A.I. Artificial Intelligence is back on Peacock, bringing Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick’s unusual take on Pinocchio to the streaming service again. The 2001 science-fiction fantasy replaces the wooden puppet with a humanoid robot who wants his mother’s love. The unsettling twist: he’s programmed never to stop wanting it.
Spielberg worked on the film with Kubrick and completed it after Kubrick’s untimely death. As Polygon’s coverage of their collaboration explores, the film brings together two filmmakers whose names suggest very different sensibilities. But its central tension goes beyond that pairing: what happens when technology creates a child who longs to become human but cannot change the desire built into him?
Set in the 22nd century, the story unfolds in a world devastated by a deadly climate crisis. David, played by Haley Joel Osment, is a mecha, or humanoid robot. His wish to become a real boy isn’t an abstract fascination with humanity. He wants to belong to a family and receive his mother’s love.
That places him in a long, remarkably varied fairy-tale tradition. Carlo Collodi’s original 1883 novel, The Adventures of Pinocchio, is a cautionary tale about disobedience; Disney’s 1940 musical fantasy turns it into a more sanitized coming-of-age adventure. Polygon’s criticism describes Robert Zemeckis’ live-action version as jarring and soulless, while praising Guillermo Del Toro’s stop-motion adaptation as breathtaking, with a Pinocchio driven by complex, chaotic desires.
Even Marvel’s Vision follows a version of that path across movies and shows, from Avengers: Age of Ultron to VisionQuest. The common thread isn’t simply an artificial being becoming human. It’s the desire to belong, and the problems that follow when becoming a real boy seems to be the only way to achieve it.
A child built to love, not to move on
David enters a household already living with grief. Monica, played by Frances O’Connor, and Henry, played by Sam Robards, have a son named Martin, played by Jake Thomas. A rare disease has left Martin in a long-term coma. Henry brings home the prototype mecha child to ease their pain. David can experience unconditional love, but only after someone activates his imprinting protocol.
Monica activates the code, binding David to love her forever. Both naive and unsettling, he nevertheless shows her tenderness. He can’t sleep or eat as humans do, so fitting in means copying routines he cannot truly share. He also finds companionship with Teddy, Martin’s robotic teddy bear.
Then Martin is unexpectedly cured. His eventual return home turns David’s uncertain place in the family into a source of conflict. Martin mocks his inability to follow human norms, and Martin’s friends bully him. The child designed to soothe the adults’ loss becomes the outsider once their human son returns.
David’s efforts to follow his programming and win affection backfire painfully. He shoves food into his mouth until he damages his wiring. On another occasion, his self-defense modules activate, endangering the children who threatened him. Soon afterward, the prototype brought home to fill a real child’s absence is discarded.
That sequence is central to Polygon’s reading of the film as a brutal coming-of-age story: David receives an unbreakable attachment from people whose willingness to care for him has limits. His devotion isn’t a choice he can reconsider when those people hurt him.
The fairy tale that refuses an easy answer
A.I. Artificial Intelligence divided critics and audiences when it reached theaters in 2001, when public discussion of artificial intelligence looked very different from today’s. Some viewers found its fairy-tale-like ending overly sentimental. Others found Spielberg’s depiction of a callously cruel dystopian society bleak and uncomfortable. Polygon argues that both responses persist, while describing the film as criminally underrated.
The publication’s central interpretation shifts attention away from the machinery: this is less a film about artificial intelligence than about living in a society desensitized to human selfishness. Whether David genuinely feels or simulates emotion, as an AI chatbot might, is beside the point in that reading. Polygon sees Spielberg asking viewers to recognize his condition as deeply tragic, much as they recognize the pain behind Pinocchio’s wish to become flesh and blood.
David’s programming is irreversible. His love for Monica cannot waver with time, experience or disappointment. Witnessing human cruelty doesn’t weaken his need to belong or his longing for her affection. Even after humanity has been wiped from the Earth, he remembers. Polygon likens that enforced memory to an eternal puppeteer: the strings remain attached long after the people who created them are gone.
Without spelling out the ending’s final events, the review reads it as an expression of David’s nonhuman nature rather than a straightforward escape from it. People change through love and grieve those they lose, however painful that process becomes. David cannot evolve in the same way. He remains in a centuries-long stasis, wanting to be a real boy; whether that wish is ultimately fulfilled depends on how the ending is interpreted.
For Polygon, the film succeeds only if viewers empathize with David, even while accepting that his feelings may be decidedly unnatural. It’s the same impulse that makes audiences root for Pinocchio across his different incarnations, including the version in which he rejects humanity and embraces being a puppet forever.
Monica can discard David, but David can’t stop loving her. The imprinting code makes their bond permanent for him, not for the person who activates it.
