Word: kubricks
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...unfortunate accidents persuade Monica to abandon David in a forest. Quick as a face slap, David and the audience are in a strange new world containing refugee robots with half-faces and a jaunty "love mecha" named Gigolo Joe (Law). In Kubrick's script, says Law, "Joe was much more aggressive, more twisted." Here he is, in Spielberg's word, David's "scoutmaster." (This was the section Kubrick could not solve and which Spielberg, in developing it, has softened. The Kubrick version would have been rated R; this film...
...Together David and Joe travel through garish landscapes that, as imagined by artist Chris Baker (who was on the project in the early years) and production designer Rick Carter, handsomely evoke every sci-fi dystopia from Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange to Blade Runner and this year's Monkeybone. Come to the Flesh Fair--a sort of Thunderdome demolition derby where vengeful humans, led by the demagogic Lord Johnson-Johnson (Ireland's Brendan Gleeson), set hapless automatons aflame--and try to get out fast. Spend the night in Rouge City, a city of sensual schlock that is filled with Kubrick...
...Kubrick was a scholar of hubris. That was his persistent theme: the dream of being other, or more, than we are. The ambition that seems honorable in your standard movie hero is often revealed as idiot obsession in a Kubrick protagonist. He falls in love with a living doll (Lolita) or himself (Barry Lyndon), with an idea that may be decent (justice, say, in Paths of Glory), even artistic (writing a novel, in The Shining). But Kubrick sets him the sort of test and trap that real-boy Martin sets for David: a man must learn the limits of hope...
...like the Terminator, are designed to destroy. In the A.I. world, robots are made to give pleasure and, in David's case, offer joy. Gigolo Joe is a sex machine, David a love machine. The toy boy's sole purpose is to give and elicit affection. His obsession (in Kubrick's terms) or dream (in Spielberg's) requires him to do everything to achieve Monica's love--after she renounces him, after she abandons him, after she's gone. The woman is unworthy, but she's all he has, all he needs to get back...
...That's an old-fashioned theme, but so is robotics. The Aldiss story (in which a couple contemplate dumping their robo-child as soon as the state allows them to have a real one of their own) was published in 1969 just a year after Kubrick's 2001 was released. These days, artificial intelligence has been overtaken, as scientific hope and ethical threat, by genetic engineering. A.I., set far in the future, conjures up popular worries 30 years in the past...