AI (the movie) question: SPOILER!! (Don't read if U haven't seen it!)

AGAIN, STOP READING NOW if you have not seen the movie and don't want me to ruin it for you!
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At the end of the movie, where spends the day with his mom and drifts off to sleep with her, they say he goes, "for the first time in his life, to the place where dreams are born".

Now, I know they're saying he goes to sleep (he had said earlier that, as a robot, he couldn't actually 'sleep').

BUT, in your opinion, does he:

A) Actually go to sleep... i.e. he is now able to sleep and dream, and is now therefore 'human' (as he's ever gonna be)? In this scenario, he wakes up later and lives on as a 'human' boy.

or

B) Go to 'sleep' forever... i.e. shuts off his circuits and dies (but dies happy, since he had his moment with his mommy)?

I just saw it, and I'm leaning towards the latter (B). He can't really ever be human, or ever win his mother's love, and that's what makes the story so damn tragic.

I would like to believe it was A, but considering the tone of the rest of the movie, it's got to be B. A good movie, but painful to watch.

... review that was probbaly on the mark: if Kubrick had done the movie (like he was planning on before he died), it probably would have ended even more tragically, with David under the water asking the Blue Fairy to help him... asking over and over... forever.

The ending as is, while certainly sad, was downright... I don't know, 'Spielbergian' by comparison.

And at some point someone will come onto this thread to tell us about the "aliens" at the end that sucked so bad, so my pre-emptive strike is that they were NOT aliens, they were extremely advanced mechas.

They were not aliens (though they looked like aliens). They were a highly-advanced race of machines, developed long after humans left the earth. Hence, they were curious about humankind.

Keep in mind that none of what you see at the point where he enters his old house is real. Those highly evolved Mechas (that look like aliens) simply scanned his brain and took the images they found there and created a sort of ideal "dream" for him. I think that when the dream is over (when Mom dies) they most likely just shut him down since they can't really use him to find out anything about humans. Remember, he was fixated on his "mother" so his view of things was pretty limited.

On edit: By the way, I LOVE that movie. I've seen it at least six times. I own a copy of it. Might pop it in again this weekend now that you mention it.

But then again, maybe the ending was left that way to make us wonder.

Very underrated movie. A fairly dark tearjerker. I know many have maligned AI, but I liked it.

the boy and the bear were trapped underwater and he was praying to the statue. I mean, sadly praying for something that would never come, after all they went through... that would have been way more tragic than the way it actually ended. I thought the part with the aliens was going too far.

They were Mechas that had evolved over those two thousand years. That is the one thing I didn't like about the movie. They made those Mechas look too much like Spielbergian aliens. It confused a lot of people.

Although it was clear to me they were advanced mechas, I could see where people were confused.

Forever praying to nothing. I actually got angry when it continued after that. I was saying, "Wow, that's brilliant!" Then, suddenly, "D'oh!"

But on a second and subsequent viewings, I find I like the ending. Leaving him underwater might have been brilliant cinematically, but not from any kind of story telling viewpoint (unless you want it to be puire existentialism--that's the only mode such an ending would have made sense in). The story has a classicly full-circle quality with that ending that I find very satisfying.

David refuses to give up on his quest for the blue fairy, and while some people attribute that to his programming, I looked at it as a result of his budding humanity. So if Spielberg had ended the movie with David finding the blue fairy only to discover she isn't real, I think people would have found that ending much too theologically cynical.

But I haven't seen the movie in a while, so I may be way off base there.

Unless of course it's Pinnochio retold, with a twist, and he dies instead.

... on to.

But sci fi pretends to be based in (hypothesized) reality, not fantasy. That, I think, is what makes it so tragic. he can never really have what Pinnochio gets. He can also never really gain his "mother"'s love.

But even if he "dies" in the end, he did get close enough to what he wants.

He *did* win his mother's love (if he ever really lost it) at the end. She tells him she loves him, and that's why he can drift off, happy and fulfilled at last. So while the story has many tragic elements (the tragedy of humanity itself, uppermost), I think it is redeemed at the end from tragedy.

Oh, and it's possible maybe he *is* human at the end. The robots never said they couldn't make him human, only that they couldn't bring a human back to a normal life.

AI is one of my all-time favorite films, btw.

edit: typo

... the basis for this is the vague ideas of reconstituting feelings and life-forces and memories of the mother, and that just got a bit tenuous for me for sci-fi (bordering on fantasy).

I DO think the mother grew to love him to an extent, and I could see, buying into what the advanced mechas told him, that he was able to experience that, if only momentarily. She did love him, she just was forced to give him up. Yes, there was a kernel of love/good in her, and yes, they brought this to him at the end.

BUT my problem with her was that if you take the responsibility of bringing "life" into the world, which is basically what she did when she imprinted him onto her, then you don't welch out on that responsibility (as a parent, to me, that was one of the biggest morals of the movie). From what I could tell, they never even made it clear whether or not she told her husband that she had done so. And if she didn't, she should have then and she should have stood up to him. Both Martin and David would have backed her up that David was not trying to drown Martin.

So I guess that's my problem. yes, he got some love from mom at the end, but how deep was it if she abandoned him and didn't stand up for him when it counted?

Well, yes, like any good Spielberg flick, the sci-fi elements are romanticized to such an extent that they become indistinguishable from fantasy. As far as the mother being restored, that may seem tenuous, to us, as a proposed fact, but within the context of the film, it IS a fact. She is fully restored for one day and I don't think there is any doubt that the "perfect" day that she and David share is a complete affirmation of her true love for him. That's one reason why I see her as a tragic figure; yes, she abandoned David, but she was forced to so by the forces deeply shaping her society. Remember how extremely distraught she was in that scene? I thought her anguish was extremely well-played, and of a sort worthy of Shakespeare. I don't think she loved him merely 'to an extent'. I think she really loved him; and the forced abandonment is the jumping-off point for the journey that is the film, which eventually reunites mother and son. And of course, if she had "stood up" for him, there wouldn't be a story, would there? :)

That was the shittiest ending to a movie I've ever seen, and I've seen an awful lot of movies. Mr. Chovexani took me to see it, and when the lights came up we just sat there looking at each other going :wtf:

In my little world that crap never happened, and the movie ended with him underwater in futile prayer to the Blue Fairy.

And he knew he couldnt live with his mom dead

and crying at the end... Glad to see that I'm in good company :)

Oh... and B. was my fantasy... as I couldn't bear to imagine a forever like that... since he could never get out of his situation, and could live for centuries in that state.