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In time, Monica's initial aversion to the child-bot erodes, and eventually she decides to "imprint" the boy's circuitry: thus she becomes definitively his "mom-my," for whom he lives and, after a fashion, breathes. For his part, David soon adapts to the modes and mores of people.
All goes well until doctors cure Martin, who proves both jealous and nasty. Subsequent misadventures prompt the parents to "return" David, even though Cybertronics will destroy him (once imprinted, he cannot transfer his affections). But at the last moment, the tearful Monica, rather than consigning her surrogate son to certain destruction, instead abandons him in the woods.
Sorrowful and alone, he encounters a host of fellow fugitives who congregate at a "mecha dump" where they scrounge for spare body parts. And so begins David's long quest to find his mother again, the one who is supposed to care for him as much as he cares for her. The "child" can't help caring, wired as he is for this bond, despite the fickleness of her affections.
Here the question of who's truly "human," the robot or the mom, gets dicey and stays that way. The predicament and the stakes are vintage Spielberg; the dark conclusions come from Hawthorne or, in movie terms, Stanley Kubrick, the late writer-director of 2001, A Clockwork Orange, and other masterpieces, with whom Spielberg collaborated on A.I.
At their best, Spielberg's dramas display the deepest human longings for love—meaning trust, care, and delight—for and from others and God, all that we pour into the notion of "home," both personal and cosmic. These longings animate Close Encounters of the Third Kind, still an impressive film, and E.T., replete with the "phone home" mantra and two abandoned creatures.
This is the immemorial turf of fairy tales, everyone's initiation into the terrors and dreams of humankind, at least until Disney began to take possession of the genre. In A.I., the master stories are Hansel and Gretel, The Wizard of Oz, and, at the very center, the tale of Pinocchio, the puppet who wants to be a real boy so everyone will love him. Like it or not, and sophisticates of various sorts usually don't, this is the stuff of which we are made, deep down and forever, and it is this very craving for mutuality or "at-homeness" that is the image of God "imprinted" within the human psyche. When done well, as Spielberg usually manages, this drama of psyche and soul recalls everyone's deep thirst to find the haven of home, the ever-elusive realm of complete and unconditional love.
David's hope is the promise of the Blue Fairy, remembered from bedtime readings of Pinocchio. The child-bot takes this fairy-tale dream dead literally: he sets out to find the magical being who will make him a real boy, so he can win back his mother. And here Spielberg, who wrote A.I. as well as directing it, stumbles.
No, the conclusions of his earlier films were never quite as happy as critics have portrayed them. In Close Encounters, Roy Neary has to leave this world to maybe find happiness with those not-so-nice aliens, and in E.T. young Elliott is left behind, alone and still fatherless, after the ascension of ET. But the close of A.I. is less hopeful still—a day with mommy, and then what, an "everlasting moment," benign sleep, or a fall (or rise) into humanness?
What leaps out most clearly from this ambiguous ending is Spielberg's somber comment on the potent forces within that seek love and, amid all that, what humankind—selfish, deceitful, and mean—does to mess it all up. In A.I. those strange creatures that follow humankind, whoever they are, do better, although probably not enough—as if anyone could.
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