A bittersweet tragedy about love’s surfaces and its deeply human core, A.I. takes place in a distant future in which climate change has sunk large parts of the planet under water, decimating the human population and leading to the rise of human-like robots known as Mecha. David, the first Mecha capable of feeling love, takes the shape of an eleven-year-old boy designed by an idealistic professor and given to a young couple to ease the pain of losing their comatose son. Following their son’s miraculous recovery, the young couple abandons the superfluous David in the woods, where he begins to learn what it means to be human.
"You watch Osment’s calculated movements and think: that can’t possibly be a human child."
Some may argue that A.I. combines the worst of Kubrick’s cerebral sensibility with the worst of Spielberg’s signature schmaltz, but for a movie that passed through so many hands over decades of rapid technological advancement, it presents a surprisingly coherent image of the future, at the centre of which is a boy who yearns to be real enough to love. Supporting David in his quest for humanity are Teddy, an animatronic teddy bear played by prolific cartoon voice actor Jack Angel, and Gigolo Joe, a literal sex machine played by the charming Jude Law, a twinky ingenue fresh off the set of The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), a few years before getting caught in bed with the nanny. Ben Kingsley, Meryl Streep, Robin Williams, and Chris Rock lend their voices to various CGI holograms, and if you squint hard enough, you might recognize the brief, silent appearance of a young Adrian Grenier as a teenage joyrider. But the movie’s standout performance belongs to its lead, played by archetypal child star Haley Joel Osment.
Kubrick didn’t want a real boy to play the role of David, concerned that a child’s face might age over the course of a long shoot. Instead he commissioned a special effects artist to build him a robot, but the machine’s rubber face proved too uncanny to garner sympathy on screen. Under Spielberg’s direction, the role went to Osment, whose breakout performance as a disturbed clairvoyant in The Sixth Sense (1999) made him one of the youngest Oscar-nominated actors in history. Osment’s David is as uncanny as any robot, his smile engaged as if pressed by a button, his head swivelling on his neck as if operated by remote control. The performance is unsettling for the precision of its embodiment, rarely seen so gracefully in someone so young. You watch Osment’s calculated movements and think: that can’t possibly be a human child. But then you watch his face crumple as he grabs for his mother, and you watch his eyes widen through the rear-view mirror as his mother drives away, and suddenly there's no denying that he’s a real boy.
The world presented in A.I. is white, chrome, and grey, an austere future that inverts the trope of the malicious machine. In this world, robots are an underclass made innocent by the limits of their programming, while human cruelty knows no bounds. It’s a future in which humans leave robots by the side of the road, hunt them for spare parts in the moonlight, destroy them on stage for sport, and hang them from hooks like carcasses in a butcher’s window. As Gigolo Joe says to David: “They made us too smart, too quick, and too many. We are suffering for the mistakes they made because when the end comes, all that will be left is us.”
The movie’s final act flashes forward two thousand years, the earth frozen over, humanity long gone, the remaining robots transformed into a species of faceless beings somewhere between alien, animal, and machine. The image feels prophetic nearly 25 years later, with climate catastrophe lighting the world on fire, and artificial intelligence models becoming more advanced and ubiquitous by the day. This technology isn’t sophisticated enough yet to win our sympathies, but maybe one day it will be. How will we respond when AI eventually emerges from the flatness of our screens and appears in front of us, arms outstretched, with the face of a child ready to be loved?
"How will we respond when AI eventually emerges from the flatness of our screens and appears in front of us, arms outstretched, with the face of a child ready to be loved?"
Like all science fiction, A.I. acts as a reflection of our collective anxieties rather than an exact prediction. Kubrick’s initial vision, transformed over more than 20 years of development, still feels as timely today as it did upon release, a testament to the enduring relevance of its themes: the end of the world, the threat of the future, man vs. machine. And while Spielberg may be right about an impending ice age, reality tends to be much more banal than the future promised by Hollywood blockbusters.
Take, for example, Osment: based on his role in A.I., I would’ve expected the young actor’s career to go one of two ways: either he’d parlay his early success into a lifetime on the A-list, like Leonardo DiCaprio or Jodie Foster, or he’d crash and burn in some some spectacular scandal like so many child stars before him. What happened to Osment, however, is much more boring than I could’ve predicted. Besides a DUI in his teens, his reputation is pretty spotless. He remains a working actor, never to the same prestigious degree as when he was young, but enough to keep him in the industry (some of his recent roles include a voiceover gig in a Lego movie and a cameo in Blink Twice (2024), Zoë Kravitz’s directorial debut). His signature baby face is now expanded and masked by a beard, just like any other guy. The future, by the time it arrives, is never as exciting as it looks in the movies; never as bright, and never as real.
