What does the ending to A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) mean?

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I've always been under the impression that the last bit was added by Spielberg but I've been reliably informed recently that it was actually part of Kubrick's original vision for the film.

But I don't understand why he would choose to end the story like that. I'm not even sure if I'm supposed to feel happy or sad at the end. A.I. was Kubrick's dream project that he'd been working on it for nearly 30 years so I would suspect that the scene was there for a very specific reason because otherwise it just seems rather silly. Like why was Monica not wondering where a husband and son were? Why could she only be brought back for one day?

Don't get me wrong I loved the film and I think its central theme of how one ought to treat a robot with emotions fascinating but some parts were just so weird and I'm not sure what to make of them. It sort of feels like a weird mixture of E.T. and 2001: A Space Odyssey.



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I guess you could call it a bittersweet ending that's not totally happy or sad (though I'd say it leans more towards the latter myself). It seems happy since David finally gets what he wants after all he's been through across the movie, but the fact that it comes with all these drawbacks (such as the one-day limit) means that it is a very empty form of happiness that David has to accept. It also brings the story full circle as it goes from humans creating robots for their emotional needs (i.e. a replacement child) to robots creating humans for their emotional needs (i.e. David wanting to be accepted as a real boy).

Since the robots were bringing Monica back to life for David's benefit, it stands to reason that they would have had the technology to manipulate the clone into the simplified version that only loves David and has none of the original Monica's consciousness. Also, the robots' cloning technology is limited (whether by its own shortcomings or the fact that they have to work off a single strand of hair) so that the clone won't be able to survive for more than a day.

There's been some extensive discussion about it in this thread and this thread if you want some more detailed responses about the topic
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Since the robots were bringing Monica back to life for David's benefit,
I watched this once, but always thought they were aliens.
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Unfortunately since its initial release, A.I. has been plagued with discussions about which filmmaker, Kubrick or Spielberg, was responsible for which elements of the story, with critics and audiences alike refusing to accept that A.I. cannot be trivially classified as a Steven Spielberg film or a Stanley Kubrick film - an indication of how unhealthy we're all subconsciously tied to the auteur theory.

As you've already pointed out, A.I., for the most part, operates at an extremely ambivalent tone - a result of Kubrick's chilly bleakness squaring off against Spielberg's warm-hearted optimism. It deliberately keeps its humanity at a distance so that audiences will try to define it. The ending to A.I. is, in my opinion. the single greatest piece of filmmaking of Mr. Spielberg's career.

The problem with the ending is that people always seem to believe the supermecha's story about creating Monica for a single day. As you've shrewdly noticed, the Monica they create is nothing like the one we saw from before; she's a fake designed solely to unconditionally love David, just as David was once created to unconditionally love Monica. But in this moment, both David & the audience assumed that their love was "real", which is why everyone complained about this being a happy ending.

Is this our understanding of love? Programmed obsession? In fact the ending is visibly ironic. Interestingly, Spielberg directs the entire sequence as a freudian wet dream of a boy expressing his romantic yearnings towards his mother. We see David make Monica some coffee, we see them play hide and seek together, we see Monica give David a haircut (If you recall in the 1st Act, it's David who cuts Monica's hair), we see David tuck Monica in bed (and not the other way around), we see them celebrate David's birthday (as opposed to Martin's) and here we see Monica looking at David's paintings whereas in the 1st act, it's David who's observing Monica's family photos. All the events are repeated, except now the roles have interchanged. David is the one who's desires are being fulfilled. He's playing the role of the human this time. The supermeccha's are doing precisely what Prof. Hobby was doing before, but in a subtler form. They give David what he wants while they observe him to see what happens. He's the last connection with humans, they study him.

