Real Hollywood
Well, it's Tuesday so I went to see a half price movie. There has been a bit of talk on the newspaper about Artificial Intelligence, the new Steve Spielberg flick, so Christa and I went to see what it was all about. The comments that I had read were concerning the movie's suitability for young children.
I can't really say what my thoughts were going into see the movie, but the combination of Spielberg, some sort of collaboration with Kubrick and warnings about unsuitability for children sort of make me think they weren't that bad. Anyway, the film starts off interestingly enough. It begins in a futuristic classroom like setting, where what the movie's framework seems to be set up. A bunch of engineers come up with a plan to make a robot child that is capable of loving. They imply that this has never been done before and will represent a new and possibly revolutionary development. In other words words this will be the most intelligent form of artificial intelligence, one that capable of emotional learning and personality development. They treat the question like any bunch of engineers. The problem is to program emotional love which becomes a technical question. One young lady in the classroom asks an interesting question, but in the end it is a marketing question. And so the engineers go off and solve the problem of making a robot love.
The first act of the movie is quite interesting and we are taken with what seems to be the central theme in the movie. The robot, David, is created and given to a couple who's real son has a terminal illness and has been cryogenically frozen and will remain frozen until he can be cured. Some emotional scenes follow where the human family struggles with whether they can accept David. Soon the real son is miraculously cured and the real son competes with David for the Mother's affection. We are occupied with the idea that if it is possible to create an object that loves us what if anything do we owe to that object. This idea is, however abandoned quickly. The answer is apparent. Though one might become strongly attached to David, when the real son is threatened David is tossed. David filled a need, but is only seen instrumentally as something capable of loving when you need to be loved.
In the second act we hit some really interesting stuff. David, who has been abandoned, tries to become 'real.' That is, he wants to be a real son in order to gain the love of the lady who was his mother, who he was programmed to love. During this act we are asked: what would make David real, something we would consider a person? Throughout, David is drawn by his love for 'his mother' and the belief that the Pinnochio fairy tale is real. So, he searches for a blue fairy to make him real. In typical American style David wanders. He meets some memorable characters and moves off to a dangerous frontier. Oddly enough he heads east, to Manhattan, a ghost town that was flooded when the ice caps melted. In Manhattan David was supposed to be turned into a real boy.
I will not spoil how the ending turns out, it is enough to say that it will spoil itself. It is a typically Hollywood ending. The possibilities questions that the movie starts with never realize themselves. Instead, what begins as a movie that seems to ask hard and interesting questions turns into a teary, emotional, made for Oprah mother - son moment. Even that wouldn't be so bad had the second, and central theme been realized. There is a moment, the climax, when we see a Hegelian/Hobian consciousness dialectic emerging. Unfortunately, it does not realize and David remains a slave to his programing. The third act is really pointless.
Maybe I missed something. Maybe I simply don't buy into the idea that emotional love equals humanity, that love is our one defining trait. I thought self-consciousness had at least something to do with it.
This movie, however had beautiful and haunting images and all that technical stuff, but the story failed. The max this movie can get is 49%. Therefore it gets
2 1/3 stars. ERRATUM
Using the scale recently developed with Mr J.J.E. Imber, Esq this Movie gets: ** (2 Stars)
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