"Bravo, Pinocchio! In reward for your kind heart, I forgive you for all your old mischief. Boys who love and take good care of their parents when they are old and sick, deserve praise even though they may not be held up as models of obedience and good behavior. Keep on doing so well, and you will be happy." (Carlo Collodi, Pinocchio, 1883)

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Do you ever ask yourself "what could she (or he) have been thinking?" I had just such an experience when I went to see A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. About halfway through the film, the action shifts to Rouge City, a red-light-district-meets-the-Las Vegas Strip-meets-Blade Runner kind of place. Just then, I saw a woman lead two small children out of the theater. That's when I asked myself that question. After all, even a cursory glance at the reviews would have told her that A.I. is definitely not a kid's movie.

A.I. is the product of two of the most important filmmakers of our time: the late Stanley Kubrick (2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, Doctor Strangelove, Spartacus) and Steven Spielberg (Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Jaws, E.T., Schindler's List, Saving Private Ryan). It's based on a 1969 short story, Supertoys Last All Summer Long, by Brian Aldiss. Kubrick worked on turning the story into a movie for the last 15 years of his life. After his death in 1999, his family asked his friend Spielberg to complete the project.

Talk about an unlikely pairing! Kubrick was, to put it mildly, the least sentimental great director in history. His magnum opus, 2001, has no dialog for the first half-hour of the film and is dialog-less for more than two-thirds of its running time. The aliens of 2001 are never seen and communicate with humanity through a flawless and impenetrable monolith. Spielberg's alien was E.T., who was as vulnerable as the monolith was impenetrable, and whose final words, "be good, Eliot," still choke me up 20 years later.

The product of this pairing tells a story set in "the distant future." Global warming has produced a catastrophic rise is sea levels. Coastal cities, such as Amsterdam, Venice and New York, now lie underwater. It isn't only the coastlines that are affected. Food, water and other resources have become scarce. So scare that governments have resorted to that old science-fiction warhorse: strict controls on childbirth. This creates a market for robots, called "mechas," who perform many of the functions people used to perform without using any resources other than those used to build them. This isn't enough for the folks at Cybertronics of New Jersey. Professor Hobby (William Hurt) proposes the next step in robotic evolution: a robot who can love. At this point, another science fiction warhorse makes an appearance: the concern that our technology is outpacing our morality and ethics. A colleague asks Hobby "if a robot loves a person, must that person love him back?" It's a question that Hobby and company never answer.

Twenty months later, we meet Henry Swinton, a Cybertronics employee, and his wife Monica. Their son Martin is in a coma, and is given little chance of recovery. One day, Henry comes home with a surprise for the grief-stricken Monica: a mecha named David (Haley Joel Osment). While David can't replace their son, he can fill some of the void Martin's absence has created. That's because, unlike other mechas, he can love her. Henry tells Monica that they don't have to keep David. As long as he hasn't been "imprinted" on her, they can send him back, with no consequences to either them or David. However, if Monica decides to go through with the imprinting, it's irreversible, and the only way to get rid of David is to return him to Cybertronics, where he will be destroyed.

As you can guess, Monica eventually decides to go through with the imprinting protocol. For a while it's good for both of them. After Monica reads to him from — what else? — Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio, David begins to wonder about that Blue Fairy who can turn artificial boys into real ones. I don't want to give away too much of the plot but, after a few unfortunate incidents, none of which were David's fault, Henry and Monica decide that there isn't room in their life for David. But rather than take him to Cybertronics and have him destroyed, Monica abandons David in the woods. A distraught David is left wondering why his mommy left him, and sets out to find the Blue Fairy who can turn him into a real boy that his mother can love. Along the way he meets Gigolo Joe (Jude Law), a mecha programmed to give sexual pleasure. Joe acts as David's, in Spielberg's words, "scoutmaster," his guide through the new world he has entered.

And he needs one because this world is a lot more like A Clockwork Orange than Hook or even Jurassic Park. It's dark and dystopic, not warm and fuzzy. With one exception, A.I. is a Kubrick film — one that happened to be directed by Steven Spielberg. And, as with all Kubrick films, people have strong reactions to the movie, positive and negative. One positive reaction was that of Time magazine's Richard Corliss. While acknowledging A.I.'s flaws, Corliss nevertheless called it "engrossing," and, most intriguingly, a "prophecy."

