Mars Saxman / Archives

Saturday, the 14th of July, 2001

I haven't been writing lately because I haven't felt there was much to say. Maybe I will take another crack at this journal thing later, but for now the desire is gone.

Tuesday, the 3rd of July, 2001

Things that bothered me about A.I.:

- They can build a robot boy who can take a twenty-story dive into the ocean and survive without so much as an "ouch", but he can't eat a plate full of spinach without short-circuiting his (optical?) brain.

- The robot boy's "damage avoidance system" is so finely tuned that he'll pull his brother into a pool rather than allow someone to stab his hand - nevermind that his hand can clearly take the damage, as demonstrated by Dr. Hobby in the opening scene - but it won't stop him from eating the abovementioned spinach or jumping off the building.

- Society has created near-perfect human simulacra and employed them at tasks diverse as coal mining and prostitution, but hasn't thought to use them as chauffeurs.

- The Flesh Fair management needs scrap robots to destroy for show, but instead of buying them cheap on a secondhand market, they go to incredible lengths to capture free-running robots.

- Human beings, who manage to feel affection for automobiles, computers, and cheap toy robot dogs, have a hard time accepting and loving a convincing replica of a cute little human boy.

- Human beings, riled up and enraged at the faux-humans being destroyed in front of them at the Flesh Fair, stop on a dime and change their minds - all at once - when they see a cute little boy robot crying.

- The ocean froze solid overnight, preventing Manhattan's abandoned buildings from being crushed and ground to pieces by hundreds of years of winter icebergs.

- The earth lost its moon one day, just for the hell of it, thereby allowing the amphibicopter to sit frozen in ice at the bottom of the ocean for hundreds of years instead of being ground to bits by tidal forces acting on the glacier over its head.

- The Cybertronics corporation (or whatever it is they were called) figured out how to mass-produce sentient children, but - in spite of the fact that Hasbro managed it in the 1980's with Cabbage Patch Kids - didn't catch on to the idea that people would rather have a unique individual robot kid to adopt than one which looks just like the neighbors'.

- It made more sense to set up Dr. Hobby's lab (and manufacturing facility, apparently) in the decaying, rusting hulk of a partially submerged office tower in the middle of the ocean than to put it in a city on dry land, where services like transportation, power, and communications are cheap.

- Thousands, perhaps millions of robots with these eternity power supplies are manufactured, but the only ones to survive the unnamed crisis and ensuing ice age are the ones stuck underneath the planet's biggest glacier.

- The kid runs off in a fantastic, expensive-looking "amphibicopter" after dramatically knocking over a dozen cops, busting out a neon sign, and unaressting a fugitive criminal robot, and nobody chases him.

- Humanity can build robots with power supplies that last for thousands of years without a recharge, but can't engineer its way out of its massive resource crisis.

- Humanity suffers a resource crisis so severe that reproduction requires a license, but has enough robots to spare that they can just be blown up for entertainment.

- Earth's land area has been reduced dramatically by the rise of the oceans, destroying a great deal of habitable land, but there's plenty of open space and all the buildings sprawl out comfortably.

And on, and on.

There are so many things about A.I. that didn't make sense to me that I came away feeling I had missed the entire point. It was a tragic, miserable movie when it wasn't frustrating. I didn't know whether to hate David for being a selfish monster who, by nature, could never learn to think of others' feelings, or to pity him for the tragedy to which his nature doomed him. There was never any hope, never any change; it just went on and on, David wishing with a focused mania for a love he could never have.

Professor Hobby's villainy was presented in sympathetic fashion, as though the filmmaker didn't really see what a wretched thing he was doing. This man created a mechanical replica of his own son and programmed it to love and seek love - dooming it to near-eternal misery in a world that has eternal robotic power supplies but no better longevity science than we have today. What an incredible act of cruelty!

It wasn't a bad movie, really; the production quality was top notch, Haley Joel Osment's acting was spot-on, and the future vision was articulated in detail. Some of the details were excellent - Gigolo Joe's inability to break out of his seduction script, for example, was a creative and understandable example of a sentient machine limited by his programming. The scene where David's mother reads the imprinting code was perfect - a little shift in body angle, a change in the tone of voice, and you can tell he's gone from being a weird little robot kid to an adoring son - excellent work by Mr. Osment.

But it wasn't a good movie, either. It was full of pointless plot twists, characters with whom you are expected to sympathize for no apparent reason, motive shifts for no apparent reason, and strange leaps of logic all round. It was both cruel and pointless, a frustrating mix.

It should have ended with David in the amphibicopter, trapped under the sea, waiting for the Blue Fairy to answer, and gradually falling silent. It would have been a tragic story with a lot of problems, but it would have worked as a sad movie. The real ending felt tacked-on and strange, and even more disturbing than the basic tragedy of David's pointless quest for his mother's love - in fulfilling his wish, he perpetrated a bizarre piece of cruelty. Pulling his mother from the grave and walking through his fantasy in a sort of cosmic puppetry, he alienated himself from any understanding of real human love.

A.I. cut down to ninety minutes - ending in front of the Blue Fairy and omitting the pointless Flesh Fair sequence - would have been a tragic movie with many flaws, but a far better movie than the one I saw last night.