**Lots of SPOILERS if you haven't seen it**
*the DVD 2-disk special edition is LOADED with neat extras - even some of Kubrick's original storyboards*

This started as some stray ruminations but I guess it turned into another review, so I put it over here.

Well, most of my misgivings about AI were due to my not having paid attention the first time.  The various commentaries here and on the DVD itself have helped me a lot.

I have viewed it again three times and have fallen in love with it.  And of course I fell in love with Haley's character.  Isn't he a darling?  I would have loved, cuddled and protected David even if he were a boy made up from cheese scraps.

They make a robot boy and by some very fancy tinkering with neurons and sub-neurons they implant a capacity to love that can be activated by reading off an imprinting protocol.  We're asked to accept this; it is a fairy tale, after all.  But it seems that this implanting is only a crude first step that leads to David's growth into a boy with all of a human's spiritual capacities.  So the focus of the movie is not on a robot coming to love, but on a robot boy becoming 'real.'

In the opening, David simply responds as programmed up to the time that Monica does the imprinting.  From that point on he begins a series of life experiences that cause him to grow, emotionally at least, into a 'real boy.'  David behaves more and more like a true boy as the story progresses until, at the end, he is able to weep for joy.  I found it a sweet irony that even as the 'mecha' Blue Fairy tells him she cannot make him real,  David has already, through his trials, achieved humanity.

At first,  I had trouble believing David's love for a mother who would dump him and her appearance at the end did not satisfy me.  But I missed a lot of details and, somehow, failed to see her cruel dilemma.  David appeared to be a danger to her natural son. Yet she did love the odd little boy and could not bear to see him returned and destroyed.

On first look,  I was jarred and displeased by Gigolo Joe, the Flesh Fair, and most of Rouge City; all those bad old Kubrick elements that apparently put off so many movie-goers.  My cornball heart didn't want to ruin a sweet story with brutal or flashy interludes.  But they gave the story depth - how else was David to have the hard experiences which would work to transform him?  And I missed the clever parallels to scenes and characters in the story of Pinocchio.  I read the story to tatters when I was seven - I loved it.  

In the book, Pinocchio and a fellow puppet are threatened with death by an angry puppet theater manager but are saved by an outcry of sympathy from the audience (the Flesh Fair).  Gigolo Joe's leading David to Rouge City is very like the bad boy wheedling Pinocchio into taking off for the 'Land of Boobies.' (Pleasure Island in the Disney film)  David even goes underwater to seek the Blue Fairy, as Pinocchio finds his father underwater, inside the Dog-fish (whale, in the Disney version.)  There are others.

I think Gigolo Joe is there mainly for contrast:  David's love is all intense devotion; Joe is designed for carnality only.  (I did find it odd that Joe makes insightful speeches re Mecha versus Man that seem way above and beyond his design function.)

Did you notice that David focused on Monica even before she did the imprinting?  

And was that school of fish that guides David to the place of the Blue Fairy the only overt piece of magic in the movie, or am I missing something?

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Thanks for the very interesting review YA.

Pelle,  that's a really neat point!  It went right by me that the voices of the narrator and the mecha leader were both Ben Kingsley.  Well, I noticed it but not what it signified.

This view would also suggest that David's final fate was an act of mercy on the part of those 'beings.'