A.I. (film)

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Artificial Intelligence: AI
original film poster
Directed by	Steven Spielberg
Produced by	Steven Spielberg Kathleen Kennedy Bonnie Curtis Jan Harlan Stanley Kubrick (posthumous credit) Walter F. Parkes
Written by	Screenplay: Steven Spielberg Screen Story: Ian Watson Short Story: Brian Aldiss
Starring	Haley Joel Osment Jude Law
Music by	John Williams
Cinematography	Janusz Kaminski
Editing by	Michael Kahn
Distributed by	Worldwide Theatrical & Non-USA DVD/Video Warner Bros. Pictures USA DVD/Video DreamWorks SKG
Release date(s)	Premiere (NYC): 26 June 2001 Premiere (LA): 28 June 2001 Theatrical (USA) 29 June 2001
Running time	146 min
Country	USA
Language	English
Budget	$90,000,000
Gross revenue	Domestic $78,616,689 Foreign $157,309,863 Worldwide $235,926,552
All Movie Guide profile
IMDb profile

Artificial Intelligence: A.I. is a science fiction film co-produced, written, and directed by Steven Spielberg and released in 2001. It was the last project on which filmmaker Stanley Kubrick worked — he died before the film started shooting, and Spielberg dedicated the film to him.

The film won five Saturn Awards, including Best Science Fiction Film. It was nominated for Academy Awards for Best Effects, Visual Effects and Best Music, Original Score.

1 Production
2 Plot
3 Alternate Reality Game
4 Reception
5 Trivia
6 Cast
7 See also
8 References
9 External links

[edit] Production

"AI" was initially inspired by a very short story by UK science-fiction writer Brian Aldiss, "Super-Toys Last All Summer Long". Kubrick and Aldiss spent years (on and off) attempting to develop this piece into a full length film. Aldiss claims he never felt the story could be successfully expanded into something bigger, as its focus was too intimate to begin with, and this seems to have been the origin of his problems with Spielberg, who was equally certain it could be fleshed out. Despite these problems, Aldiss has claimed he and Kubrick had come up with three or four "non-submersible units" (Kubrick-speak for the interesting sequences a film should contain 6 of) by taking ideas from other stories of his. Kubrick seems to have made some highly unreasonable demands on Aldiss^{[citation needed]}, and there was also a dispute over money. Coupled with Kubrick's insistence on taking elements from "Pinocchio" this ended their relationship.

Irish science fiction novelist Bob Shaw was then brought on board for a few months, but he found Kubrick too demanding. Kubrick turned to another UK science fiction notable, Ian Watson, who did seem to work well with him, and the two produced the long treatment (credited to Watson) that Spielberg used to write his screenplay. Both British feminist writer, Sara Maitland, and Arthur C. Clarke added ideas to "AI". A science fiction painter known as Fangorn (Christopher Baker website) was commissioned to produce hundreds of pictures from ideas and descriptions given to him by Kubrick which were used heavily by Spielberg, too. Spielberg then bought the rights to Aldiss' two brief sequels to "Supertoys" and ideas from them appear in the movie.

It is often believed that the character David does not blink until the very end of the film when he closes his eyes; this is not true. Actor Haley Joel Osment thought it best to not blink as it would make the robot character seem less human, however there are a few scenes, particularly the scene in which Monica abandons David in the forest that he can be seen blinking a few times.

[edit] Plot

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The story of A.I. begins sometime in the future following an ecological disaster that has resulted in a drastic reduction of the land area of the Earth and human population.

Androids with very high levels of artificial intelligence (called mechas, short for "mechanisms," i.e. synthetic life—as contrasted with orgas for "organisms," i.e. organic life such as humans) have become commonplace but have been granted no civil rights and must submit to government registration or else be destroyed. While mechas have a level of intelligence comparable to that of humans, they seem to lack emotion. They are also able to simulate certain body functions, such as sexual intercourse, but not others, such as eating or sleeping.

Henry and Monica Swinton are a married couple whose son, Martin, is dying of a rare illness. Hoping for a cure, the Swintons have their son cryonically frozen (a state in which he has remained for five years). In hopes of cheering up his wife, Henry agrees to an offer from his company, Cybertronics, to let him bring home and test a prototype of an extremely advanced humanoid mecha that looks like a boy about the age of their hospitalized son, and which is supposed to be capable of feeling love. The mecha's name is David—modeled and named after his creator's late son—and although Monica is initially frightened of the android, she eventually warms to him after activating his imprinting protocol, which makes the mecha feel love for her as a child loves a parent.

Android Gigolo Joe (Jude Law)

The couple's son eventually recovers from his disease and returns from the hospital. This prompts a sibling rivalry between the mecha David and the Swintons' real son Martin, who delights in taunting David, chiefly by telling him that Monica will never love him because he isn't "real". After an accident in which David nearly drowns Martin (the Swintons hold a party for their son, David falls into the pool, clutching onto the Swintons' son; due to his metal viscera, he sinks to the bottom but is too afraid to let go of the Swintons' son, causing him to inhale water and lose consciousness), Monica decides to return him to the manufacturer. Fearing that David will be dismantled, she instead releases him in the forest of rural New Jersey to live as an unregistered robot, accompanied by his loveable animatronic teddy bear friend, named Teddy. David is soon captured and nearly destroyed by a group of anti-robot activists at an event they organize called a Flesh Fair. He narrowly escapes with the help of Gigolo Joe, a prostitute mecha, who is on the run after being framed for the murder of one of his clients.

