Adumbration

A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001, Steven Speilberg, Director)

In brief, don't bother with it.  While it opens some interesting questions, the second half leaves so many loose ends it looks like the producers failed to consider some of the most basic ramifications of the premise.

The boy is created, he's "mecha", a prototype that is intended to be self directed.  The first problem is the presumption that only a parent's love can motivate that determination.  Now, I love my parents tons, but I fail to see why that is a necessary condition to motive or self-directed action.  If I were creating an android like that, Data would be a much better model.

Next, the creator apparently gave no thought to whether his creation would mature.  Instead, the boy goes on and on in exactly the same emotional and intellectual state as the day he woke up.  If I wanted to be a parent and chose an android to satisfy that need, I sure would not want one that was a perpetual 10 year old, even if it did never have to be fed and could stay under water indefinitely.

The middle of the film is where it starts to really go down hill.  The kid is a little spooky (unintentionally), and fear ultimately causes the mother to send him away.  At this point it becomes fixated on the notion that his mother's love will return if he becomes a "real" boy, a la Pinocchio, so he searches for the mythic "blue fairy" to cause the transformation.  The "Flesh Fair" mob scene is just gratuitous pap, but he manages to escape by pleading for mercy.  Eventually he discovers his creator, who is so pleased with himself for leading the boy his way that it really calls into question his confidence that the android's actions were truly self-motivated.

The setting is some future in which the oceans have risen due to global warming, flooding coastal cities.   The boy goes underwater and finds a statue in some ruined amusement park depicting something like a blue fairy, which he proceeds to beseech to grant his wish to be "real".  At this point one is sincerely hoping the movie will end, but there's still at least 30 minutes to go.  And while movie time now jumps 2000 years ahead, it seems much longer. 

Those millennia find the oceans having frozen once more (which don't cause the coasts to recede, so I suppose it was a flash freezing), and the boy is still there in front of the statue, in exactly the same state and continuing to operate, when he is discovered by the space aliens from Close Encounters.  Of course they are telepathic and so can inform him he is the last remnant of human civilization, which has somehow managed all to die in the freezing.  But it turns out the aliens can clone people from hair samples, so they can bring a reasonable facsimile of the mother back to life, which turns out to even have the same hair style.  And so the boy and mother are reunited, and the mother has no recollection of having sent the boy away in the first place, so all is bucolic from sun-up to sun-down.  But the cloning treatment only works for one day (who knows why), and the mother dies once more, but that's OK, because now the android boy has somehow attained closure with his desire to be loved by his mother, even if he continues to be "mecha".

Perhaps this is all an indictment of religion.  The opening scenes show the boy's creator espousing on child-parent love as a motive, when a student asks about the converse parent-child relation.  The response:  when god made adam, he did so to have someone love him.