meaning to the desires of David's life, the ending and the temporary resurrection of the Mom answers this question, at least in part if not ultimately. The mother truly loves David, giving the answer to the philosophical moral issue of the film: David is every bit a human child, so the human Mother must owe him the same responsibility as she does her own flesh-born child. This is what the ending does, reveals and allowd humanity to be redeemed, or at least not damned as unempathetic and purely nihilistic. If the filmed ends with David's forlorn please to be a real boy then the revelation of the film is a nihilistic and meaningless moral destiny for humankind. My feelings and beliefs aside (damn, I'm even dicussing morality, me of all people), it is a much less powerful and meaningful ending to just damn humanity to unfettered distruction and emotional isolation from each other. One of the central issues of the film, especially when it involves the son, is that the family and humanity cannot and will not accept David as the human he so well desires to be. This smacks of Asimov's Bicentennial Man, Card's Piggies, Heinlein's Mycroft Holmes, and countless other varlese who know they are ramen. In fact, the evolutionanry path forged by David's emotional capacity is evident in the mere presence of the future machines. They are uncovering a past that enthralls them because they have lost its memory. They are resurrecting the memories and legacies of their creators, and they KNOW this. That they do not discard David as just another inferior relic of the ancient past, as is the case in so much technology-based fiction, they actually are quite impressed with this little boy robot, who "knew actual, living people". They seek to cater to his desires and wishes because he is their link to a forgotten past. By humoring David, they find a form of carthartic relief in reliving and seeing the forms of their past open up. Its the legacy of humanity passed on to our silicon offspring. I think the ending has its usefulness and demonstrates a much more profound and necessary conclusion to this story than the senseless waste of a human life, David. Of course, I think of David as a fellow human, albeit of different origin and design. So, is the ending perfect or the only possibility? No, but it is possibly much more insightful and meaningful than 99.9% of my peers are giving it credit. Think about it for a while. Let it eat you up inside a little. I mean, what have you got to lose in learning to be emotional about a fictional boy robot-come-human?
I always get the shakes before a drop.
"Ai" in Japanese means "love". I wonder if this was an intentional thing? If it was, it was really clever...
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
Beyond an Ice Age, there is the possibility of having a snowball earth. A state where the abido effect of the icecaps reflecting light and therefore energy goes unchecked further lowering the tempature of the earth further freezing more oceans futher reflecting more light off there white surface untill you have frozen all the oceans of the world sevral miles deep and all the moisture in the air has been percipitated out and it is nearly impossible to find liqued water on the surface of the planet unless you look near a volcanic event.
This has happened two or three times in the geologic history of the earth most notibly right before the cambrian explosion of life.
The movie's premis that everything would appear to be flash frozen as is is a little unreaserched. However during a snoball earth event it's believed that the oceans are higher due to the fact that frozen water occupies more voluime than liqued and because all moisture has been precipitated out of the air you have ice over everything except where it may have sublimated, been eroded by wind, or melted by volcanic activity.
The "aliens" are indeed robots. Robots that were designed and built by the robots that survived the catastophic weather changes that froze the earths oceans. Ala' they descended from early mecha.
Well the first half rocked. Creepy laughter, Ministry performing. Then the robots started with inconsistant emotional abilities.... And then 2000 years passed and the bioeletical robotic decendents with blinky wires explained how Mommy could be recreated for only one day due to the memory trace of all things in the fabric of the space-time continum... What a terrible Frankestien of fiendishly Kubrick moments in the first half, juxtaposed with utter schlock and sappy super-junk that lasts all movie long (well just the last 1.5 hours with the extra 25 minute BONUS ice-world of the future.)
This movie wasn't good or bad. I think it was 3 movies shuffled together badly. I think this movie could have been so much more. If only the family angle could have been dealt with more, this could have also been a great story about the love of and inventor for his invention (be nice) it could have also been a watch out technology is scary movie instead it showed what can happen when you pass ideas along to people, that sometimes things get lost on the way. Thank goodness for teddy he rocked.
SPOILER BELOW:
I didn't think the dudes at the end were supposed to be aliens, despite what several disgusted reviewers said. I thought they were supposed to be sort of nth generation post-humans, built by machines built by machines and so on. This explains their deep fascination with humans (which mirrors david's fascination with his mother)
I still thought the end was a bit treacley, with the "you only get one day" bizness. Anyway that's my two cents.
vote quimby.
