A.I. (film)
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A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (actual on-screen title: Artificial Intelligence: A.I.) is a science fiction film that was released in 2001. It was the last project on which filmmaker Stanley Kubrick worked.
Kubrick had long planned to film A.I., but had been putting it off until he was confident that the effects could be handled convincingly, all the while working on the story in close cooperation with Steven Spielberg. After many years of exchanging ideas about the project Kubrick became convinced that this film needed Spielberg's "different kind of sensitivity" and urged him to direct the film. Spielberg finally accepted. Using Kubrick's storyboard, he wrote the script himself. The film is a unique harmony of both Kubrick and Spielberg's styles. It bears Kubrick's widespread use of metaphors and an ethereal score, along with Spielberg's warmth and subtle humor. Kubrick died before the film started shooting, and the film is dedicated to him.
Box office
The film had a reported budget of $100 million (according to [Box Office Mojo]) with a domestic gross of $78,616,689 and an overseas gross of $157,309,863 (for a total worldwide gross of $235,926,552) and ranked (domestically) in 28th place for the year of 2001 (it ranked 16th worldwide).Partial credits
- Haley Joel Osment as David, a young Mecha
- Jude Law as Gigolo Joe, David's companion and also a Mecha
- Frances O'Connor as Monica Swinton
- Brendan Gleeson as Lord Johnson-Johnson
- Sam Robards as Henry Swinton, David's adopted father
- William Hurt as Professor Allen Hobby, David's creator
- Jake Thomas as Martin Swinton
It was nominated for Academy Awards for Best Effects, Visual Effects and Best Music, Original Score.
Plot
The story of A.I. begins sometime in the 22nd century following an ecological disaster that has resulted in a drastic reduction of the land area of the Earth and human population.
These problems have been successfully addressed by technology. Androids with very high levels of artificial intelligence (called mechas, short for "mechanisms," i.e. synthetic life -- as contrasted with orgas for "organisms," i.e. organic life such as humans) have become commonplace but have been granted no civil rights and must submit to government registration or else be destroyed. While mechas have a level of intelligence comparable to that of humans, they seem to lack emotion. They are also able to simulate certain body functions, such as sexual intercourse, but not others, such as eating or sleeping.
Henry and Monica Swinton are a married couple whose son, Martin, is dying of a rare illness. Hoping for a cure, the Swintons have their son cryogenically frozen (a state in which he has remained for five years). In hopes of cheering up his wife, Henry agrees to his company's, Cybertronics, offer to let him bring home and test a prototype of an extremely advanced humanoid mecha that looks like a boy about the age of their hospitalized son, and which is supposed to be capable of feeling love. The mecha's name is David (named after "his" creator's late son) and although Monica is initially frightened of the android, she eventually warms to him after activating his imprinting protocol, which makes the mecha feel love for her as a child loves a parent.
The couple's son eventually recovers from his disease and returns from the hospital. This prompts a sibling rivalry between the mecha David and the Swintons' real son, who delights in taunting David, chiefly by telling him that Monica will never love him because he isn't "real". After David accidentally nearly drowns the Swintons' son, Monica sets out to return him to the manufacturer. But fearing that David will be dismantled, she instead releases him in the forest of rural New Jersey to live as an unregistered robot, accompanied by his animatronic teddy bear friend, named Teddy. David is soon captured and nearly destroyed by a group of anti-robot activists at an event they organize called a Flesh Fair. He narrowly escapes with the help of Gigolo Joe, a prostitute mecha, who is on the run after being framed for the murder of one of his clients.
The two become friends and set out to find the Blue Fairy, who David remembers from the fairy tale "Pinocchio" as a being who has the power to turn him into a real boy. If he becomes a real boy, he imagines, Monica will love him and take him back. With the assistance of some sympathetic frat boys on a road trip, Joe and David make their way to the decadent metropolis known as Rouge City (perhaps a future Philadelphia), in search of the knowledge that will lead them to the Blue Fairy.
