Aug. 16, 2026

A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) — The Heart

Show Notes
Transcript

A.I. Artificial Intelligence began as a Stanley Kubrick project before Steven Spielberg inherited and completed the film after Kubrick’s death. The result is one of Spielberg’s most emotional, divisive, and philosophically ambitious works. In this episode of Spielberg Reloaded, we explore the story of David, a robot child programmed to love his human mother forever, and the devastating consequences of creating artificial intelligence capable of emotional attachment. We discuss Haley Joel Osment’s performance, Kubrick’s influence, the film’s Pinocchio parallels, futuristic worldbuilding, and why A.I. may ultimately be Spielberg’s most heartbreaking film about longing, humanity, and the need to be loved.

A.I. was used to help with narration and creative elements of our scripts.

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Calaruga Shark Media. There is a boy at the bottom

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of the ocean. He has been sitting there for thousands

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of years, frozen in the blue dark, hands pressed together,

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eyes open, staring up at the submerged ruins of a

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city that was once called Manhattan. He is praying to

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a statue of the Blue Fairy from Pinocchio, because someone

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told him that if he wished hard enough, long enough,

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she would make him real. He is a robot. He

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cannot stop wishing. He will never stop wishing. This is

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Spielberg reloaded Episode twelve AI. Artificial Intelligence two thousand and one.

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AI is the strangest film in this series and one

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of the strangest films Steve van Spielberg ever made. It

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is also, in the full view of his career, one

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of the most revealing. It is a film about the

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desire to be loved by someone who is constitutionally incapable

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of loving you back, which is either a film about

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robots or a film about being human, depending on how

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long you sit with it. The film began with Stanley Kubrick.

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He had been developing the project for decades, based on

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a nineteen sixty nine short story by Brian aldies called

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super Toys last all summer long. Kubrick was fascinated by

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the idea and paralyzed by it. He could not figure

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out how to make the central character, a robot child

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programmed to love sympathetic rather than unsettling. He tried and

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abandoned it repeatedly. Eventually, he passed the project to Spielberg,

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telling him it was more his kind of film. Kubrick

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died in March nineteen ninety nine. Spielberg ai as a tribute,

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using Kubrick's extensive notes and his own instincts, and the

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result is a film that feels like two directors in permanent,

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productive argument with each other. The Kubrick half is cold, precise,

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formally constructed. The Spielberg half is warm, emotional, operatic. Neither wins.

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The film holds both intention for its entire run time,

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and that tension is not a flaw. It is the

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film's subject, David the robot boy, is himself a creature

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caught between two natures, the mechanical and the feeling. The

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film's form mirrors its content in ways that are either

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brilliant or accidental, and are probably both. A I Artificial

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Intelligence was released in June two thousand one, Written and

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directed by Spielberg from Kubrick's development materials. Hailey Joel Osmondt

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plays David, a prototype Mecca, the film's term for robotic beings,

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who has been programmed with the ability to love. He

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is placed with a suburban family whose biological son is

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in a coma. The mother, Monica, activates David's imprinting protocol,

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a one way process that bonds him to her permanently

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and irreversibly. He loves her the way no human child could,

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completely and without condition, and without the possibility of revision.

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When the biological son recovers, David becomes surplus, Monica cannot

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bring herself to return him to the company, where he

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would be destroyed, so she abandons him in the woods.

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She tells herself, this is kindness. The film is not

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sure it agrees. What follows is a journey through a

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future America that Spielberg and production designer Rick Carter built

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as a place of extraordinary beauty and casual brutality, gleaming cities,

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luminous water wind, and a shadow economy of discarded makahs

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who are hunted for sport. David moves through this world

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looking for the Blue Fairy. Convinced that if he can

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become a real boy, Monica will love him again. He

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does not understand that the problem was never that he

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wasn't real enough. The problem was that he loved too much,

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and the people around him could not bear the weight

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of being loved that completely. Hailey Joel Osmond's performance is

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one of the great child performances in American cinema. He

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plays a being that feels everything and is allowed to

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show nothing, a child's emotions running behind eyes that are

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always slightly too still, always slightly too attentive. He is

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uncanny in the precise sense of the word. He makes

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your skin prickle and your heart break at the same time,

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sometimes in the same moment. Jude Law plays Jigglo Joe,

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a pleasure mecca who becomes David's companion and guide. Law

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plays him with a movie star ease that is itself

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a kind of comment. Joe was built to be irresistible,

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and he is, and the film understands that this is

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as sad as it is charming. Francis O'Connor plays Monica

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with a guilt and helplessness. The film does not let

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her escape. She does not deserve easy absolution, and she

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does not receive any. John Williams wrote the score, and

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it is among his most beautiful and most melancholy. The

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main theme for David is built around a simple, childlike

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melody that keeps reaching upward and never quite arriving. It

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sounds like longing. It sounds like someone who has been

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told that the thing they want most is just out

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of reach, and has decided to keep reaching anyway. AI

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was released three months before September eleventh, into a cultural

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moment that was about to end. Critics were divided. Some

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found it cold and over long, Others recognized it immediately

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as something extraordinary. Roger Ebert gave it four stars. The

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audience was uncertain. It made money, but not the kind

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of money Spielberg films usually made, and the conversation around

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it faded faster than it deserved. It has been reconsidered

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films often are when the moment they were made for

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finally arrives. AI was made when artificial intelligence was theoretical,

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when the question of whether a machine could feel was

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philosophical rather than practical, a thought experiment for scientists and screenwriters.

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That moment is gone. The question is now engineering. The

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machines are in the room, and the film Spielberg made

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in two thousand and one about a robot who loves

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too much and is abandoned for it lands differently now,

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not as science fiction, but as a question that is

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already being asked in boardrooms and courtrooms and living rooms,

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whether we are ready for it or not? What does

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it mean to build something capable of attachment? What do

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we owe it when we do? If we teach a

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machine to need us and then we no longer need it,

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what have we done? The film does not answer these questions.

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The ending is one of the most debated in Spielberg's career.

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After thousands of years on the ocean floor, David is

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found by the beings who have inherited the earth, highly

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evolved descendants of the Meccas, for whom David is an

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artifact of almost archaeological importance. They can give him one

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last day, with a recreation of Monica built from the

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DNA locked in a strand of her hair. He chooses

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to spend it as an ordinary day, breakfast, a story,

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a quiet afternoon, falling asleep in her arms. He is

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not asking for the extraordinary. He never was. He wanted

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the ordinary, and he was denied it, and the film

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understands that this is the most human thing about him.

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Spielberg has called Ai the most personal film he has

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ever made, which surprises people who expect him to say

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that about Shindler's List or et. But Ai is a

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film about what it means to love someone who cannot

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love you back in the same way, About the persistence

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of feeling in the absence of reciprocation, about whether love

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that is not returned is still love. Those are not

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questions that belong only to robots. This series began with

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Close Encounters, a man who saw something in the sky

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and could not stop reaching toward it. It ends here

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with a boy at the bottom of the ocean who

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cannot stop reaching. Either. The direction is different, inward instead

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of outward, instead of cosmic, but the gesture is the same.

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Spielberg has been making films about that gesture for fifty years.

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The reach towards something just beyond what we can hold,

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the refusal to stop reaching even when the reaching costs everything.

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That is what this series has been about. That is

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what he is about.