AD: what's so unpleasant about being drunk?
This movie is about Humanity, our relationship with each other, and our faith. It follows the basic flow of development of any one of us after birth, how we learn to laugh, and cry, fear, and experience joy. It looks at the commonly felt emotion of abandonment, that some feel toward God and our perceptions of the tragedies that exist on earth. In man's desire to create something good, we see his motivation may not be as pure as we first perceive it to be, that it may be a selfish act that has the potential to hurt others, but that in the end may have a better outcome than had Humanity not strived to accomplish great things that exceeded our understanding. As the Robot's quest takes it on its journey, it finds no time for sentimentality or reflection, running blindly after the promise of salvation; it has faith. After coming face to face with its sacrosanct icon and not receiving the immediate gratification it thought was its due, the Robot has to endure 2000 years with the object of salvation just out of reach and apparently cold, uncaring, and unsympathetic to its quest. The faith to believe carries the Robot through the ages until benevolent beings appear and free the Robot. I suggest that the viewer not look at these beings as aliens, but try to understand that had the Directors used a voice-over to impart the presence of a spiritual being, the audience would have seen this as either the voice of God or that of a narrator. These beings I believe are our souls, which even they do not understand themselves to be. These beings or spirits *are* in this future date the archeologists of a great hidden and now nearly vanished culture of which only fragments are found, similar to any of our studies of the Egyptian, Native American, or Jurassic ages. Like us, these beings are looking back upon their own history and origins.
AI is a reminder of the journey of the soul in a man or woman to know who we are through the enlightenment of finding our Messiah, God, or Savior. It is a brilliant movie that will by its nature and subtlety confuse and probably attract misunderstanding and ridicule, as a large part of the audience will not understand the depths of story telling that these great Directors achieved with their desire to shed light on our own humanity and our own quest to rise to the heights of the heavens.
This movie is about Humanity, our relationship with each other, and our faith. It follows the basic flow of development of any one of us after birth, how we learn to laugh, and cry, fear, and experience joy. It looks at the commonly felt emotion of abandonment, that some feel toward God and our perceptions of the tragedies that exist on earth. In man's desire to create something good, we see his motivation may not be as pure as we first perceive it to be, that it may be a selfish act that has the potential to hurt others, but that in the end may have a better outcome than had Humanity not strived to accomplish great things that exceeded our understanding. As the Robot's quest takes it on its journey, it finds no time for sentimentality or reflection, running blindly after the promise of salvation; it has faith. After coming face to face with its sacrosanct icon and not receiving the immediate gratification it thought was its due, the Robot has to endure 2000 years with the object of salvation just out of reach and apparently cold, uncaring, and unsympathetic to its quest. The faith to believe carries the Robot through the ages until benevolent beings appear and free the Robot. I suggest that the viewer not look at these beings as aliens, but try to understand that had the Directors used a voice-over to impart the presence of a spiritual being, the audience would have seen this as either the voice of God or that of a narrator. These beings I believe are our souls, which even they do not understand themselves to be. These beings or spirits are in this future date the archeologists of a great hidden and now nearly vanished culture of which only fragments are found, similar to any of our studies of the Egyptian, Native American, or Jurassic ages. Like us, these beings are looking back upon their own history and origins.
AI is a reminder of the journey of the soul in a man or woman to know who we are through the enlightenment of finding our Messiah, God, or Savior. It is a brilliant movie that will by its nature and subtlety confuse and probably attract misunderstanding and ridicule, as a large part of the audience will not understand the depths of story telling that these great Directors achieved with their desire to shed light on our own humanity and our own quest to rise to the heights of the heavens.
"one of the great things about Kubrick's films was the economy with which he used music"
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't 2001 pretty much constantly have wonderful classical, romantic, and some baroque music?
I'm the stranger...posting to
One of the most dissipointing features in the movie is the ending. No, not the ending that every other slashdotter has ranted on, the credits. When I heard about the elabarate promotional story wraping its self around the web I assumed that the movie would mention it at least some. How mistaken I was. There is no mention of the Salla mistery any where in the movie or the credits. However I can tell you the one place where you can be sure that you will see the "answer". The limited edition DvD box set availible for $40 at Amazon.com. So for all of us who enjoyed this glorified ad campain will be stuck with the bill.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Another damn Kubrick neurosis dragged out to be adored by those people who do that kind of thing.[Arthur C. Clark made 2001 but Kubrick raised the money.] He always manages to get his hands on a few attractive ideas & then waters them down,so you're never awake when these gems go by.Sort of like the surprise symphony.Reading the critics tho & seeing all the great stuff sort of rounds out the experience.
