'A.I.: Artificial Intelligence' Is the Essential Pinocchio Film of Our Time

At the core of most tales about androids and artificial intelligence lies a variation of the same question: what, if anything, makes these sentient, inorganic beings different from us? Flesh and biology aside, do they possess all that makes us human--are they, in all their hardware and programming, fundamentally the same? Steven Spielberg's criminally underrated film A.I.: Artificial Intelligence is less concerned with this question than it is with questioning what obligation humans have for their "living" creations. It centers around a mecha (mechanical humanoid robot) named David (Haley Joel Osment) who is uniquely programmed with the ability to love. Stanley Kubrick, who originally conceived of the film and purchased the rights to its source material by Brian Aldiss, saw it as a Pinocchio story. Like Pinocchio, David is a manufactured object that suddenly dreams of becoming human.