After David is abandoned in the woods, the movie makes a strange jump. So far, the film hasn’t exactly followed the story of Pinocchio very closely, although, thanks to Martin’s suggestion for a bedtime story, Spielberg has made it clear that this is supposed to be a modern retelling of the classic tale. Therefore, the story of Pinocchio and, to an extent, classic fairy tales, in general, are supposed to be at the forefront of the audience’s mind, and that’s what makes the next scene so baffling.

Enter Gigolo Joe, played by Jude Law. If Teddy is supposed to be a Jiminy Cricket, I have no clue who Jude Law is portraying. I wondered if he was supposed to be “Honest” John Worthington Foulfellow and Gideon from the Disney classic, but there was really no way to make that comparison. Jude Law seems to be a wholly original addition, and he fundamentally breaks the fairy tale structure. I believe there is a specific reason for this, and I’ll address it later, but first, I believe a little setup is required.

Joe is a robot prostitute who is framed for the murder of one of his clients. Apparently, robots don’t have any due process in this universe, and while this makes sense, really the idea of framing a robot for murder wouldn’t be a very good idea.

First of all, the robot shouldn’t have the ability to lie unless programmed to do so under certain circumstances, but even if the robot were capable of lying in the event of a murder, the robot keeps records of its whereabouts. By the script’s own logic, the audience is meant to believe that Joe is not on the same level as David in terms of sentience and intellect.

When the jealous man who murdered the woman asks how long it had been since she and Joe were last together, Joe gives the exact number of seconds. Well, if Joe was capable of tracking the seconds and also willing to disclose those seconds, even to the man who has clearly set him up, then it wouldn’t take a detective very long to figure out that the robot had been framed.

Plus, it’s not like a robot prostitute is working for itself. Somebody would be making money, and that somebody would be wanting to save the records of the robot’s whereabouts to keep track of the profits that unscrupulous individual was making.

I only bring this up because I want to point out the lack of thought that has been put into Joe’s story. He is simply meant to get David from point A to point B later on in the script. But the more interesting point is that Spielberg, and presumably Kubrick, chose to include this half-contrived story rather than keeping in line with the original tale of Pinocchio.

At this moment in the story, the two swindler characters, the first tempters, should be introduced to lead Pinocchio down a dark path. Remember, the first time Pinocchio is isolated is when he is on his way to school.

But David isn’t on his way to school. He’s been abandoned. His tale is more like Hansel and Gretel during this period in the script, but Jude Law isn’t a witch architype either. If anything, Jude Law is more like a guide, and, by the end of the movie, he practically turns into a mechanical sage. So, what’s going on here? The audience has been fed all this setup for a modern retelling of Pinocchio, but once the quest begins, there’s no discernible parallel that can be drawn to the classic tale.

To put it simply, while Kubrick may have thought of David as a mechanical puppet, the story of Pinocchio doesn’t fit at all because Pinocchio is a morality tale. Pinocchio’s quest to become a real boy is directly tied to learning virtues, but the audience is supposed to believe that David is the most virtuous character in the script.

Of course, since David has nearly hurt or killed someone on multiple occasions, the only way to paint the dubious character as virtuous is to depict everyone else in the story as complete degenerates. Monica is selfish. Her husband is uncaring. Martin is jealous. And Joe is a hedonistic tool. And the reason David must already be virtuous is because the real point of the story is that David is human already because “nobody knows what ‘real’ really means.” Again, this story is more like the Tin Man than anything else, but it might be more accurate to say that this retelling is really a refutation of Pinocchio. This will become more apparent as the story goes on.

 After Jude Law is framed, he cuts off his ID badge and goes into hiding. The film returns to David’s point of view. He decides that he must find the blue fairy, thinking that if he becomes real, then Monica will love him. As he stumbles through the woods, he comes across a giant dump truck that unloads a bunch of mechanical body parts.

Robots then pour out of the woods and begin rummaging through the parts, trying to repair themselves. Before long, a giant moon appears on the horizon, but the moon isn’t a moon at all. It’s a large hot air balloon. This is the introduction of the hunters. They begin scanning the pile of parts, looking for old robots for something called a “flesh fair.” This is an event where people destroy robots as a means of defying society’s attempt to replace them.

Now, it wouldn’t make sense for David to be literally chased by wolves in the future, so the motorcycles used to hunt the robots down have wolf heads mounted to the front of the vehicles. Since the film is incapable of replicating the moral aspects of a fairy tale, it’s chosen to keep the fairy tale analogies superficial.

David runs into a shed, where he meets a maid that immediately begins trying to convince him to hire her. The wolf cycles corner David in this shed, and he and the other robots are captured, then taken to the hot air balloon.

Jude Law was rummaging around the ruined robot parts as well, so he’s also captured. While David is being taken to the flesh fair, his grip on Teddy slips, and Teddy falls back to the forest floor. Teddy, however, is mostly unharmed by this, so he stands up and begins running after the hot air balloon. I’ll cover what happens at the flesh fair in the next review.