Neurotics weep because they don't deal with their own actions, if they did, why weep. The kid 's gottah get himself hacked, preferrably by an Asimovian therapist.
Sad but true--there hasn't been an original story since ancient Greece. David (and the audience) are meant to believe that the only obstacle between David and Monica is his mecha-ness. The real obstacle is Henry, his father. At the end, David is still a mecha when he climbs into bed with Monica. Henry is out of the picture, 2000 years dead with no chance of re-animation. One can argue that David's subconscious killed Henry through time, using Teddy to allow Monica to be re-animated for a single night and a chance to become completely human.
The other clue is David's jealous rage directed at the other assembly line David.
To drift offtopic here, I was annoyed by the series of commercials before the movie. One seemed to be an advertisement for Zen Buddhism but turned out to be a fucking Jeep commercial. I really wanted to burn an SUV dealership after that...
"What is the sound of one belly slapping?"
Dreary ending aside, I can't stand poor engineering. After creating a mechanical and computational marvel like David, they overlooked (or worse, intentionally designed) an open ended esophagus that dumps straight into the internal circuitry of the chest cavity? What an insanely stupid shortcoming. At the stage of development they had reached, it would have been so simple to implement a fully operative ingestion and excrement system. How can you possibly treat David like a real boy if he NEVER eats?
Phoenix
Phoenix Anime
Phoenix
Its possible that the "time-space pathways" term might have suggested the soul of a being, and why a cloned individual can't exist for more than a day, without a soul. Earlier, there is a scene where robots/aliens are gathered around what looks like a table with a viewing screen displaying David in a recreated home. Considering the initial graininess of the images, it suggests that David's recreated home was virtual, as well as the "cloned" Monica and the robot (who tried to explain things to David). Much of what David experienced may have been fabricated by the robots in order to emotionally appease him and lead him to a humane state of rest.
For the most part, I felt A.I. was a very well thought-out movie that smelled like Kubrick and tasted like Asimov (like the 2000 year gap in time moving forward to a world of only robots). I liked that it had a slow and deliberate pace and didn't come right out in your face and say "Is there more to being alive than the ability to feel?" or "Does it take organic roots to live?", but the questions are obvious. I liked that for David, a day is as good as 50 years - all that mattered was emotional reciprocation. HOWEVER, I didn't need that crap at the end about only being able to resurrect someone for one day given their DNA. A more scientifically sound ending would have been to explain that they could indeed clone Monica, but it would only be an identical twin without the same memories or experiences. David would have loved her anyway and she him (given a world of no further stimulus) and that would have been a fine ending with her dying 70 years later and David still a boy.
I think it's safe to say that Kubrick's film ended with David praying to the Blue Fairy; Spielberg's begins with David's resurrection. If the film had ended with David's endless, unanswered prayers, I don't think that anyone would be able to deny that it was a serious, provocative film. Most commentators have taken the view that Spielberg's ending was a cheap attempt at tacking on a happy, emotionally satisfying ending that would make the film more of a crowd-pleaser. I question this view. The ending was far from happy. David is delivered into the hands of grey being whose interest in him is identical to the interest that Dr. Hobby's team had in him: How can he help us solve our problems? They offer to David the choice that Monica had. He is given the chance to satisfy his emotional need, at the expense of another. Just as Monica "activated" David, placing him in a world where he was meant to have neither autonomy nor freedom, David chooses to have Monica resurrected, so that she may die again, all for his selfish desire. For the Monica at the end is surely not the "real" Monica; she is the idealized Oedipal mother, just as David was the idealized, perfect son. Did Spielberg actually believe that the ending was a happy one? If so, he is a bigger fool than most take him to be.
I even think the ending was good (except for the look of the aliens) - I guess I want to see it another time to fully understand it, though, as I expects there are some hints up front that fit in with the later parts. Some parts reminded me of Sophie's World; also: if robots can dream, who says that the whole 2nd and 3rd part are not a dream?
