Ah, love. AI is another movie about love, this time, maternal love. As everybody knows, Stanley Kubrick tried to do this movie forever, and somehow passed the project on to Steven Spillberg before he died. An unlikely pairing, but perhaps Spillberg is the spoon full of sugar necessary to swallow Kubrick's often stark sense of humanity.
This is the BIG picture. We -- human beings -- aren't the center of the universe. We're smart and terribly mean, we're creative and what makes us human may not be our bodies.
In AI, the world is run by orgas (short for organics) and aided by megas (mechanicals or robots) due to a shortage of orgas because of environmental catastrophes. The ice caps have melted, and New York along with all other coastal cities around the world are underwater.
The humans feel both paternal and superior to the megas, who are basically slaves. In wilderness "Flesh Fairs," megas are routinely destroyed in entertainments akin to Roman circues.
Almost all sympathy in AI's world is with the megas in general, and in particular a boy robot named David played by Haley Joel Osment (an actor who has mastered the art of playing lonely little boys isolated from all others). Osment is creepily good, and on the screen for almost the entire movie. He definitely deserves a nomination for this role.
The other two sympathetic characters are: 1) Teddy, the sympathetic Smart Toy teddy bear and Sancho Panza to David's Don Quixote; and 2) Gigolo Joe, played by Jude Law, a slick and cocky mega created to give women sexual pleasure.
David was created to provide love for childless couples (most humans are in this world). He was also built to dream and retain affection for the mother who says the magic sequence of words. Once they are said and the right button is pushed, he is hardwired for life to love and desire that love, to want to be loved by that mother.
Unfortunately, humans have a hard time returning love to megas, and secondly, life for a machine can potentially continue long past life for a person. In fact, the fiat assumption of this movie, is that this boy is going to last for a long time.
I've read several comments about how darkly disturbing this movie is, but I didn't respond that way. Perhaps colored by Spielburg's "sugar," the audience is given enough time to accept that what makes us humans, at least the good part, our spirit, might be transfered down the line to mechanical entities.
In some ways, this movie harks to an eschatalogical (end times) theology that says our flesh (our bodies) are vile and diseased, and we must be liberated from them in the last days. What was Calvin's term, depraved?
Finding mama. That's another theme. Wasn't the first or second Star Trek movie about a force gone amok because it was trying to find its creator, in this case, the satellite sent up in the 70s to explore outer space?
Maybe A.I. is a modern day "Pilgrim's Progress."
