- Cast – Haley Joel Osment as David, Frances O’Connor as Monica Swinton, Sam Robards as Henry Swinton.
- Director – Steven Spielberg
- Writers – Brian Aldiss, Ian Watson, Steven Spielberg
- Budget – $90–100 million
- Hit/Flop – Hit
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Story
The story of A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) is set in the distant future after the polar icecaps have melted, flooding has devastated most major cities and the world is populated with as many servant robots as there are humans. But there still remains a challenge for technologists to create a robot that knows how to love, i.e., is fully human.
Director Steven Spielberg effectively immerses us in a future universe, largely through a tour de force of special effects and a rich visual style that helps underscore the question about what may or may not be real. “David” (Osment) is the mecha (short for mechanical) given to a couple whose only child is cryogenically stored until medical technology comes up with a cure for his life-threatening disease. The couple choose to activate a temporary protocol that releases David’s capacity to love. A wonderfully strange relationship develops, although David’s love still does not make him human.
While David expresses totally dedicated love, he doesn’t experience the same from his mother. When the couple’s human son is healed and returns home, David’s desire to be “real” becomes increasingly problematic. Unable to reverse David’s protocol and unwilling to regard having him destroyed by his makers, his mother abandons him in the woods to fend for himself in the company of his robotic teddy bear.
David’s story swings into a wild odyssey to find the Blue Fairy he believes can make him real and allow him to be reunited with his mother. His adventures become an implicit commentary on what, besides being able to love, it means to be human.
David is soon captured by a hunter who sells renegade mechas to a Flesh Fair, an immense, garish carnival wherein mechas are smashed or blown up to the wild cheers of spectators. Seeking desperately to avoid destruction, the mechas nevertheless smile incongruously as they are led out to be annihilated.
David, however, is saved from this horrible fate by pleading for his life. His appeal moves the raucous throng. If he has feelings, they shout, he must be human. Instead, they stone the unfeeling hunter who would destroy the boy robot.
David’s search for the Blue Fairy eventually leads him to the laboratory where he was originally built, and where he discovers in a chilling scene that he is not unique, only a prototype for a production line.
This leads to the controversial ending of the story, which jumps ahead 2,000 years to a world where humans are extinct. But highly evolved mechas survive, artificially intelligent beings that have achieved superior wisdom and compassion. We are left with a final question: What does it even matter to be human?
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