AI

Today the film goes largely forgotten and unappreciated as an admirable, ambitious failure that overestimates its initial commitment to challenge its audience to emotionally invest in an inhuman, robot, David. In the first scenes, Professor Hobby, head of leading robot or “mecha” manufacturer Cybertronics, proposes their newest model be a child capable of unconditional love. The first test unit is offered to a company employee, Henry Swinton, and his wife Monica, whose son, Martin, remains in suspended animation until a cure for his rare disease can be found. But with a sudden cure found for Martin, David’s presence becomes redundant and problematic, and, out of motherly protection, Monica abandons her automaton child in the forest to prevent his destruction at Cybertronics. David assumes he can return once he becomes a real boy. To actually become real, however, David believes he must find the Blue Fairy, like the protagonist in his storybook The Adventures of Pinocchio. David’s search for the Blue Fairy takes him through the lit up sexual metropolis of Rouge City to a flooded Manhattan barely peeking out from the rising ocean. At this, David plunges himself into the ocean, where he comes upon the Blue Fairy statue at the underwater Coney Island. Trapped there, he repeats his wish to the Blue Fairy, asking her to make him a real boy, so that he might return to Monica and feel her love once more. He repeats the wish on and on, until the ocean freezes as two millennia pass. Many believed the film should have ended with David submerged in his vessel underwater, doomed to watch the Blue Fairy forever. Because after all, David could never be a real boy, could he? Eventually reaching the Blue Fairy only to discover he would not become real would crush him and twist the fairy tale elements of the story into a nightmarish tragedy. When David is awoken by the futuristic beings, ironically, the state of the world is in such a way that makes David the most human character onscreen.