A.I.

As far as the film-as-artistic-product thing goes, my main complaints were these:

1) Oh my God, the ending. Liza thought the movie should have ended when David pushed himself off the ledge of the skyscraper. I thought it should have ended with David trapped in the amphibicopter praying to the Blue Fairy. Under NO circumstances do I think any sane person would have advised Spielberg to add another 30 minutes of screen time, especially with a story line as implausible as that one was. If Spielberg is under the impression that by inflicting that story line on us he was providing us with a happy ending, then he is much, much sicker than I ever knew he was. As far as I'm concerned, the "resurrected" Monica is far creepier than anything Cybertronics ever came up with. If all he wants is something that talks like Monica, walks like Monica, and has been leached of any aspects of Monica that may not have been entirely conducive to making him the epicenter of her life and purpose of her existence, why didn't they just build him a robot Monica and tell him it was her?

2) David winning the hearts of the mob at the flesh fair. I'm sorry, no. A mob whipped up into that state of frenzy wouldn't have cared even if they were convinced David was a real human.

3) Almost all of the dialogue written for the human characters. More time has clearly been spent on the androids, who are much more interesting.

4) The voiceovers. Holy Chris Carter flashbacks, Batman!

5) The opening scene in which Dr. Hobby and the Cybertronics team lays out the Big Moral Issue for us. If that dialogue were any balder it would have to pay Yul Brynner royalties.

6) Enough with the fucking Pinocchio thing already!

As far as the nastiness and foulness of the film, it basically comes down to the view of human nature, human relationships, and parenting that clearly informs it. Here are just a few of the things that made us very angry:

• Everything about the film assumes that "parent"="mother." Monica is the only one we really see being affected by Martin's "death" or by David's arrival. The implicit assumption is that Henry got David "for" Monica as a way of getting her over her maternal grief. What about Henry's grief? Why doesn' t the film tell us more about that? We're supposed to just take it for granted that his motivations for taking on this experiment aren't just as complicated or significant as Monica's responses to David are?

  The fact that David is designed only to imprint on one person bears this out. Cybertronics assumes that the important thing is to bond the android to its "mother"; its relationship to its father is unimportant. Henry doesn't seem to expect David to imprint on him and doesn't seem particularly interested in him. David has an overwhelming desire for his mommy but couldn't care less about whether he has a daddy. The film is no more interested in Henry than David is; Henry is a complete nonentity whose only function is to bring David into the house and then force him out. And what *is* Henry thinking, anyhow, to bring this kid home without either telling or asking Monica first?

  The result is that everything that happens to David becomes Monica's responsibility. She's the one who imprints him, she's the one who abandons him, she's the one who won't love him enough until he's real, she's the one whose absence causes him millennia of grief. Meanwhile Henry, the asshole who created this situation in the first place, is allowed to fade into the background.

• Going along with the extremely '50s understanding of gender roles and parenting, we have the '50s model of the perfect family. Does Monica work? Does she have a life? Does she ever do anything aside from take care of her frozen son, do laundry, drink coffee, and read books to her children? Not that we know of.

• And about the imprinting. The whole film is predicated on the idea that Cybertronics has succeeded in creating an android who can actually love. That's why we feel so bad about what's happening to David--because we believe his love for Monica is real. Well, how is it real if it's triggered by an arbitrary sequence of seven words? The "imprinting" function guarantees that the android will bond with the parent--who, in this world, will always be the mother--no matter how badly she abuses, abandons, or neglects him. It also guarantees that he will never be able to bond to anyone else, no matter how long or lovingly she takes care of him. Is this how these people think the parent-child bond really works? I sure fucking hope not. If he'd bonded with her as a result of her taking care of him, I'd have bought it. But the imprinting protocol is just one of the many indications that the people who imagined this future don't understand what love is.

• And now we get to the root cause of it all. As defined by A.I., "love"--as David experiences it--appears to be an arbitrary, irrational attachment to a particular person that is not affected by history, personality, empathy, or understanding. David has no idea who Monica is or what she's like; he doesn't care about how she treats him; all he knows is that she's mommy and therefore he has an irresistible compulsion to be with her. And you know what? He can't have any idea of who she is because we don't have any idea who Monica is because the film never lets us find out. It doesn't matter--to David, to us, or to the filmmakers--who Monica is. It just matters that she's David's mommy.

  Meanwhile, Monica's love for David is based on what? As far as we can tell, the fact that he loves her so unconditionally and abjectly. This is depressing. What's more depressing is that Cybertronics' whole marketing scheme for these androids assumes that this is what parents really want from children. I'm willing to believe a lot of bad things about humans, but I don't believe this *particular* bad thing. I think a kid who's always 11 would be terribly unsatisfying even to the most horrible of parents, even if they could get over his being mechanical. You can't feed these things; you can't change their diapers; you can't bathe them; you can't teach them how to talk; you can't watch them take their first steps; you can't even watch them get older. In short, there is no way to nurture them, aside from letting them bask in your maternal presence. And this is a huge design flaw, because what these prospective clients would want is to be able to replicate the experience of raising a child. Even Hasbro figured out that to make Baby Alive really sell she had to be able to eat and poop.

• The post-apocalyptic thing. To me, this was just a device to explain the development of androids and an excuse to show Manhattan underwater. The original Brian Aldiss story did without the apocalyptic excuse, and Spielberg could have too, since it was not followed through in any other aspect of the film. For instance: if space and resources are really in such short supply, why is there all this waste land around the Cybertronics plant that's not being used for anything? Why has all this technology gone into android production instead of land reclamation or agricultural science? If pregnancies are so strictly regulated, why are there so many kids Martin's age at his birthday party?

• Why is the only Irish guy in this movie the one running the Flesh Fair? Why do the supermagical futuristic aliens/androids/whatever the hell they are who free David from the ice all have British accents?

• How come, with the exception of a couple token scientists and an android who gets fired out of a cannon at the flesh fair, everyone in this movie (and every proto-child-android we see in the Cybertronics lab) is white?

And so on. I know that the film is supposed to be "a cautionary tale," but that doesn't cut much ice with me at this point. We've been told this exact cautionary tale so many times that I can't really see this film as making a unique contribution. Oh, you mean that creating an autonomous sentient being who's smarter, stronger, and longer-lived than us, but so different from humans that he couldn't help but be alienated from society, would be a bad idea? Hmm. I think I remember reading some really old book by some chick named Mary Shelley that said something about that...or no, wait, maybe I'm thinking of Rocky Horror Picture Show. What would be a challenge would be figuring out how to tell this story so that it doesn't end in tragedy. That'd be a movie. This is just a waste of eight bucks.