A bittersweet tragedy about love’s surfaces and its deeply human core, A.I. takes place in a distant future in which climate change has sunk large parts of the planet under water, decimating the human population and leading to the rise of human-like robots known as Mecha. David, the first Mecha capable of feeling love, takes the shape of an eleven-year-old boy designed by an idealistic professor and given to a young couple to ease the pain of losing their comatose son. Following their son’s miraculous recovery, the young couple abandons the superfluous David in the woods, where he begins to learn what it means to be human.
"You watch Osment’s calculated movements and think: that can’t possibly be a human child."
Some may argue that A.I. combines the worst of Kubrick’s cerebral sensibility with the worst of Spielberg’s signature schmaltz, but for a movie that passed through so many hands over decades of rapid technological advancement, it presents a surprisingly coherent image of the future, at the centre of which is a boy who yearns to be real enough to love. Supporting David in his quest for humanity are Teddy, an animatronic teddy bear played by prolific cartoon voice actor Jack Angel, and Gigolo Joe, a literal sex machine played by the charming Jude Law, a twinky ingenue fresh off the set of The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), a few years before getting caught in bed with the nanny. Ben Kingsley, Meryl Streep, Robin Williams, and Chris Rock lend their voices to various CGI holograms, and if you squint hard enough, you might recognize the brief, silent appearance of a young Adrian Grenier as a teenage joyrider. But the movie’s standout performance belongs to its lead, played by archetypal child star Haley Joel Osment.
Kubrick didn’t want a real boy to play the role of David, concerned that a child’s face might age over the course of a long shoot. Instead he commissioned a special effects artist to build him a robot, but the machine’s rubber face proved too uncanny to garner sympathy on screen. Under Spielberg’s direction, the role went to Osment, whose breakout performance as a disturbed clairvoyant in The Sixth Sense (1999) made him one of the youngest Oscar-nominated actors in history. Osment’s David is as uncanny as any robot, his smile engaged as if pressed by a button, his head swivelling on his neck as if operated by remote control. The performance is unsettling for the precision of its embodiment, rarely seen so gracefully in someone so young. You watch Osment’s calculated movements and think: that can’t possibly be a human child. But then you watch his face crumple as he grabs for his mother, and you watch his eyes widen through the rear-view mirror as his mother drives away, and suddenly there's no denying that he’s a real boy.
The world presented in A.I. is white, chrome, and grey, an austere future that inverts the trope of the malicious machine. In this world, robots are an underclass made innocent by the limits of their programming, while human cruelty knows no bounds. It’s a future in which humans leave robots by the side of the road, hunt them for spare parts in the moonlight, destroy them on stage for sport, and hang them from hooks like carcasses in a butcher’s window. As Gigolo Joe says to David: “They made us too smart, too quick, and too many. We are suffering for the mistakes they made because when the end comes, all that will be left is us.”
The movie’s final act flashes forward two thousand years, the earth frozen over, humanity long gone, the remaining robots transformed into a species of faceless beings somewhere between alien, animal, and machine. The image feels prophetic nearly 25 years later, with climate catastrophe lighting the world on fire, and artificial intelligence models becoming more advanced and ubiquitous by the day. This technology isn’t sophisticated enough yet to win our sympathies, but maybe one day it will be. How will we respond when AI eventually emerges from the flatness of our screens and appears in front of us, arms outstretched, with the face of a child ready to be loved?
"How will we respond when AI eventually emerges from the flatness of our screens and appears in front of us, arms outstretched, with the face of a child ready to be loved?"
Like all science fiction, A.I. acts as a reflection of our collective anxieties rather than an exact prediction. Kubrick’s initial vision, transformed over more than 20 years of development, still feels as timely today as it did upon release, a testament to the enduring relevance of its themes: the end of the world, the threat of the future, man vs. machine. And while Spielberg may be right about an impending ice age, reality tends to be much more banal than the future promised by Hollywood blockbusters.
Take, for example, Osment: based on his role in A.I., I would’ve expected the young actor’s career to go one of two ways: either he’d parlay his early success into a lifetime on the A-list, like Leonardo DiCaprio or Jodie Foster, or he’d crash and burn in some some spectacular scandal like so many child stars before him. What happened to Osment, however, is much more boring than I could’ve predicted. Besides a DUI in his teens, his reputation is pretty spotless. He remains a working actor, never to the same prestigious degree as when he was young, but enough to keep him in the industry (some of his recent roles include a voiceover gig in a Lego movie and a cameo in Blink Twice (2024), Zoë Kravitz’s directorial debut). His signature baby face is now expanded and masked by a beard, just like any other guy. The future, by the time it arrives, is never as exciting as it looks in the movies; never as bright, and never as real.