Usually true, but I thought he was pretty damn perfect in this movie.
Ebert ads A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) to his Great Movies list.
- Thread starter Flying Spaghetti Monster
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Usually true, but I thought he was pretty damn perfect in this movie.
Yup. Took me a bit to get that. They were advanced mecha that had survived, and saw David as a link to their past and helped him achieve his wish for whatever reason.
Ebert's interpretation doesn't justify calling A.I. a good movie, much less a great one. I'ts not only that the final scenes don't make much sense in this interpretation. Reinterpreting it as the tragedy of unloved machines doesn't help, because he can't figure out why we people should give a rat's ass if no machine will ever have a Mommy to love it. Also, by this interpretation the whole wrecking ball has neither thematic relevance nor plot logic.
Plus it ignores the thematic shout out by Dr. Hobby in the very beginning of the movie!
Part of Ebert's problem is revealed by his offhand comment about people projecting human emotions into animals, etc. There is no dividing line between human and animal emotions. Human emotions evolved from animal emotions. This imaginary distinction is simply a kind of self-flattery.
But if our emotions were evolutionarily programmed, are they any more real than David's? That's why we should care about David's happy ending, because the question about the reality of his love is, shocking as it may seem, a question about the reality of our "love." Which is why it's so important to understand what happens in the end. "Monica" is an illusion. David's success in finding love is therefore an illusion. The illusion cannot be sustained, therefore David must die. The conclusion is that "we" delude ourselves into loving our ideal (not the real person, who we are too blind to really see,) then die.
Oddly I haven't seen anyone who objects to the ending for a forced and bathetic pessimism/cynicism about humanity and life. The complaint that David gets a schmaltzy happy ending is founded upon a misunderstanding.
PS The movie also sustains a religious interpretation.
Plus it ignores the thematic shout out by Dr. Hobby in the very beginning of the movie!
Part of Ebert's problem is revealed by his offhand comment about people projecting human emotions into animals, etc. There is no dividing line between human and animal emotions. Human emotions evolved from animal emotions. This imaginary distinction is simply a kind of self-flattery.
But if our emotions were evolutionarily programmed, are they any more real than David's? That's why we should care about David's happy ending, because the question about the reality of his love is, shocking as it may seem, a question about the reality of our "love." Which is why it's so important to understand what happens in the end. "Monica" is an illusion. David's success in finding love is therefore an illusion. The illusion cannot be sustained, therefore David must die. The conclusion is that "we" delude ourselves into loving our ideal (not the real person, who we are too blind to really see,) then die.
Oddly I haven't seen anyone who objects to the ending for a forced and bathetic pessimism/cynicism about humanity and life. The complaint that David gets a schmaltzy happy ending is founded upon a misunderstanding.
PS The movie also sustains a religious interpretation.
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So Ebert's a human exclusionist too, in addition to all his other dipshittery?
Perfect...News flash: human exclusionism has been debunked by science, a few centuries late, but whatever.
Take Ebert's review of The Fountain. It's almost as if he gets whistleblower points for "revealing" that reviewers, including himself, trawl through other reviewers' work before formulating their "own" opinion of a film ( do tell... ), but these whistleblower points would be negated by lost credibility points anyway. And, of course, he misunderstands what happens in the film, but that's what you get when you sit back and let other people do your homework for you while posing as a credible reviewer.
