Mr. Levy has clearly provided us with a thoughtful and balanced review of A.I. This film and reviews such as this one may have elicited unusually hateful criticism because of the starkly different styles and fan bases of Kubrick and Spielberg. And no doubt the contributions of the two filmmakers made it even more difficult to reconcile the concordant elements of the film's story. But the story's themes are as important as they are difficult to treat in a film, and deserve serious consideration.

These themes involve the distinction between organic and inorganic life, and the relative value of different kinds of life. These themes are important in part because it seems that humanity is moving toward the day when technology will create machines capable of independent thought and volition, or we may possibly mechanize humans (in order to extend life) to the point that mechanized humans may become indistinguishable from inorganic machines. Of course, A.I. is just one of many films and novels to address this issue over the last four decades or so.

But I believe this theme has also been prominent in the imagination of intellectuals because it is related to the broader question about the relative value of different kinds of life, which is a much older and consequential question. The historic devaluation of the lives of people of 'other' races and ethnic groups has contributed to countless massacres and several genocides. And one of the primary material motivations for this history of violence has been the desire of one group to dominate the labor of another, which is the same motivation for making machines and ultimately robots. For that reason, it should not be surprising that films that have dealt with the human-like travails of robots, often seem like slightly veiled treatments of the issue of slavery. This is most evident in films such as Blade Runner and Bicentennial Man, but there is also an element of this in A.I.

Of course, the main robot in A.I. is not created for the purpose of labor, which is the primary distinction between this child robot and the earlier generations of 'mechas' that humans casually dispose of in the film. This is the source of A.I.'s sentimentality, which some viewers have strongly rejected. Ironically, a viewer's appreciation of this film mainly depends of whether he or she empathizes with the child robot, which depends in part on the viewer's interpretation of what constitutes a valuable life– just as it did for characters in the film.

A.I.'s ending may seem disjointed, but it makes an interesting commentary on the earlier debate among human characters in the film about the value of inorganic but intelligent beings. In the last sequence we learn that humans have apparently gone extinct, but that highly advanced machines are lovingly trying to recover vestiges of humanity. This is an interesting take on the future, given the history of representations of evil machines going back to 2001: A Space Odyssey and continuing forward to Star Trek's Borg and beyond.