An oracular computer personality called Dr. Know (voiced by Robin Williams) eventually leads David, with Joe in tow on the run from the authorities, to his manufacturers' offices at the top of a building in the flooded ruins of Manhattan. There, he sees that he is not unique and his manufacturers have created dozens of copies of him. Outraged that there exist others who could also vie for Monica's affection and determined to prove himself as special, he meets and destroys one of his copies. He is stopped by his human creator, who is unsurprised to see him there. The whole journey- David's obsession with the story of Pinocchio, the clues divulged by Dr. Know of the hiding place of the Blue Fairy- was in fact a test constructed by his creator. His creator excitedly tells David that his arrival at the planned destination demonstrates the true, 'realistic' nature of David's (artificially created) emotions, because he was driven by his love for his mother and desperation to be with her. To his creator, this proves that David is a perfect success as a robot model and the line of David replicates will be fit for the general market. Disheartened, David leaves and falls from the office into the ocean, possibly trying to commit suicide.
David is fished from the ocean by Joe in a stolen amphibicopter (amphibious helicopter), but before he is pulled up he sees the Blue Fairy on the bottom of the ocean. After Joe is seized by the police, David flies the amphibicopter back under the water, where it's revealed that what he saw was a statue of the Blue Fairy in the submerged ruins of Coney Island. Naïvely believing it to be the real Blue Fairy, he makes his wish to be turned into a real boy. But the ruins of the Wonder Wheel collapse on the amphibicopter, no longer able to take David back to the water's surface, so he simply waits for the wish to come true, repeating it into infinity with Teddy by his side. David waits for many years, sitting in the amphibicopter on the bottom of the ocean and staring at the Blue Fairy statue.
The Ending
In a long flash forward, the action skips ahead ten thousand years further into the future for the end of the film. Sometime in the twelfth millennium, Manhattan is buried under several hundred feet of glacial ice and snow, and the human species is extinct. Highly advanced mechas are conducting an archaeological excavation and discover David, perfectly preserved and seemingly "shut down" after presumably having his original power stores depleted during his long centuries under the ice.
The future mechas reactivate David and one of them lifts his hands in front of David and downloads his memories. The rest touch the first one and do the same thing. To them, David represents a discovery of supreme importance, as he was constructed by human hands, and therefore knew members of the future mechas' extinct creator race. One of David's first visions upon reawakening is that of the nearby wooden statue of the Blue Fairy, which, being organic and now thousands of years old, immediately crumbles to dust upon exposure to the elements.
The future mechas reconstruct the Swinton household using data from his memory banks, hoping that this will make him happy. But when they explain to David that Monica died long ago, he responds with deepest despair. It becomes clear to the future mechas that David's programming was never equipped to deal with this kind of revelation, and that they would need to do something more.
Eventually the creatures tell David, through a holographic version of the Coney Island Blue Fairy (voiced by Meryl Streep), that they can resurrect Monica from some strands of her hair that Teddy had saved, but that she would only live for one day, and she could never be revived again. David eagerly accepts their offer and spends one long day alone with Monica, basking in her love. The film ends as Monica and David lie down at the end of the day, to go to "the place where dreams are born."
Debate Over The Ending
The film's ending has been the subject of much debate. Many allege that it was really a dark ending disguised as a happy one. They suggest that the resurrected Monica was, in fact, an illusion planted in David's mind by the future mechas so that David could finally end his long quest and terminate his program. They point to the fact that resurrected Monica had a much warmer persona than her original self, and that during the long day she spent with David, she never asked about her husband or her son. The future mecha warn David not to mention her past family because it might cause Monica to fall into despair, and David eagerly complies.
The ending also became a matter of debate among science fiction fans from a storytelling standpoint. One side believes the ending is an intrinsic part of the story's larger theme, and hailed the film (as a whole) as a modern classic. The other side believed the ending to be unnecessary and discordant, and that the film should have closed with David finding the Blue Fairy. The debate over the ending is further complicated by the fact that many viewers mistook the future mechas for extraterrestrials. If this were true, the ending might be imagined to offer a different theme entirely. The mistake is understandable, however, as the future mechas are never formally introduced as such, and bear some resemblance to the extraterrestrials in another Spielberg film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
It is worth mentioning that Stanley Kubrick planned to have an ending similar to the one found in the film, and it is also notable that, even when given the "happy" ending interpretation, the finale is quite dark: humanity has been extinct for thousands of years. Also, in the DVD's supplemental material, composer John Williams confirms that David "dies" at the end of the film; after Monica passes away, he shuts down, essentially committing suicide.
