A Spoiler Review.
I watched A. I. Artificial Intelligence last night. The title sounds somewhat redundant now that everyone knows what AI stands for. 25 years later, I watched it for the first time, and while it didn’t predict (yet) the exact nature of AI, it’s still worth considering what it has to say.
This movie has a lot of incredible material in it. The exploration of the nature of love. The reckoning with the moral and epistemic questions inherent to AI. Little critiques of human behaviors, showing them to be artificial. However, I think there’s a bit too much here. I would have preferred a movie that cut maybe 45 minutes and really got into one or two of its big ideas, instead of smashing them all together.
There’s three acts to this movie. Undoubtedly, the first act ends with Monica abandoning David in the forest. The boundary between the second and third acts, I would argue is when David and Joe leave Rouge City in the amphibicopter1 and fly to Manhattan, the submerged city at the end of the world. The first and third act match each other in tone and thematic material, where the second feels a bit out of place. This is the carnival section in the middle of the Pinocchio story. Gaudy, tumultuous, and chaotic, fading away with a sigh of relief when the mecha trio emerges above the clouds on their flight from Rouge.
This movie takes you to places you would never expect. The first hour focus primarily on the family: Henry and Monica, Martin and David. We watch their family dynamic play out in their sleek, modern, but mostly familiar-looking suburban home. After Monica abandons David, and the film fades to black, we fade in on Joe’s face, talking with a distressed woman in a bedroom. It’s a pretty jarring shift of setting and tone. It becomes obvious that Joe is a sex bot, and that this has become a totally different movie. There’s the crazy moon reveal, and suddenly we’re at the Flesh Fair. They escape to a futuristic Vegas. You’d have no idea that the end of this movie starts 2000 years later when David is excavated by alien archaeologists. Wild.
What I was most interested by was the questions raised about love. In the first scene a woman asks Professor Hobby what moral obligations humans would have to a robot capable of love. Hobby makes an allusion to Adam and Eve, but this moment is fleeting. The movie makes note of the fact that as soon as the conversation turned philosophical, most of the people in the room stopped paying attention.2 This is a crucial question.
The answer we see play out in the movie is that humans with all their flaws–shortsightedness, rashness, disloyalty–are not capable of reciprocating unconditional love. David is programmed to love Monica completely and unconditionally. It leads him to take actions that seem nonsensical. Henry wonders to Monica whether it would be reasonable to assume David could hate. He was right to be concerned; David cannot bear the reality that others would compete with him for her love. When she abandons him, she thinks she’s doing him a favor by not taking him to be destroyed, but she’s actually damning him to a fate worse than death. He’s an immortal being with a single desire, a desire that now can never be fulfilled.
At the end, the aliens can only resurrect Monica for one day. The movie ends before the following morning comes, but we know what will happen. David will wake and his existence will continue, now with the knowledge that he will never see her again. I find this conclusion to be hopelessly bleak. But that’s the only conclusion that would have made sense.
In David, I see a sort of inversion of our relationship with God. We were imprinted with a desire to love him and worship him, but we chase after other imperfect things to fill that desire. David doggedly pursues the desire with which he was imprinted, but the target he’s aiming for will always be out of reach. Monica can never love David like he desires her to. She’s only human.
This paradox makes me grateful to God. His standard for us is perfect. He made us in his image, after all. He deserves nothing less than our whole selves, but daily we choose otherwise. While this response gives him every reason to destroy us for our defection, he pursues us. And he paid the ultimate price to restore us to him. Thanks be to him.