When they are wrong about their own work - Page 2

Woody Allen, by all interviews I've read, doesn't watch his movies after he's done with them. Combine that with his frantic film-making pace, the fact that Annie Hall wasn't brilliant until someone else edited it, and his contrarian streak, and I'm thinking his judgement on his films are not going to be spot on.

But besides that, I think it's really hard to be objective about your own work.

Tarantino's defense of Anything Else, however, has no excuse. I eagerly await the day he explains that one.

I recall Vincent Gallo saying The Brown Bunny was his best work yet. Seeing as Buffalo '66 is great and The Brown Bunny blows, I became a bit confused.

One in which Monica genuinely loved David. It's all the same to David, unable to tell the distinction between reality and fiction--something the film drives home again and again--but the situation under which Monica says "I love you" to David is entirely artificially constructed. Something where all the other worries in her life have been taken away, as the narrator tells us, and there's only David. It's a fiction. And even if it was genuine, it comes 2000 years too late.

I quote writer Sarah Maitland, who worked on A.I.: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE with Kubrick:

"I really liked the idea that Monica's resurrection was temporary. David's dream of her is in the way that memory is like a dream. He's given back his memory, not his mother, which of course relates to how real one thinks the products of memory actually are. His revival is real, hers is real, but it's not concrete or historical, and she's not going to change, she's not going to get older, because he's not going to get older by the very nature of being a robot. The story is not very pro-human, and not very pro-Monica, who fails to love the child."

David is truly a character that doesn't really change over the course of the film. Even Joe, when we meet him, has gained some insight into the situation robots find themselves in that world. David gains no such insight, but does gain the ability to feel more and more complex emotions, which could form the basis of an argument that there's an arc here.

I love the movie, it's a masterpiece, but I'd have to agree that the ending is not a happy one for anyone but David. But even then it's a moment of peace in a lifetime of adversity, right on the cusp of oblivion.

AI's ending is a simple fairy tale ending. The blue fairy granted him his wish and like a real boy, he fell asleep with his mom.

Of course, many fairy tale endings can be viewed as creepy or tragic, but David getting what he wants is a happy ending.

Kubrick wrote in his copy of PINOCCHIO that he wanted to reverse Pinocchio's moral development in ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. As David becomes more and more experienced, he becomes more and more selfish, more violent. The end of the film is little more than personal wish fulfillment for David; it's not about what he can offer Monica, it's about David receiving the happy childhood he didn't get.

Just watch Teddy plop down on the bed as if to say, "Um, hey, what the hell do I do now?" and tell me that's a happy ending.

It's a fairy tale ending, but it's fairly clear, given his notes as well as the comments of his collaborators, that Kubrick intended the ending to be subversive, to work on two separate levels. The ending satisfies the fairytale quest around which the film is structured, but even so, it ultimately suggests something very troubling.

He's kind of dismissive of Halloween, also. He always stresses that it was "a work for hire" and doesn't quite get all the fuss about it.

Plus the final frame's pull-out, reminiscent of Tarkovsky's SOLARIS, where the house is revealed to be an artificial recreation in an icy, humanless future. In SOLARIS, the protagonist gets his dream fulfilled, too, but like David, he's settled for an illusion.

The problem is you are placing Kubrick's notes and SOLARIS as stand-ins for the final Speilberg film.

I don't see bringing Monica back as an illusion as you make it. For all intents and purposes the real Monica is brought back (with a "scientific" explanation to avoid saying "magic"). David has the time of his life and then falls asleep to dream, like a real boy. It's David's story and he's gotten his happy ending. The rest really doesn't matter to him or his story.

I agree entirely with this take, but do you have a link to those comments and Kubrick's notes? I've never seen any authorial comments that support this reading, and Spielberg has said that his reading is drastically different and unambiguously happy.

I re-watched A.I. for the first time in years a few weeks back, and it's clunkier than I remember, but I'm still utterly perplexed by the idea that the ending is upbeat in any way. David may end up happy (or, given how his attachment was programmed to begin with, he ends up having fulfilled some aspect of his programming), but his happiness isn't an ongoing concern of the movie. He's arguably not even the protagonist until the point that Martin comes back - we're largely following the story from Monica's perspective. When he's abandoned, it's still hard to fully empathize with his perspective, since he's on a doomed quest from the beginning. Plus, we've been constantly reminded of his inhuman nature, from the malfunction at the dinner table to the Flesh Fair to the reveal of hundreds of Davids.

Where did Spielberg make that statement? I've done a lot of research about ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, but I've never seen a Spielberg quote to that effect. I've actually read things about the creative process on A.I. that would seem to contradict that.

They're not online. You can find some of them in this book, which was only released last fall, but is a goldmine of information regarding the project. I was absolutely astonished to see how much of the finished product was pretty much "locked in" under Kubrick's supervision.

Hang on. What can I do to steer you in a different direction? There might be time to save you from actually arriving to this odd and remote location.

And am I the only one that sees a definite resemblance between Willie (as she is seen through most of the film) and Amy Irving?

Which of course says a lot more about Spielberg than he may care to reveal, considering that he ended up marrying Kate Capshaw.