Please ignore the previous message.
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
I don't want a dog or a cat. I just want a bear just like the one shown in the movie...
These people have looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined.
Overview: It was too artificial and less intelligent. Kubrick and Spielberg dont mix. Because it is a Spielberg doesnt constitute worth. The Good: The movie in general lacks good dialogue and the highlight as many will agree is TEDDY. Teddy, the super-toy teddybear companion, is animated and leaves you longing to have one. Apparent Flaws: -David was left handed with the scissors, yet he was right handed latter on. -The movie is generally hard to believe because it segments parts that dont really make any of it realistic -The robots were created to conserve resources and such. Yet did you see how they killed the robots off? Can you say pollution? -The car was unrealistic -Computer generated scenes were awesome but unbelievable Aliens? or Robots? Beings at the end. I was unsure if they were aliens or future robots. If they were future robots, where did they come from? From just the surface of the earth? What convinced me that they were aliens was not only their form but also their respect for the human race. Their marvel at a race . Seemed unlike robots, rather alien anthropologist ravellers.
The only good part of the movie was the "SuperToy", Teddy. He was the only one that seems to have any love, common sense, and intelligence. I believe Kubrick must have been on twelve different drugs when he wrote (or collective thought written in journals) this "work". I thoroughly enjoy most SciFi movies, but this movie sucked the big one. My family and I viewed this movie at a drive-in theater, so maybe I missed a few details, but the whole "alien" or "future bio-bots" was just too much. The reason I did not leave was for the second feature "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider"; by far a better movie for entertainment. The part that seemed the most stupid was the part about a robot "David", wanting to commit suicide by jumping off the building. This was stupid. Where is David learn about suicide? The insertion of the narrator here and there in the last 45 dreadful minutes as a little strange and out of sync with the other parts two parts of the movie. I would not suggest anyone going to this movie. Wait for it on video or DVD. I would be very embarrassed if I was Steve Spielberg. It lacked compass for direction and meaning. I laughed at some many different part because it was so stupid. Why didn't the mother have another child instead of murring over her "frozen" child. I told my children this why you do not do drugs. There where some very interesting SFX, but the "Flesh Fair" had no meaning to the initial plot. The "Sin City" was on little use to the plot except for the Dr. Know (Robin Williams did a good job on the voice by the way). The contrast of lust and love was over done. The gigalo Joe becoming sensitive to the loving needs of a child robot was worthless. The environmental liberized stance on the ice caps melting was stupid. Then the whole world freezing was way too stupid. I thought the earth was too hot for freezing. Is this not the reason way the ice caps froze in the first place. Ignorance about the way physical, biological, and chemical systems work was not part of this movie. Please say your money. Help with the power problems in California by not going to the movie. The less the number of people go to this movie the less it costs to cool theaters and run projectors. This movie sucked.
This movie is filled with hate full, hatred of the feminine, and adult content. If your familiar with Baal and Ashtoreth , I'd basically say this is a celebration of Baal and Ashtoreth. An introduction to children (the marketed audience) to Adult sexual neurosis.
This movie preaches hatred of women: Bloody nude murder victims soaking in their own bodies fluids. Later the male sex robot (tin man) promises the little boy robot that he will have sex with a Fairy to "Make her a real Women"; then once real, he insinuates this Fairy would have sex with the little boy robot and make him "Real" too.
Women aren't real until they have sex, or more importantly great sex?
The big sex city is entered (equivalent to OZ), is entered by driving into the open mouths of the blow-job giving awaiting heads of both males and female... Building and statues are all either obvious erotic statues or phallic shaped visual elements that flood the screen and viewers senses.
etc... etc... etc.... on the sex stuff. The list is literally too long to list.
Religious people are portrayed as murderous, torturing, lynching, Klu Klux Klan, mad max thunderdome, WWF, circus Nero party animals.
This movie is so full of hate don't care to revisit them in my mind to continue to list them.
I mistakenly took four 14 year olds to this. I almost made the mistake of taking my 4 year old son to this piece of hate.
This movie is not fit for Children under 16 years of age .........
MSN Kids lists it on there movies to see this summer for kids, so you know Micro$oft's stance on this type of early childhood introduction to porn and hatred of feminine, unless they quickly remove it from their listing.