Fake Monica tells David she loves him, he cries, then contentedly crawls into bed next to her dead body and dies next to his lover's corpse. Now that in itself is a tragic ending but it gets darker the more you think about it. Jonathan Rosenbaum nailed it in his review, saying the ending sparks a feeling "too terrible to name". Love is an illusion. Human's are as biologically programmed to love as David is. It's a byproduct of our evolution and importantly it's an utterly solitary fixation. David doesn't even realise that his mother has been replaced. None of what happens at the end is "real", the Monica is just an empty vessel, a product of David's imagination, but David believes it, and is happy to "go to that place where dreams are born". Spielberg and Kubrick are indicating how self-delusion can result in wish fulfilment.

Everyone complaining that David naively took the Pinocchio story too literally has completely missed the allegory Spielberg has presented here. David's quest to find the Blue Fairy is symbolic of man's eternal search for the god he created with the Pinocchio fable being his Bible (or Koran or whatever religious text you believe in). In a moment of sheer beauty at the bottom of the ocean, we see the blue fairy's face dissolve into David's suggesting that she exists within him. A.I. is filled with religious symbolism ( including its circular narrative , inspired by the biblical parable about the story of Eden ). The ending (when David finally encounters the Blue Fairy) is Spielberg's version of heaven, when man finally encounters god, face-to-face. Only difference is it's a complete illusion here, a Freudian wet dream, with all sorts of extremely creepy sexual undertones which can only be attributed to Kubrick, given he's explored similar themes in the Shining.


When fake Monica dies, A.I. addresses what modern philosophers (such as Camus) would label as the only important question in life: the genesis and exodus of humanity itself: suicide. To be or not to be? David self-terminates and accepts death because he understands that he no longer has a purpose in the world - something the supermeccha's have yet to accept. Now is when you can call him "real", a mortal. Recognising death is what makes us alive. As Heidegger pointed out, this results in a hugely important and seemingly paradoxical thought: freedom is not the absence of necessity, in the form of death. On the contrary, freedom consists in the affirmation of the necessity of one's mortality. It is only in being-towards-death that one can become the person who one truly is. Concealed in the idea of death as the possibility of impossibility is the acceptance on one's mortal limitation as the basis for an affirmation of one's life.

In fact even Joe starts to tread down this path with his chilling final line "I am I was", a reference to Descartes' quote "I think, therefore I am". Even the heuristic Joe has taken Descartes’ logical next step in evolutionary progression, being self-aware of one's mortality. He’s participated in history and knows it. Later, when David plunges into the Sargasso, calling softly for his mother, his image becomes a reflected tear in the eye of Joe (who is, we might suddenly realise in his grief for David, a Joseph?): Spielberg gifts him with the feeling he can’t express.

Audiences took the mecha story as "truth", and so left disappointed, faulting Spielberg for putting a "happy ending" onto the film, when he did the exact opposite. He simply shot it from David's emotional p.o.v., in a sequence that is cousin to the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). But there is another level of metaphor in A.I. that few sci-fi films have dared to touch. The central question of Collodi's Pinocchio fable has always been "What does it mean to be human?" A.I. finds dark and sobering answers.

Regardless of your reservations about his past work, Spielberg makes an awful lot of other film-makers look timid and negligible by comparison and that's something that's not easy to do. "At the very end, he's reaffirming the bed room sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey and in doing so he locates the unspoken moral of all fairy tales. To be real is to be mortal; to be human is to love, to dream, and to perish."



I didn t like the ending of AI it made me feel sad and alone, it was a good film but the ending was sad



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I found the ending sad and a little tragic, but not overly so. David still had the intelligence of a child (and was even more naive), even though he was ancient (he never developed mentally); we saw that in the way he continued to stare obsessively at the statue of the Blue Fairy for many years, believing it to be the real Blue Fairy, capable of transforming him into a real boy. Given this, David probably believed the fake Monica was a real facsimile of Monica, even if for just a day. Because David is a robot and therefore doesn't have a soul (ie. spirit), this is as close to Heaven that David can experience, and I think that's a happy thing. I like to think that at the end, David went to "sleep" (ie. shut himself down) feeling happy. I actually felt more sad for the teddy bear, who just sat there looking at David go to sleep.



The end of the film made me so sad.