He was kind of right. I love Eyes Wide Shut. But it is a piece of shit in many ways and I always assumed it was Kubrick's intention for it to be.

Then again...

Basically, artists are the worst barometers of their work. Especially when seen from the point of view of those that have already embraced it. I never really pay attention to what a filmmaker or an actor's favorite is, any more than I pay attention to what a musician's personal favorites are.

Many have already chimed in with why this is the case. But all that about a director "not getting his own film" or "not understanding why it works" is ultimately horseshit coming from us. In some cases, you can have the fix what isn't broken scenario, yes. But if an artist really revisits his work for an honest reason, I can't fault them for that. And I'll still have the original work that I fell in love with. And the artists can have whatever makes them happy. That's the beauty of art.

Not to be a showboater, but as a filmmaker I have seen this happen and experienced it. I've had people see my film and tell me their "interpretation" of it. And it was not what I intended at all. But I would be amused by someone telling me I didn't understand my own film.

From the maker's point of view: I act in my own film. I hated my performance. I hated specific takes because I was self-conscious. I needed an editor to tell me I was full of shit. And, as far as the film itself is concerned, there are scenes and shots I hate for very specific reasons that I know will bother no one else but me.

Similarly, I had actors complain when they saw the finished film that they didn't feel I chose their best work... or what happened to this or that scene that I decided to cut? it was such a good scene! etc.

I shot a video for a local rock band. Put it together, was happy with the finished result. Screened it for the band. And then had a couple of them ask me about this or that shot... (ego - the drummer wished he was in it more... the singer wished he was in it more) ... made suggestions that made no sense: "why don't you add a shot here... like a quick smash cut of me on the drums?" ... "because such a shot does not exist." ... "maybe you can use one of the outtakes and do an effect with Final Cut... just like a 'whooosh'... Or maybe...." ... "Listen guy. I'm done with this. Take it or leave it. Next time, either direct your own video so you can have the shots exactly how you want them, or hire someone else."

Basically "artists" don't really know what they're talking about most of the time when they're talking about their work is my point.

No. I'm saying that ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE has complexities. It neither belongs solely to Kubrick or Spielberg. It's a true collaboration. If you knew how much of the final film really belongs to Kubrick, you might feel differently.

But in entirely artificial circumstances. Beyond DNA structure, it's not really the real Monica, who had so many other cares and concerns, like her husband and her son, and was willing to abandon David and then never bothered to seek him out again. The Monica of the end is a different Monica than the one from earlier in the film.

Yes, but he hasn't received any real love. Even what he has received has come 2000 years too late.

But the film isn't really told from his perspective. The film has broader concerns.

And it's still a little creepy that David so single-mindedly pursues the love of a woman who dumped him in the woods, even to the point of rejecting his "Geppetto" in Dr. Story, the man who has the most claim to being his actual father. Here's a man who actually affirms David's ability to love and be loved, and David turns his back on him to chase off after his Blue Fairy.

That plus he's probably sick of having been asked about it for the past 32 years, while films he likes better (like The Thing) don't get as much love (at least not outside film-geek/horror-geek circles).

And I wouldn't be surprised if part of him legitimately hates Halloween because it made him a Horror Guy, and he never particularly wanted to be a Horror Guy. Before then, his portfolio was nicely eclectic. After that, he made few films that couldn't be covered in Fangoria. Because horror was all the studios would give him money to make, he got stuck in one genre when he wanted to dabble in a bunch of them.

I don't live there but I do live next door to where TEMPLE OF DOOM is the best, and it's a place I like to visit from time to time. I always have a great time next door, and even though I enjoy returning to the warmth and comfort of my home where RAIDERS is the best, I still always look forward to the next time I visit my neighbors of DOOM. I just avoid the other side of the tracks where the retirement home housing the geezers who drool over LAST CRUSADE and the insane asylum containing the loons who eat their own CRYSTAL SKULL feces are located.

I don't. I haven't read the book you cite, so all I have to go off of is the finished project. But it may be an interesting read.


The film rooted in science so it can't magically whisk them away to 20xx. It's answer to "recreate" everything. Doesn't Monica save David after it's decided by Henry to have David destroyed? I doubt she could seek him out again without risking him being captured...blah blah blah. But all that hinges on whether Monica ever loved David. I say yes, you think not.

Why is it 2000 years too late?

But it's still David's story, despite the point of view.

As for the rejection of Geppetto, Dr. Story viewed David as a technological achievement, a machine that worked beyond expectation. Dr. Story was proud of what he saw as David being able to manufacture "love" but didn't see him as really experiencing "love." I saw the point as David really did feel love and saw this as a dismissal of him being a real boy, thus the rejection.

I always laugh when people say a filmmaker doesn't get his own film. The go-to guy for this is Richard Kelly who allegedly didn't "get" Donnie Darko and thus made a lot of poor choices in the Director's Cut. I agree that the Theatrical Version is better, but it isn't that Kelly didn't get the movie it's that he wasn't convinced anyone else did. By and large, he was right.

