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Re: A. I.

PTC wrote:
> I certainly did not think that it was a feel-good coda to the film, 
> as many critics accused it of being.

I felt, and I've only seen it the once, that the ending was *trying* to be a
feel-good coda, which was so incongruous with all that went before that it
ended up being the creepiest part of the movie.  Do you think Spielberg
*intended* it to be a happy ending?  

> I found a fair bit of creepiness in _A.I._

The teddy bear was creepy, the robot-smashing entertainment was creepy, the
scene where Osment's robot gets abandoned in the woods was *really* creepy.
The emptiness of the human relationships as portrayed contrasted with the
robot's desparate desire to have one.  This desire was coupled with the ongoing
reminders that the desire itself, as realistic as it was, was programmed;
artificial, hence raising the question as to whether any of *our* loves are
other than selfish and blind hunger, following out our own genetic programming,
"dolled" up to look like something greater.  Yeah, it was pretty creepy.  And
then to have these robots come in at the end and talk about humanity's genius
and greatness, and their quest to understand it... it just didn't gel.  As you
say, the creation of the mother at the end (scientific nonsense, compared with
the pretty good tech-savvy of the rest of the film), resulted in a completely
hollow simulation of a loving relationship, for a hollow simulation of a child,
and yet it was decked out with all the signals that we were *supposed* to cheer
on this opportunity for the robot to fulfill his dream, as if he, like
Pinocchio, had become a real boy, with the future robots standing in for the
blue fairy.  We were given a warm glow around a truly horrifying travesty.  I
was reminded of Act III of Thorton Wilder's _Our Town_, in which the dead Emily
gets a chance to relive one day of her life, but finds the prospect of facing
that vitality and possibility, with the *true* awareness of how fleeting it is,
to be too horrible to contemplate.  A.I. lacks that awareness, and seemed to me
to be as if Emily had gone through with her one day, thus diminishing the value
of real life and real experience.

They should have just stopped with him under the ocean, looking at the fairy.
But then, if they had, would we be discussing it as much?  ;-)

Yours,
-- 
Don Smith                           Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment
donaldas at umich_edu                                 http://xte.mit.edu/~dasmith/

"Life is ... moments flabbergasted to be in each others' presence."  
        				     - "Speed" Levitch in _Waking Life_
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