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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.
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.)
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.
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.
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!!!!
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 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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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
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.
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.
"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.
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
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
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"
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
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.
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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... 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.
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
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.
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....
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
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
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.
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
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
Unfortunately, it ended later - it almost looked like a test audience had demanded a somewhat happy looking ending. Bah.
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
Finally, an insightful comment.
illegitimii non ingravare
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....
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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"?
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
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?
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!
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
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...
SDMI: Finally! Music that won't rip or burn! Brought to you by the fine folks at RIAA.
This is remarkably similar to some student comments I read in a college newspaper. The comments were about the movie 2001 when it first came out, and the newspaper was found in a box of old stuff. Fascinating how shallow that comment seems with 20/20 hindsight and the passage of a couple of decades.
It is always fascionating to go back through th old newspapers, and read what regular folks felt about stuff, and how the perception has changed.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
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
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).
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.
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
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
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
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.
It is always fascinating to hear someone's honest opinion without being subject to the decades of previous reviewers. Numerous famous books fall under the category of almost never being published do to lack of interested publishers or being buried in notoriety from first reviews.
Someone seeing 2001 for the first time in the present period will no doubt have heard of the high regard for this film and Kubrick so their opinion will be subject to the effect of their knowledge of it's previous critiques. As far as being shallow I disagree but think this is an effect of someone's contemporary environment and their body of reference.
...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 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
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 :).
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?
Boring. Nothing that wasn't covered by bladerunner.
And I also seriously question the notion that this is largely a product of Kubricks work.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[ 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.
"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
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.