And that's what A.I. is, although not in the sense that Corliss or most people understand that word. For most of us, "prophecy" and "prophetic" are synonyms for "prediction" and "predictive." Prophecy is the act of describing the future, or, at least, a possible future. But there's another, more important, meaning to "prophecy." It's what the Hebrew prophets such as Isaiah, Jeremiah and Amos primarily meant by the term. Not describing the future, but the present. Stripping away the self-deception, the euphemisms, the cant and everything else that keeps us from seeing our life, our times and ourselves as they really are. It's in this sense that A.I. is prophetic. Is this what either Kubrick or Spielberg intended? In some instance, I suspect so. In others, I have my doubts.

In the former category, there's the film's critique of our tendency to leap before we look when it comes to technology. Remember the scene in Jurassic Park where Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) upbraids the park's creators for being so "preoccupied with whether or not they could [bring dinosaurs back to life], that they didn't stop to think if they should?" In A.I., Spielberg revisits the issue. With one exception, everyone involved in David's creation thinks that being able to build a robot that loves, and even dreams, justifies doing it. The achievement, and the promise held out by the technology, sweeps away all moral concerns. The technology and its benefits are tangible and, thus, of consequence. The moral concerns are intangible and, thus, inconsequential. Only later do the personal and social costs become evident, and by then, blame has become so diffused that it's nearly impossible to hold anyone accountable.

In this regard, A.I. depicts the spirit of our age perfectly. Too perfectly, in fact. As I write this, the president and the Congress are considering what to do about stem cell research and human cloning. And it's another instance of life imitating art (or vice versa). The promise of the technology — what I call the "wow!" factor — is overwhelming the moral concerns raised by these technologies. People who question what adoption of these technologies will do to human dignity and the sanctity of life are being called extremists and Luddites. Once again, "could" is running over "should."

Just as accurate is the film's depiction of our confusion over what it means to be human, or "real," as the film puts it. Only this time the film exemplifies the confusion, starting with the premise that it's possible for "miles of fiber," or any other human technology, to produce an artificial intelligence that not only mimics human behavior, but also duplicates it in all its emotional and even spiritual complexity. In other words, human consciousness. Suspension of disbelief aside, this epitomizes our conceit that, given enough time, we can "take apart" human existence and break it down into its constituent parts.

This conceit goes beyond biology to the moral and even spiritual realm. Being able to love, being loved, dreaming, pursuing your dreams, and believing in what you can't see all take turns as the essence of being "real." And being "real" matters because it determines whether others have a moral obligation towards you or if you are simply a means to one of their ends. But if this what it means to be "real," where does that leave folks who can't do these things? After all, do comatose people dream? Do autistic children love? In what sense can a severely handicapped person pursue his dreams?

What's more, all of these, singly or collectively, make being "real," — the object of moral obligation — contingent on what we can do, and, more to the point, what we can do for others. In the end, everyone, including the audience, cares about David because of what he represents and what he can do, not because of any intrinsic dignity or value he may possess. And how is this any different from, say, what Princeton's Peter Singer advocates? (You can argue that Monica's decision to abandon David was simply a case of a new mother exercising her right to a trial period before deciding whether or not to keep her new child.) In either case, protection and obligation are a matter of whether or not you contribute to the overall supply of happiness in the world.

And this reasoning inevitably leads to the exclusion of those who should be included. The most vulnerable members of our society are vulnerable, in large part, because they don't make such a contribution. Whatever the intentions of the filmmakers were, A.I. is a reminder of how inadequate our thinking about personhood has become. Love and dreams, as good as they sound, are a poor substitute for what historically created moral obligation: the belief that all people are created in the image of God and, as such, must be treated with dignity and regard for their well-being.

This concern with personhood, "realness," or whatever you want to call it, invariably leads to another issue: the sanctity of human life. A.I. depicts how contingent our culture's regard for life has become as a result of our confusion about what it means to be "real." David is the quintessential example of an "inconvenient life." He's discarded precisely because he no longer fits within the Swinton's understanding of what's best for them. Monica knows that he's more than a machine; she hears his heart-wrenching wails, and she still leaves him to a near-certain death. The difference between Monica and us is that while she has some basis for doubting David's "realness," we have no such doubts with regards to the Davids in our midst. Still, year after year, the circle that includes those to whom we are obligated shrinks. The unborn, the elderly, the seriously ill, all of these are now considered inconvenient life. And as our technology "progresses," the number of Davids among us will grow, and the circle will become smaller and smaller.

There are movies that supposedly explore "serious," and "important" themes, but, in reality, serve up little more than warmed-over clichés and groupthink. (A recent Oscar winner named after a type of rose comes to mind.) A.I. really is about serious and important things — the most important things there are. That's what makes it a "prophecy." Whatever Kubrick and Spielberg intended, A.I., in depicting the distant future, paints a disturbing portrait of our present. Now, the question is: Do we prefer fairy tales to prophecy?