This film won't leave my memory. On a daily basis. I was so moved by its imagery, so struck by its directness, that I've been forced to ruminate on its ideas everytime an image from it pops into my head. I've read a number of the reviews, trying to figure out exactly what it is that alienated people from it. It finally came to me, and the answer strikes me as ennobling of the accomplishment of the film. This film raises the questions. It has no answer for you. I'll elaborate.
I was watching it with a friend who said he didn't like it because it didn't really deal specifically with the technology of artificial intelligence. He said that David wouldn't have waited for 2000 years in the same redundant hope of finding his mother. He said that the construct of meta-thought, or as he described it, the ability to think about thoughts, or discern the reality around you, would have alerted David and knocked him out of the loop. Roger Ebert stated that the reason David is treated cruely by the other children in the film is perhaps 'the same reason we swear at computers.' Ebert and my friend reduced the essence of the main character to a machine, and to be sure, it is a common criticism of science fiction that so little of it in the mainstream seems to deal in human characters. But that never stopped Ebert's adoration for 2001. Harry Knowles called the film a demented, cruel piece of cinema. He then went on a tirade about the worst ending he had ever seen.
I've given you three examples of people who missed the point after their first viewing (honestly, this film warrants a few). David has a mind, a soul and a body. He may have been programmed in a lab, but Speilberg invests him and all the other mecchas with human characteristics that seem almost too individual. These characters, as far as Spielberg is concerned, are cognizant. 'In the beginning, didn't God create Adam to love him ?', William Hurt's character intones. That statement is the heart of the film.
David has not been programmed with advanced meta-thought, as has no other meccha. These mecchas inhabit a world that has forced them into servitude, as would likely be the case were the ice caps still stable in this future dystopia. David is created to fill a human need, not his own. That is the central cruelty and narrow-mindedness of his creators. The film deals exactly with how we would treat creatures we may not realize are filled with fear and dread and doubt. We would murder and incinerate them. Finally, a minority group we can ethically destroy! They're just the same as our microwaves after all, and much more dangerous. They're taking our jobs from us! You bet we'd have flesh-fairs, global warming or not. Spielberg believes these creatures are fully aware of themselves. The cruelty is ours, not his.
On some level, this is made very clear in the film, and we as a culture will not warmly respond to something that underlines our intrinsically possible cruelty. We applaud Speilberg when he sticks it to the Nazis, but when he shows us how evil and heartless we could be, that's when we draw the line. Ebert didn't believe that David was anything more than a machine. It's more comfortable for us to believe that as we're watching the film, I think. But I'm with Spielberg on this one. David's love is real. Quite frankly, so is he. But he's trapped in the programming of a society selfish enough and brilliant enough to create a consciousness out of materials taken from the Earth, while limiting the poor creature's intuition and individuality to serve our emotional, or worse, our utilitarian needs.
All of this is, on further analysis, so direct in Spielberg's presentation that it forces us to come to conclusions on our own, which is not what we expect at all from Spielberg. In the end, when trapped for 2000 years under the ice, but trapped even more palpably by a limited intellect David can scarcely hope to improve, the film creates one of the most evocative meditations on the human spirit I've ever seen. It's odd that these basic human motivations would be delivered in the guise of an inhuman creature, but David is clearly intended to represent our genius as well as our shortcomings. The tedium of the underwater wait is slight. The ending is among the most sad and satisfying things I've seen in a film. It's not satisfying in a sense of closure, but rather, it opens up worlds of thought and emotion. There is a real sense of longing presented at the conclusion of AI that could only be described in the language of cinema. This is one of the noblest endeavours Spielberg has given us yet. I will cherish this film.
