In Reply to: Re: A.I. posted by TAFKA Steve on July 11, 2001 at 17:59:41:
>> "If you create something capable of loving you, are you morally
>> obligated to love it in return?"this I think is a very deep question, that would be pretentious to answer, especially in the settings of this movie. How can a mother love a robot the same was she loves her son when the robot melts in front of her face after eating foods, and the has his electronics guts open up to get fixed? How can the people of today society have the capacity to answer such a question?
Spieldberg attempts to answer this questions because most people think they have answers for it as it is indeed a very interesting question. That is where Spieldberg excels: touching hearts of the masses; and that's why he is so rich and famous. He is also a great director.
One interesting consequence of this movie is that today we question the worthiness of advance technologies, medical or otherwise. Some people argue that such technologies may be harmful in the hand of criminals and so on and so forth. Here we have a situation when technologies are successfully implemented: when David ask, "please turn me into a real boy", he is a real boy as far as human emotions are concerned (wonderfully portrayed by Osmone); a robot can't move emotions the way he does. So basically they successfully make a perfect robot; everything was perfect; the robots didn't take over the world, etc...And yet there's dilema. This's a great attempt by Spieldberg to show that we must be really careful with our actions...
However, he cheated... He took a present-day mother, put her in a 30th-ish century living with robots, showed the results to present-day audience, and hoped to make his points with this quick sleight of hands -- masterfully misdirected with appeals to emotions. His weakness is his slight bias, in this case towards the machines; he undoubtedly roots for the mechas. This is a big difference between him and Kubrick.
So although its not a perfect movie, its still a great one.
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Follow Ups
- Re: A.I. - caa 23:55:44 07/11/01 (6)
- Re: A.I. - Alan 09:46:53 07/12/01 (5)
- Re: A.I. - caa 19:00:13 07/12/01 (0)
- Re: A.I. - Dr. Freud 14:39:55 07/12/01 (1)
- Well spelled again Doc. - Alan 12:34:19 07/13/01 (0)
- "My parents made me eat liver." - clarkjohnsen 11:14:01 07/12/01 (1)
- Re: "My parents made me eat liver." - Jeff Starrs 11:19:16 07/12/01 (0)