A.I. (film)

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Template:Infobox Film A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (actual on-screen title: Artificial Intelligence: A.I.) is a science fiction film that was released in 2001. It was the last project on which filmmaker Stanley Kubrick worked.

Kubrick had long planned to film A.I., but had been putting it off until he was confident that the effects could be handled convincingly, all the while working on the story in close cooperation with Steven Spielberg. After many years of exchanging ideas about the project Kubrick became convinced that this film needed Spielberg's "different kind of sensitivity" and urged him to direct the film. Spielberg finally accepted. Using Kubrick's storyboard, he wrote the script himself. The film is a unique harmony of both Kubrick and Spielberg's styles. It bears Kubrick's widespread use of metaphors and an ethereal score, along with Spielberg's warmth and subtle humor. Kubrick died before the film started shooting, and the film is dedicated to him.

1 Box office
2 Partial credits
3 Plot
- 3.1 The Ending
4 Debate Over The Ending
5 Implications
6 Website game
7 Trivia
8 External links

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Box office

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).

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Partial credits

Haley Joel Osment as David, a young Mecha
Jude Law as Gigolo Joe, David's companion and also a Mecha
Frances O'Connor as Monica Swinton
Brendan Gleeson as Lord Johnson-Johnson
Sam Robards as Henry Swinton, David's adopted father
William Hurt as Professor Allen Hobby, David's creator
Jake Thomas as Martin Swinton

It was adapted by Kubrick, Ian Watson and Spielberg from the short story "Supertoys Last All Summer Long" by Brian Aldiss.

It was nominated for Academy Awards for Best Effects, Visual Effects and Best Music, Original Score.

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Plot

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The story begins in the year 2143, when an ecological disaster has resulted in a drastic reduction of the land area of the Earth and also of the human population.

These problems have been successfully addressed by technology. Androids with very high levels of artificial intelligence (called mechas, short for "mechanisms" as contrasted with orgas for "organisms," i.e. 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 cryogenically frozen (in which state he has remained for five years). In hopes of cheering up his wife, Henry agrees to his company's offer 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 (named after the creator's late son) and although Monica is initially frightened of the android, she eventually warms to him after activating his experimental imprinting technology, which makes the mecha feel love for her as a child loves a parent.

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, who delights in taunting David, chiefly by telling him that Monica will never love him because he isn't "real". After David accidentally nearly drowns the Swintons' son, Monica sets out to return him to the manufacturer. But 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 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 male 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 (perhaps a 22nd century Philadelphia), in search of the knowledge that will lead them to the Blue Fairy.

An oracular computer personality called Dr. Know (voiced by Robin Williams) eventually leads David, with Joe in tow, to his manufacturers' offices at the top of a building in the flooded ruins of Manhattan. There, he sees that he is not unique and his manufacturers have created dozens of copies of him. Outraged that there exist others who could also vie for Monica's affection and determined to prove himself as special, he meets and destroys one of his copies. He is stopped by his human creator, 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 his creator, 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. Disheartened, David leaves and falls from the office into the ocean.

David is fished from the ocean by Joe in a stolen amphibicopter (amphibious helicopter), but before he is pulled up he 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's 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. But the ruins of the Wonder Wheel collapse on the amphibicopter, no longer able to take David back to the water's surface, so he simply waits for the wish to come true, repeating it into infinity with Teddy by his side. David waits for many years, sitting in the amphibicopter on the bottom of the ocean and staring at the Blue Fairy statue.

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The Ending

In a long flash forward, the action skips ahead two thousand years further into the future for the end of the film. In A.D. 4142, Manhattan is buried under several hundred feet of glacial ice and snow, and the human species is extinct. Highly advanced mechas are conducting an archaeological excavation and discover David, perfectly preserved.

The future mechas reactivate David and show what must be their version of amazement. To them, David represents a discovery of supreme importance, as he was constructed by human hands, and therefore knew members of the future mechas' extinct creator race.

The future mechas reconstruct the Swinton household using data from his memory banks, hoping that this will make him happy. But when they explain to David that Monica died long ago, he responds with deepest despair. It becomes clear to the future 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 creatures tell David 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."

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Debate Over The Ending

The film's ending has been the subject of much debate. Many allege that it was really a dark ending disguised as a happy one. They suggest that the resurrected Monica was, in fact, an illusion planted in David's mind by the future mechas so that David could finally end his long quest and terminate his program. They point to the fact that resurrected Monica had a much warmer persona than her original self, and that during the long day she spent with David, she never asked about her husband or her son. The future mecha 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. One side believes the ending is an intrinsic part of the story's larger theme, and hailed the film (as a whole) as a modern classic. The other side believed 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 fact that many viewers mistook the future mechas for extraterrestrials. If this were true, the ending might be imagined to proffer a different theme entirely. The mistake is understandable, however, as the future mechas are never formally introduced as such, and bear some resemblance to the extraterrestrials in another Spielberg film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

One could also imagine the ending to have evoked religion, specifically Catholicism. David, in essence, prays to an icon reminiscent of the Virgin Mary for 2000 years, after which his mother is resurrected, and he is finally loved.

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Implications

The film echoes Isaac Asimov, the Asimov-derived films Bicentennial Man and I, Robot, many old and new episodes of Star Trek, and doubtless the original work by Brian Aldiss. It explores philosophical and moral challenges that come when robotics and artificial intelligence move ever closer to the human condition. Will a sufficiently complex machine find emotions awakening inside it as an emergent property? Or will human beings supply them?

If machines can be made to feel, but remain effectively immortal, what kind of responsibility would humans - their parent race - bear? How far down the road shall we go? Do we love them back? Do we have a choice? Could we stop ourselves if we tried? The film suggests that all barriers to engaging in physical love could eventually disappear.

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Website 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 2000-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. 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.

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Trivia

The November 6, 2005 episode of The Simpsons, "Treehouse of Horror XVI" featured a parody of the film entitled "B.I.: Bartificial Intelligence."
The World Trade Center towers are shown standing 2000 years into the future after humanity has ceased to exist. This is noted to have been the last major film in which the towers were portrayed prior to their destruction on September 11, 2001.
Throughout the entirety of the movie, the main character, David, doesn't blink. Haley Joel Osment, the actor for David, decided not to blink in order to make David seem less human. The only time that David closes his eyes is at the end of the movie.

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