The two become friends and set out to find the Blue Fairy, who David remembers from the fairy tale "Pinocchio" as a being who has the power to turn him into a real boy. If he becomes a real boy, he imagines, Monica will love him and take him back. With the assistance of some sympathetic frat boys on a road trip, Joe and David make their way to the decadent metropolis known as Rouge City, in search of the knowledge that will lead them to the Blue Fairy.

David, holding Teddy, and Joe in Rouge City.

An oracular computer personality called Dr. Know eventually leads David, with Joe in tow on the run from the authorities, to his manufacturers' laboratory at the top of a building in the flooded ruins of Manhattan. There, he meets and frantically destroys one of his copies, outraged that there exist others who could also vie for Monica's affection and determined to prove himself as special. He is greeted by his human creator, Professor Hobby, who is unsurprised to see him there. The whole journey—David's obsession with the story of Pinocchio, the clues divulged by Dr. Know of the hiding place of the Blue Fairy—was in fact a test constructed by his creator. His creator excitedly tells David that his arrival at the planned destination demonstrates the true, 'realistic' nature of David's (artificially-created) emotions, because he was driven by his love for his mother and desperation to be with her. To Hobby, this proves that David is a perfect success as a robot model and the line of David replicates will be fit for the general market. David wanders around the lab and sees that he is not unique and his manufacturers have created dozens of copies of him. Disheartened, David leaves and falls from the office into the ocean, possibly trying to commit suicide.

David is fished from the ocean by Joe in a stolen amphibicopter (amphibious helicopter), but before he is pulled up he briefly sees the Blue Fairy on the bottom of the ocean. After Joe is seized by the police, David flies the amphibicopter back under the water, where it is revealed that what he saw was a statue of the Blue Fairy in the submerged ruins of Coney Island. Naïvely believing it to be the real Blue Fairy, he makes his wish to be turned into a real boy. He decides to wait for the wish to come true, repeating it into infinity, with Teddy by his side.

In a long flash forward, the action skips ahead two thousand years into the future. Manhattan is buried under several hundred feet of glacial ice and snow, and the human species is extinct. A future "race" of mechas (which closely resemble the classic "grey alien" archetype, and are confused by audiences as being aliens) is conducting an archaeological excavation of the ruins of the Earth and discover David, perfectly preserved and seemingly "shut down" after presumably having his original power stores depleted during his long centuries under the ice.

The mechas reactivate David and download his memories by touching his forehead. They form a circle and share and analyze David's memories. To them, David represents a discovery of supreme importance, as he was constructed by human hands, and therefore knew members of their own long-extinct progenitor species. One of David's first visions upon reawakening is that of the nearby statue of the Blue Fairy, which cracks and collapses as David touches it.

The mechas reconstruct the Swinton household using data from his memory banks, hoping that this will make him happy. However, when they explain to David that Monica died long ago, he responds with deepest despair. It becomes clear to the mechas that David's programming was never equipped to deal with this kind of revelation, and that they would need to do something more.

Eventually the mechas tell David, through a holographic version of the Coney Island Blue Fairy (voiced by Meryl Streep), that they can resurrect Monica from some strands of her hair that Teddy had saved, but that she would only live for one day, and she could never be revived again. David eagerly accepts their offer and spends one long day alone with Monica, basking in her love. The film ends as Monica and David lie down at the end of the day, to go to "the place where dreams are born." It is implied that David stays with the sleeping Monica forever. The last shot shows Teddy sitting down near David, presumably to join them in their eternal slumber.

Spoilers end here.

[edit] Alternate Reality Game

The movie had an unusual publicity campaign consisting of a new type of "game" involving approximately 30 interlinked websites. This type of game has since become known as an alternate reality game (ARG). The A.I. game did not have an official name, but became known as The Beast by its most ardent fans, the 7000-strong team who called themselves the Cloudmakers. The Beast was wildly successful as a game, attracting a much more devoted audience than the game designers had expected.^{[citation needed]} It set the tone for future ARGs, and defined much of the genre's terminology.

In the game, the interlinked websites purported to be sites for a number of organizations (universities, businesses, and personal home pages) set in the fictional world of the movie in the 22nd century. Hints to the websites' existence were contained in posters, trailers and other movie publicity materials.

By studying the information on the sites, a story set in the world of the movie involving the murder of one Evan Chan became apparent. Solving various puzzles and hints, some involving email, physical meetings in New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago, telephone calls and telephone answering services, allowed the unlocking of more websites which gradually revealed the story of whodunnit and why.

[edit] Reception

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The film had a reported budget of $100 million (according to Box Office Mojo) with a domestic gross of $78,616,689 and an overseas gross of $157,309,863 (for a total worldwide gross of $235,926,552) and ranked (domestically) in 28th place for the year of 2001 (it ranked 16th worldwide).

