Eddie, I think we've been down this road before. If it wasn't you, it was somebody else on this forum I'm pretty sure. Lemme say it again, 'cause once again I find myself needing to: Whenever I sound really fucking condescending, it's because I'm making fun of myself a little bit and the between-the-lines whatnot isn't coming through over the Internet. For reals. Promise.
That said, I'll try to cut down on it.
Anyway, at the risk of actually staying on topic, lemme just say this about that regarding "AI." There's legitimate debate to be had about the difference between an author's intentions and a viewer's interpretations and whether one or the other of those is more legitimate. But whether either Kubrick or Spielberg meant it this way — or Aldiss, who wrote the short story on which the movie was incredibly loosely based — that film has to be one of the most deeply and unapologetically misanthropic works of art ever. It's practically the anti-Spielberg film. Spielberg, the consummate humanist, put his name on a feature that starts out with the contention that humans are bastards who are absolutely not worth saving and never lets go of it for a second.
There are two kinds of characters in the movie: human beings and robots. The humans are, without exception, selfish, crass, venal, shallow, weak, manipulative and cruel. The robots have their own personalities, because they were built to, but they share one characteristic in common: They are innocent. They're simple and child-like and pure of spirit, by virtue of, well, not having spirits at all. They are virtuous, but empty.
Precisely one character (or more accurately, group of characters) shows the slightest humanity in the course of the film. And it happens at the very end, and in deference to anybody here who may not have seen it, I won't spoil. But suffice to say it fits with the theme.
"AI" is the anti-fairy tale. It starts with the premise of Pinocchio, then says fuck you, there is no fairy, there is no magic, you will never be anything other than what you are. You're incapable of transcendence, and no one — no one — will ever love you.
It's a dark, dark film. And the reason I made my wisecrack about not understanding it is because a lot of people simply don't. They misunderstand this or that aspect of the film — or maybe it's more accurate to say they differently understand it, since I make no claims about one interpretation or another being the correct one — and it leads them to think the movie was thematically murky, or that it took a hard swerve in the third act. It wasn't, and it didn't. It's a brutal, nihilistic film.
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