This article originally appeared in the September, 2001, Number 24 issue of *spark.
AI: Artificial Intelligence is a film written and directed by Steven Spielberg. However, Stanley Kubrick had worked on the film's pre-production for many years, developing the story and storyboarding the scenes which would end up being the visual touchstones for the film. Are there two more different filmmakers than Spielberg and Kubrick? Not likely. And it shows.
It's been a long time since I saw a film at such odds with itself.
The film is about David, a robot in the form of a seven-year-old boy. He is the first robot designed to bond emotionally with a human being, which he does with a woman whose own son is in a coma from which he is not expected to recover. However, the human child does recover, and David becomes a threat (literally as well as figuratively) to the human family. His mother is supposed to return him to the company that built him, where he will be destroyed. Instead, she leaves him in the forest to fend for himself. The film then becomes a quest: David needs to find a way to make his "mother" love him.
The film dramatizes questions which have become an integral part of artificial intelligence research: Will our machines ultimately develop their own sentience? If so, what is our responsibility to them? Like AI research, the film also uses the machine to question what it means to be human. All in all, it is a fascinating film. Had Kubrick lived to make it, it may have been a masterpiece. As Spielberg has made it, however, it is deeply flawed.
The problems begin in the first act. This is a family drama, the kind at which Spielberg excels. However, the first act is shot almost entirely on oddly lit sets, a Kubrick concept. Where Spielberg wants to create emotional intimacy, Kubrick's style tends to distance the viewer from the characters. How the viewer interprets these scenes will depend upon whether she or he is paying more attention to the dialogue or the direction (with a truly attentive viewer not knowing how to respond).
This duality continues in the second act, where David is taken to Rouge City by Gigolo Joe, another mechanoid he has met in his travels. Rouge City is supposed to be where human beings are sexually satisfied by their machines. While one can imagine Kubrick treating this subject with dark humour, Spielberg has never been comfortable portraying human sexuality in his films, and, thus, pretty much neuters Gigolo Joe and Rouge City.
This has the effect of unbalancing the second act. It begins with a truly scary sequence involving human violence towards robots. This is where David learns about human cruelty. Had the Rouge City sequence been more honest in its depiction of human/robot relations, it might have taught David about human passion. As this sequence exists in the film, it only hints at what could have been another powerful comment on humanity, as well as another lesson in David's education about the world.
Then, there is the film's ending. Or, rather, the film's two endings. The first ending has David sitting in a submersible vehicle at the bottom of the water which, thanks to global warming, has engulfed New York City. He has found the blue fairy who, in Pinocchio, made the wooden boy into a real human being (she is actually a plaster exhibit in a submerged Coney Island amusement park). He asks her to make him human so his "mother" will love him.
Repeatedly.
Forever.
Fade to black.
And fade in, not forever, but two thousand years later. The human race is extinct; aliens excavating the block of ice that was once New York find David. He is the only robot in existence with direct experience of humanity, so he is precious to the aliens. In order to make him "happy," they resurrect his mother, who tells him that she loves him before the day is up and she falls back into a death-like sleep (don't ask). Having heard about her love, David himself falls asleep and, apparently, dreams.
The first ending is pure Kubrick. David wants something he cannot have, and so suffers. In his suffering, David at last comes to experience what it means to be human. This is a bleak ending, but powerful.
The second ending is pure Spielberg. For one thing, the deus ex machina of the aliens coming to save David comes out of nowhere, and doesn't feel integral to the story. (Spielberg has never allowed narrative credibility to stand in the way of tugging emotional heartstrings.) Setting aside my problems with the way he resolves the story, we can see that Spielberg also wants to show David achieving some form of humanity. Rather than define humanity by suffering, however, Spielberg defines us by our ability to dream; his ending finds our humanity in a very different place than Kubrick's.
Much has been made of the idea that Kubrick is an "intellectual" filmmaker and Spielberg an "emotional" filmmaker. I believe AI shows a more complex picture: Kubrick reveals a depth of compassion for human suffering from which Spielberg consistently shies away in an effort to create uplifting "adult fairy tales." It might be more accurate to say that Spielberg plays with the darkness in the human soul in order to illuminate its light better, while Kubrick explores that darkness on its own terms. The two visions sit very uncomfortably together in AI.
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