Critics affiliated with Rotten Tomatoes gave the film 121 "fresh" reviews out of 162.^[1] Roger Ebert called the film "both wonderful and maddening"; he ends his print review noting:^[2]:"A.I. is audacious, technically masterful, challenging, sometimes moving, ceaselessly watchable. What holds it back from greatness is a failure to really engage the ideas that it introduces. The movie's conclusion is too facile and sentimental, given what has gone before. It has mastered the artificial, but not the intelligence." James Berardinelli writes: "while A.I. is consistently involving, and has moments of near-brilliance, it is far from a masterpiece. In fact, as the long-awaited "collaboration" of Kubrick and Spielberg, it ranks as something of a disappointment."^[3] In a review for The New York Times by A. O. Scott, A.I is described as the "best fairy tale — the most disturbing, complex and intellectually challenging boy's adventure story — Mr. Spielberg has made." He comments on the film's ending:^[4]

After the Flesh Fair and a tour of the artificial fleshpots of Rouge City (which looks like a fusion of the old Times Square and the new), David and Joe, with the help of Robin Williams's voice and William Butler Yeats's poetry, come to the end of the earth, the half-submerged island of Manhattan. A.I. goes even further: on at least two occasions, it seems to be ending, only, like 2001, to push into ever stranger territory, ultimately leaving the human world altogether. The final scenes are likely to provoke argument, confusion and a good deal of resistance. For the second time the movie swerves away from where it seemed to be going, and Mr. Spielberg, with breathtaking poise and heroic conviction, risks absurdity in the pursuit of sublimity. The very end somehow fuses the cathartic comfort of infantile wish fulfillment — the dream that the first perfect love whose loss we experience as the fall from Eden might be restored — with a feeling almost too terrible to acknowledge or to name. Refusing to cuddle us or lull us into easy sleep, Mr. Spielberg locates the unspoken moral of all our fairy tales. To be real is to be mortal; to be human is to love, to dream and to perish.

The film's ending has been the subject of much debate. Many allege^{[citation needed]} that it is really a dark ending disguised as a happy one. They suggest that the resurrected Monica is, in fact, an illusion planted in David's mind by the future mechas, so that David could finally end his quest and terminate his program. They point to the fact that the resurrected Monica has a much warmer persona than her original self, and that during the long day she spends with David, she never asks about her husband or her son. The future mechas warn David not to mention her past family because it might cause Monica to fall into despair, and David eagerly complies. The ending also became a matter of debate among science fiction fans from a storytelling standpoint. Some believe^{[citation needed]} the ending is an intrinsic part of the story's larger theme, and hail the film (as a whole) as a modern classic. Others believe the ending to be unnecessary and discordant, and that the film should have closed with David finding the Blue Fairy. The debate over the ending is further complicated by the interpretation by the viewer that the future mechas are extraterrestrials. The reason for this confusion is several fold: 1) the advanced mechas are never identified as such; 2) their appearances are fluid and organic rather than mechanical looking; and 3) the mechas bear a striking resemblance to extraterrestrial lifefroms from an earlier, well-known, Spielberg film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. This interpretation of the beings at the end has a significant affect on the meaning of the ending, making it feel more like some aliens were tacked on to the end to make it a "happy ending". However, one may take into account earlier dialog where David asks Gigolo Joe why the humans hate robots, with Joe responding that it is because the humans know that in the end there will be only artificial beings, implying that artificial beings ultimately will be smarter and stronger and will outlast the human race. The mecha's "lights", circuitry-like internals, and ability to wirelessly communicate with David also suggest that they are the artificially-constructed successors to the human race. The frozen settings also may suggest that human extinction may have resulted from the climate change leaving the more adaptable mechas who inherit the earth.

It is worth mentioning that Stanley Kubrick planned to have an ending similar to the one found in the film, and it is also notable that, even when given the "happy" ending interpretation, the finale is quite dark: humanity has been extinct for thousands of years. Also, in the DVD's supplemental material, composer John Williams confirms that David "dies" at the end of the film; after Monica passes away, he shuts down, essentially committing suicide. Another theory (that goes along with the other Pinocchio imagery) is that the love he had for his "mother" caused him to become alive or engage his soul. So his death along with his mother is merely an ending to the life he had born inside him.

In an interview with film critic Mark Kermode on The Culture Show broadcast on November 4 2006, Spielberg responded to some of the criticisms of the film, stating that many of the so called 'sentimental' elements of the film, including the ending, were in fact Kubrick's and vice-versa the darker elements were his own.

Spoilers end here.

[edit] Trivia

The November 6, 2005 episode of The Simpsons, "Treehouse of Horror XVI" features a parody of the film entitled "B.I.: Bartificial Intelligence."

The movie shows the twin towers of the World Trade Center still standing 2000 years into the future. Less than 3 months after the release, the towers were destroyed in the September 11 terrorist attacks. Although risking controversy and criticism, Steven Spielberg left the towers in the DVD release.

Chris Cunningham, a British music video film director famous for his award nominated music video 'Come to Daddy' by Aphex Twin, worked for over a year on the film when it was a Stanley Kubrick project.