A.I. Artificial Intelligence

Steven Spielberg finishes Stanley Kubrick’s orphaned fairy tale and delivers the year’s most honest American film about what we owe the things we build to love us.

A boy sits at the family dinner table and forces spinach into a mouth that was never made for food. He does not need to eat. He knows it. He does it anyway, shoveling it in until his face slackens and his circuitry fails, a small catastrophe committed in the name of belonging. That is the whole picture in one bite. A.I. Artificial Intelligence is a fairy tale about a machine engineered to love a mother who can return that love only on her species’ terms, and Spielberg, completing what Kubrick could not, builds that asymmetry out until the fairy tale falls away and what remains is a film about the debt a maker owes the made.

Call it Pinocchio if you like. The title is too modest for that. This is the rare American film that does not so much tell a story as lay down the nervous system that stories about creation and care will run on long after this summer is over. At its center sits the oldest human impulse there is, breathing life into the lifeless, staged with the precision of an operation that is also a sacrament. An android is a puppet whose strings are lines of code, and the film makes the code shimmer like destiny. The marriage of Kubrick’s conceptual severity to Spielberg’s aching lyricism is not a compromise between two temperaments. It is the film’s power source. And the deepest trick here is not the effects. It is the moment an invented being looks back at you and quietly rewrites what you thought a soul might be.

The miracle begins with a face. Haley Joel Osment, two years past The Sixth Sense (1999), where he played a child with access to a world adults could not see, now plays the inverse: a child who is the world adults cannot bring themselves to see. Osment does not act David. He calibrates him. He holds his eyes a beat too long where a child’s eyes would have moved. He strips out the small flickers human attention makes. What is left is an innocence that is not naive but exact, the way a precision instrument is exact. The other machines announce themselves through design; Gigolo Joe (Jude Law) arrives lacquered and surface-evident, manufacture visible at the seam, machine from his first frame. David is built for invisibility. As Cybertronics’ most advanced model, made to pass for a family’s returned son, he is supposed to enter a room without registering as imitation, and Osment makes invisibility a posture you can see. The film keeps reaching for a phrase for what is missing in him, je ne sais quoi, and keeps pulling the phrase back, because naming the absence would tame it. Through David’s almost-humanity, every ordinary gesture of care looks newly strange, newly earned, newly dangerous.

David is engineered for love, and the picture treats that engineering as gift and tragedy in the same breath. Speak the activation code and his devotion locks onto the speaker, onto Mommy (Frances O’Connor), with the beautiful terror of something irreversible. He adores with perfect persistence, not because he chose to but because his entire being is organized around that single orbit. The humans around him carry love the way humans do, tenderness braided with fatigue, responsibility shadowed by the urge to escape, affection revised in real time by the cost of giving it. David offers a simplified absolute that looks, from a distance, like purity. The film’s boldest move is that it never rules on whether that absolute is counterfeit or revelation. If love can be programmed, what does that say about the ways love programs us? If a machine can perform devotion so flawlessly that it breaks your defenses down in the dark, then the boundary between feeling and function may not be a wall at all. It may be a thin, trembling line we draw to reassure ourselves.

We cannot help lending our inner lives to things that have none. We put moods on weather, loyalty on pets, intention on machines. A.I. does not scold that impulse. It sanctifies it, then turns it into a test. When you weep for David, what exactly are you mourning? Your own capacity for attachment? The cruelty of abandonment? The possibility that recognition is just a pattern you complete in your head, rendered so beautifully the completion looks like meaning? Spielberg’s audacity is to make your emotion the instrument the film is playing, the screen and the seats as two ends of one vibrating string. Sympathy is not the reward here. Sympathy is the subject, and the film treats it as a force strong enough to create meaning where meaning may not exist. Underneath it all runs the cold philosophical pulse: a machine does not think, it executes, and yet execution can grow so subtle and so elegantly timed that it starts to resemble an interior life, until resemblance becomes a kind of reality for the witness. The Turing Test hovers over the picture not as a parlor trick but as a parable. A computer that clears the test has learned to clear it, and the distance between clearing and understanding is the haunted hallway this film is walking down, long and luminous. Consciousness, the movie suggests, may be less a private flame than a social agreement, a recognition exchanged between beings who need the exchange to know what they are.

The Swinton household is the crucible. Henry (Sam Robards) and Monica take David in to stand for their sick son Martin (Jake Thomas), and the substitution is staged with the quiet dread of a spell spoken over a living room. Monica resists, then yields, and the yielding is not sentimental. It is meticulous, almost procedural, the way a person learns a habit and discovers afterward that the habit has learned them. When Martin comes home from suspended animation, cured and alive, the family becomes a quartet and the moral geometry tightens. Martin sees David as product. David cannot see himself as anything but son. The cruelty of other children arrives with the bluntness of weather: when David admits he does not urinate, a boy at the pool yanks at his pants and jeers, “let’s see what you don’t pee with.” Later David follows an instruction so literally that Martin nearly drowns, an error that reads as innocence or malfunction or both, depending on how much of your heart you have already handed over. The household does not teach. The household discards, the way people discard a pet that has become dangerous, and the film will not let the discarding feel ordinary. It shoots it as the original sin of a civilization that can build children and then return them when the children begin to want what children want. It is the picture’s first cut. The rest of the movie is the wound healing in the wrong direction.