Implications
The film echoes Isaac Asimov, the Asimov-derived films Bicentennial Man and I, Robot, many old and new episodes of Star Trek, and doubtless the original work by Brian Aldiss. It explores philosophical and moral challenges that come when robotics and artificial intelligence move ever closer to the human condition. Will a sufficiently complex machine find emotions awakening inside it as an emergent property? Or will human beings supply them?
If machines can be made to feel, but remain effectively immortal, what kind of responsibility would humans - their parent race - bear? How far down the road shall we go? Do we love them back? Do we have a choice? Could we stop ourselves if we tried? The film suggests that all barriers to engaging in physical love could eventually disappear.
The film also provides a series of non-technological, social implications. It is implied that human reproduction is heavily regulated (as evidenced by the mother's need to receive approval to conceive another baby) and this would suggest that sexual intercourse and reproduction are decoupled in this world. In fact, the movie suggest that sexuality becomes much more overt and extreme in this environment. Jude Law's mecha character is a gigolo and clearly caters to female customers. When David finally enters the Rouge City, it is clearly portrayed as a red light district commonly frequented by everyday suburbanites.
This aspect of the movie has not been often discussed among reviewers. If sex does not lead to pregnancy -- by law -- then what would the world look like? Is it a liberating environment or does the circumstance fall apart into seedy despair? While the movie does not take a specific posture on the overall merits of this circumstance, it does suggest that female sexuality does become more of a public affair; there is enough of demand for sex by women that a class of robots like Jude Law is created.
Website game
The movie had an unusual publicity campaign consisting of a new type of "game" involving approximately 30 interlinked websites. This type of game has since become known as an alternate reality game (ARG). The A.I. game did not have an official name, but became known as The Beast by its most ardent fans, the 7000-strong team who called themselves the Cloudmakers. The Beast was wildly successful as a game, attracting a much more devoted audience than the game designers had expected. It set the tone for future ARGs, and defined much of the genre's terminology.In the game, the interlinked websites purported to be sites for a number of organizations (universities, businesses, and personal home pages) set in the fictional world of the movie in the 22nd century. Hints to the websites' existence were contained in posters, trailers and other movie publicity materials.
By studying the information on the sites, a story set in the world of the movie involving the murder of one Evan Chan became apparent. Solving various puzzles and hints, some involving email, physical meetings in New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago, telephone calls and telephone answering services, allowed the unlocking of more websites which gradually revealed the story of whodunnit and why.
Trivia
- The advanced mechas at the end may have been inspired by the elongated, shadowy figures of the sculptor Alberto Giacometti.
- The November 6, 2005 episode of The Simpsons, "Treehouse of Horror XVI" featured a parody of the film entitled "B.I.: Bartificial Intelligence."
- The World Trade Center towers are shown standing 2,000 years into the future after humanity has ceased to exist. This is noted to have been the last major film in which the towers were portrayed prior to their destruction on September 11, 2001.
- It is often believed that the character David does not blink until the very end of the film when he closes his eyes and dies; this is not true. Actor Haley Joel Osment thought it best to not blink as it would make the robot character seem less human, however there are a few scenes, particularly the scene in which Monica abandons David in the forest that he can be seen blinking a few times.
- One early hint that the alien looking creatures at the end are really advanced mecha, is that when David arrives at his home for the first time, his figure is initially out of focus and appears blurred. The camera subsequently comes back into focus to reveal David. The out of focus figure of David looks a lot like the figures of the advanced mecha, thus foreshadowing the evolution of robots of David's class, into the advanced mechas of two thousand years later.
External links
- [Official film site]
- [Supertoys Last All Summer Long] or the [copy on the Kubrick site]
- [Cloudmakers.org], a discussion group and guide to the game
- [Screen Shots of Rouge City]
- [The Kubrick FAQ's entry on A.I.]
- [Creating the real-life "Teddy" at M.I.T. Labs]
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