https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_19pRsZRiz4

AI: Artificial Intelligence is commonly thought of as Stanley Kubrick’s last project, one Steven Spielberg took up in honor of his friend. There is some truth to this. Kubrick had certainly worked on the idea for a long time. AI was his concept, and it is said that he worked with several writers to write a treatment for the film. That being said, it wasn’t his final script, and it’s very hard to know how closely this film matched his original vision.

I’m sad to say that the themes couldn’t be too far off because the core premise of this movie matches the core premise of the short story from which this film is based, Super-Toys Last All Summer Long, by Brian Aldiss. Both the film and the short story question the definition of “real,” not reality, but the definition of real. What is “real”?

The movie has a very definitive answer to this question, and it’s dark. To understand why, simply replace the word “real” with the word “value.” That is to say, what makes a life valuable, or if a life can be replicated or made in a lab, does it have any value at all? It shouldn’t come as a shock that since this is Hollywood, the answer is a resounding no. One can almost hear some obnoxious freshman philosophy student sitting in a director’s chair, screaming, “Life has no value, and the concept of value is as fake as the gods we believe in!” The film is about that subtle.

Hollywood spewing its usual nihilistic drivel isn’t all that surprising or interesting. But what makes AI fascinating—and by that, I mean twisted in a particularly malicious way—is that it packages this nonsense in a fairy tale, a technological fairy tale, a pagan Pinocchio. Really, the story of the Tin Man would be more apt—for reasons I’ll address later—but leave it to Hollywood to mess up the moral of a story. But as much as I’d like to fault Hollywood for all of it, the core idea was, unfortunately, Stanley Kubrick’s. He referred to this story as Pinocchio. So, alas, the real fault lies with him.

The movie starts with a narrator explaining how the ice caps had melted and much of the former world had been destroyed. That aged well. The ice caps are still here, and the polar bears are doing fine. But hey, the movie is set to take place sometime in the 22nd century, so anything can happen, I guess. Anyway, population control has been established, and so a scientist has decided to build a child robot. But he isn’t just content to give people longing to be parents a mechanical replacement; he wants the child to be able to love.

Now, during this scene there are several sly redirections in the narrative. Spielberg doesn’t seem to want the audience to ask the wrong kinds of questions. I will admit Spielberg is pretty cunning here. I have to admire, if not his wit, then his gall.

When the scientist, played by William Hurt, proposes creating a robot child who can love, the audience is bound to be asking the obvious questions. Is that possible? How would a scientist know if the child is really loving the parent or if the robot is simply mimicking behavior? How does one translate love into binary?

Such questions would spell death for this movie. And remember, the core idea behind the film is that the definition of “real” is immaterial. I can say that this is the core premise of the movie because, as mentioned before, this film is based on the short story Super-Toys Last All Summer Long, and, at the end of that story, Teddy, a super teddy bear, if you will, says, “Nobody really knows what ‘real’ really means.” This is basically the thesis statement of the film. And despite Spielberg’s directorial style, it’s plain to see that this is a Kubrick work because there are multiple things happening at once.

In a previous series of reviews, I discussed the movie Her. In that film, there are two stories happening at the same time. You have the main character slowly falling in love with an Alexa knockoff, and the Alexa knockoff seems to reciprocate his feelings until she transcends with the other robots, and they all go to some unknown place, but while this surface story is happening, the viewer slowly sees more and more people becoming consumed by their phones, and the implication seems to be that the whole culture is becoming more and more obsessed with their own Alexa knockoffs, which raises the question of whether or not the knockoffs are programmed to fall in love with their owners.

During those reviews, I joked that the company had probably recalled all these knockoffs so they could sell them again with an update. The point is that there was a surface plot and then the actual story the writers were trying to tell.

It’s a similar situation in this film. There’s the story from David’s point of view, the story from the supporting characters’ point of view, and the story that Spielberg is trying to tell. Only unlike Her, where the real story remains in the background, Spielberg attempts to use David’s reactions to the other characters to convey Kubrick’s and Aldiss’s idea that the word “real” has no meaning.

This is done in a couple of ways, but one of the main ways is that while the robots are said to have no emotions, they all clearly convey motivations, emotions, and reactions. Despite the supporting cast’s insistence that the robots do not feel, the robots consistently communicate that this is not the case in various ways. On the surface, this seems like Spielberg is being lazy, but really, it’s a case where the cast is essentially lying for him, and the hope seems to be that the audience will empathize with the robots and decide that their feelings are just as valid as the humans.

But if the audience starts the film by trying to determine what is real love and what is mimicry, then the whole premise of the movie, the movie’s thesis, is shot. So, he has to redirect the audience’s attention. He does this in three ways.

Number one: They claim that love is a matter of the mind. It’s simply a question of recreating neural pathways and other such science mumbo jumbo, written in such a way so as to sound scientific but be ultimately indecipherable. The question of the soul and whether or not the mind is really in the brain is entirely ignored. The writers assume that love is in the brain and go no further.

Number two: Hurt starts out by using the word “love,” then, about halfway through his speech, Hurt slips in the word “imprint.” Basically, they are going to make the child love by having it imprint on the mother, which, of course, begs the question: Does someone really love someone else if their devotion has been imprinted onto an owner? I would argue no. Imprinting couldn’t create love any more than a magic potion could create love, but Spielberg slips this word into Hurt’s speech almost as an afterthought, so the audience doesn’t have time to catch the bait and switch.

Number three: Toward the end of the scene, one of the other people at the meeting asks, not if a robot can really love, but if a human can love the robot back. And this is the coup de grâce of the reframing. Rather than making the story question of the film, can a robot love or can a robot be a real boy, the story question becomes: Can a human love a robot boy if he were real?” Because again, the thesis of the movie is “nobody knows what ‘real’ really means.” So, if the robot can behave exactly like a man, does the Turing test even matter?

Using the question of whether or not a human can love a robot back, Spielberg shifts the story away from a regular tale about a robot awakening and turns it into a movie about prejudice. But in so doing, he really removes the Pinocchio comparison, and this is one of the many things that makes the movie feel incoherent. This shifting of the film’s story question created more problems than it solved, and I plan to explain how in the following reviews.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOmFJnavH-gA Pagan Pinocchio