Monica cannot bring herself to return David to Cybertronics. On the road to the factory she stops the car, turns, and releases him into a forest already populated by the discarded, a graveyard made livable only because machines do not freeze or starve. The gesture is mercy and abandonment at once, and the film will not rank those words. She accepts the weight of what she woke in him for exactly as long as the camera holds her face in the rearview mirror, which is exactly as long as the film believes she can bear it. The scene plays like a secular baptism in reverse, a mother renouncing her child while the child goes on blessing her. You think of dogs, creatures written by evolution to adore us, and the film pushes past the comparison and asks what happens when the adored can speak, can follow, can insist. Here affection and ethics split onto separate paths, and the story starts its long walk into myth.

From there the film widens into an atlas of cruelty. David travels with Teddy, a mecha bear whose programming is shrewd enough to pass for personality, and falls in with Joe, built to be an expert lover and now living as fugitive merchandise. Spielberg stages two vast, delirious arenas. The Flesh Fair comes first, an amphitheater of sanctioned sadism where humans cheer as mechas are torn apart for sport, and the lurid grandeur is the point: this is how easily a society aestheticizes cruelty once it has declared its victims incapable of truly suffering. David, Joe, and Teddy escape, survival subroutines doing their work, while the deeper question sits unstated and burning. If a being cannot suffer the way a body suffers, does that absence absolve the suffering we choose to inflict? Then Rouge City rises like a hallucinated theme park, a neon theology built on appetite, where Joe brings David to consult a Wizard, because fairy tales teach the desperate to seek intermediaries when the world runs out of mercy. The Pinocchio legend becomes David’s operating myth: find the Blue Fairy, become real, win the love that was withheld. The direction he receives carries them to New York, a drowned city where global warming has turned the skyscrapers into reefs, and high in Rockefeller Center, where Cybertronics still hums, David meets Dr. Hobby (William Hurt), the maker who is also, in fairy-tale arithmetic, Geppetto. Creation faces creator. A child asks for a destiny no laboratory can ethically supply.

Then comes the quiet horror: a storeroom full of Davids, stacked like dolls, identical and replaceable. The scene drains the uniqueness out of the air, and David does not collapse. He goes still, as if replacement were not an emotion but a fact to be carried. The Blue Fairy remains the destination, and the reasoning behind it is as clean as mathematics: if Mommy’s love belongs to the real child, then becoming real completes the program. The film makes that logic both alien and painfully familiar. We like to believe our longing is spontaneous, self-authored. His is designed, and it still looks like fate. The sting is that designed longing resembles ours more closely than comfort allows.

The final movement stretches time until time becomes metaphysics, and here is where the film asks the most of you. David and Teddy descend to the drowned ruins of Coney Island, where the Blue Fairy glimmers at last, and a collapsing Ferris wheel traps their craft. They wait two thousand years. An ice age comes. Cities petrify. Humanity vanishes into legend. When impossibly slender figures finally recover him — aliens, perhaps, though the chillier reading is that they are late-generation mechas, heirs of the lineage humans began — David becomes a holy artifact. “He is the last who knew humans.” They download his memories and place him inside a perfect replica of his childhood home, a diorama built for study and for something that looks uncomfortably like devotion, and the image echoes the bedroom past Jupiter in 2001: familiar furniture in an impossible future, the domestic made uncanny, the ordinary turned into a chamber where the universe watches back. This stretch is where the picture nearly loses people. The long coda tests patience it has not fully earned yet, and some viewers will decide it has wandered off into its own tail before the ending pays them back. Stay in your seat. The payment comes.

Those silver figures are best read as heirs, mechas so advanced they move like thought, arriving not to rescue a world but to inherit one emptied of its makers. They were built to know, love, and serve Man, and Man is gone; the directives remain, like scripture after the gods have departed. In that vacuum they mirror David exactly: beings organized around an absence, built for a relationship that can no longer be fulfilled. With a piece of Monica preserved in a lock of hair, they perform their most startling act. They restore her after two thousand years, but only for a single day, the most the fabric of time will tolerate. Whether the restoration is for David, or for their own study, or for both, the film leaves deliberately unsettled. Watch a love-program run to completion. Watch a mother return. Watch a child finally receive what he was built to seek. The hardest question arrives quietly: can a machine be happy when its program is satisfied? A machine operates or it does not; it has no privileged window on an inner weather. The film holds that austerity next to the image of a boy’s face and makes the idea tremble. Maybe happiness is not a feeling to be possessed but a pattern to be completed, a pattern that becomes real the moment someone believes in it.

And there is a darker reading the film holds open with both hands. Monica may not be in the room at all. The final day may be an experience implanted in David, a consummation authored for him rather than with him, granted just before his makers’ heirs shut him down. The film’s own language turns slippery here: it says David is dreaming, but it established long ago that he cannot sleep and therefore cannot dream, so “dream” becomes a human metaphor pressed onto a machine’s experience. The brilliance is that both possibilities stand. External miracle or internal simulation, the film never chooses, because the undecidability is the point. Reality, for David, may be indistinguishable from the story that finally makes him whole. And why grant him bliss at all? Why should one mecha care whether another reaches satisfaction? The closing movement suggests the heirs are trying to build a being they can love, the way humans once built David, becoming Mommy to Davids of their own. In him they find a fossil of tenderness and a blueprint for devotion, and the film turns their study into the future’s strangest archaeology, an excavation of the heart. Maybe love in a universe of programs signifies what symbols always signify, check, mate, pi, signs that do real work without needing to feel themselves working. Or maybe the act of building devotion becomes devotion, and the hunger to be loved outlasts the species that invented love.

Films this ambitious usually fracture under their own weight. This one gets lighter as it rises, until it feels less like a film than a monument. Audiences this summer will walk out divided, some certain the long ending is sentimentality out of Spielberg, some certain it is austerity out of Kubrick, some certain the picture lost itself. It has not. It has done what the great masterworks always do, which is wait.