How is the human and machine relationship represented in AI: Artificial Intelligence?
AI: Artificial Intelligence (Warner Bros. Pictures, US 2001, Dir. Steven Spielberg)
I watched AI: Artificial Intelligence after a friend recommended it to me. From the generally poor reviews i had read, i neglected watching the film for a few weeks but i'm glad i finally sat down on a saturday night and watched it.
The Earth's melting ice-caps have drowned countless cities, but population control has ensured the US is still an island of prosperity. Professor Hobby of Cybertronics Manufacturing (William Hurt) proposes the ultimate robot, a child-like construction which can experience emotions. The prototype, a robot called David (Haley Joel Osment), is placed with Cybertronics employee Henry Swinton (Sam Robards) and his wife Monica (Frances O'Connor), whose own child Martin (Jake Thomas) has been cryogenically frozen until a cure is found for his terminal illness. The experiment is a success, with Monica and David sharing an ecstatic relationship. Monica even gives him Martin's supertoy Teddy, a mini-robot with superior reasoning.
When Martin is cured, David is no longer needed; Martin jealously makes trouble for him. When Monica reads them the story of Pinocchio and the Blue Fairy, David is convinced that he must become a 'real' boy in order to keep his mother's love. After an accident in which David nearly drowns Martin, Monica abandons David and Teddy on a distant wasteland where he is soon captured along with a load of discarded robots. He avoids being destroyed as ghoulish entertainment for the crowds at the Flesh Fair arena. With the help of Gigolo Joe (Jude Law), a 'love robot' who is on the run after being framed for murder, David makes his way to Rouge City, a riotous leisure centre where an omniscient computer tells him the Blue Fairy is to be found at the end of the world, formerly Manhattan.
Dodging the police, Gigolo Joe takes him to the drowned city by helicopter, reuniting him with a delighted Professor Hobby who has been producing innumerable further Davids. In despair at this revelation, David throws himself into the ocean but discovers, far below, a statue of the Blue Fairy and begs her to make him 'real'. Trapped in a sunken helicopter, he remains confronting the statue for 2,000 years until alien visitors release him and decipher his memory. Using a lock of Monica's hair that Teddy has preserved, they are able to reconstruct her for a single day and David at last gets his wish. As the joyful day closes, mother and son fall asleep together as Teddy watches over them.
In AI, i man's creation of machinery is genuinely a good thing and David and various other robots are shown as an aid to the human race in a bright light. The qualities of machine are very overlapped with humanity and at times it is hard to realise the fact that David is a 'programmed' machine.
David’s quest in Artificial Intelligence was based on a fairytale (Pinocchio), and therefore completely unattainable. He persisted through the entire film, to be tricked by the Blue Fairy’s existence (once by his creator and once by Coney Island) and capability of changing him into a ‘real boy’. His final satisfaction with the Blue Fairy ends in sadness and is ultimately unsatisfactory as although she is resurrected, he is only permitted to see his mother for one day as she then goes back to her grave. However, he grew through his past experience and ultimately experienced the darker side of humanity: feelings of anger and rage at the robotics headquarters in Manhattan, as well as the feelings of depression and suicide which caused him to fall from the building. It was through these experiences , the sadness, the fear, as well as the love felt from teddy and Joe, which made him as close to a real boy as possible. It is the act of being and experiencing that makes us humans.
In one of the last scenes, a silver extraterrestrial talks to David about their studies on human resurrection, he speaks of the “spirit” of humanity. He describes “spirit” as the secret to their existence and its embodiment in art and science to describe the meaning of life. It is here that I think Spielberg exposes the concept that "spirit" and "humanity" are only words to describe qualities and concepts that are not dependant on the existence of humans. They are not exclusively tied to the human experience. "humanity" as a word is almost a misnomer, for the qualities which are attached to the word can be found in other areas of life on earth.
Does anyone have any thoughts on other themes in AI: Artificial Intelligence and particularly the way that humans and robots are represented?
By Stephen Leatherbarrow