I haven't seen the Darko director's cut — I can't bring myself to — but I think for some people it's more that they feel Kelly didn't get what the film meant to them, which doesn't always have much to do with tangent universes and time travel and all the stuff Kelly apparently overexplicated in the DC.

For me it's a John Hughes film left out to molder in the rain, then jump-started back to life in a mad Frankenstein lab of Echo and the Bunnymen and Bush Sr. on the tv and a boy on meds who may be having one king-hell narcissistic/suicidal breakdown (I have to die so that the world can be saved!) or maybe not, and a whole bunch of other things. The problem with a lot of overly literal/science-nerdy responses to Darko is that those people are trying to decode and master the material when it should really just be felt. Kelly essentially saying "This is what's really happening" kills the mystique, I think.

Right. It isn't that he didn't get the plot of his own film, it's that he didn't get why his film worked for so many people.

Well you try writing an allegorical film that becomes a cult hit only because people consistently and grossly misinterpret it. When confronted with this, they get angry because they feel like their interpretations MUST be valid and the ability to have them is indeed the whole fun of the film.

But it isn't. The text of the film is worthwhile in its own right and if I were Kelly I'd be frustrated by how dismally ignored it is in favor of wild speculation, obsession with minutiae, etc. I may not have released a DC that not only over-explains but also has less good music, but I definitely understand the frustration.

Interesting this Donnie Darko talk...

I have a confession to make. I have never seen Donnie Darko. Not the theatrical or director's cut.

There is a reason for this. I was out of town when it came out and then, time passed and I never got around to it. Then, when I was doing pre-production on my film, several of the people working on it with me said it reminded them of Donnie Darko. One of the actors offered to take me to the Two Boots for one of the midnight shows. I said no thanks and avoided seeing it because I didn't want it to subconsciously influence me in any way... I told myself I would watch it after my film was done.

Time kept passing and I still didn't get around to it.

Now I can't find it around here and I guess time will continue to pass.

But the comments on Kelley "overexplaining" the movie are interesting to me. Because my film's plot and the ultimate "meaning" are kind of ambiguous. This is why people tend to read it in different ways.

The script featured some voice over and some beats that would have "clarified" my points more. At first, I was second-guessing myself when I saw that people weren't "getting" all of what I intended. Now I'm glad I didn't use that because I actually really like how people read it in different ways.

Makes the work more interesting. If I ever do see Donnie Darko, I'll be sure to see the theatrical version first.

ps. I really hope I'm not coming off as arrogant or show-offy. This thread has just really stimulated me to talk about myself and my work is all.

You've been misinformed. It's not such a bad place, actually. I live in your neighborhood too, but I've had a blast going over to that place myself. I tried visiting your neighbors, but they began to bore me when I was past my teens. I started hanging out at this "retirement home" as you call it. It's actually a really splendid social club and their lunches are spectacular. You should pay us a visit.

Eh, the director's interpretation is kind of boring. I know it's his; I know he made the movie; but it's a lot of Charlie Brown's teacher blahblahblah to me.

More than anything it's a narcissistic teen's wish fulfillment. Save the universe, take down the pedophile asshole, etc., and nobly die, and nobody knows the sacrifice you've made for all known living things, including the fact that the love of your young life doesn't even know who you are in the universe you died to save. Oh, anguish. Oh, Hot Topic swoon. I adore the film (and I was 31 when I saw it), but it's no mystery why it hit so big with a certain type of morose teenager.

For the record I'm all for reading, enjoying and/or hating art for entirely different reasons than the artist, and think artists should probably respect, and even take their audiences' opinions into account on most occasions. However, telling an artist he's 'wrong' about his own work is not only kind of crappy in theory, but to me implies that the artist's opinions on his or her own work are generally less valuable than the audiences. Then I picture bellybutton picking, runny-nosed red necks telling me that Zodiac was totally gay because it was long, and I realize I'm on a slippery slope.

If you like warm tapioca pudding and stale fruitcake, sure. I like my lunches a little more exotic and spicy. Plus all of their decor is just the K-Mart knock-off version of the fine adornments I've enjoyed in my home for years.

Kudos for not mentioning the Other Place.

Wait, what are we talking about?

I swear that Devin or someone else from CHUD actually asked him very directly about his intended tone (or maybe it was something CHUD reposted from another site), but damned if I can find it right now. Does anyone else remember this?

You're right, though. There certainly are other things he's said that would seem to contradict this stance:

I want to live and frolic naked through the hills of this world. Erix can watch..


The Last Crusade has gotten worse has time has gone on, Crystal Skull is what it is and Raiders is undoubtedly a classic but the darkness, horror and pulp of Doom brings me in every time. Temple of Doom, more so than any of the other films, has that feeling that this IS their Bond film. No care to continuity, no worries about trilogies, a dramatic shift away from Raiders in terms of tone..Temple of Doom is what the Indy franchise should have been.

Not to mention the one film that stepped away from horror in a major way, STARMAN, was clobbered upon release, despite great reviews and an Oscar nomination.

I think it made him a GENRE guy, and Carpenter 100% wanted to be a genre guy, but not just a ONE-GENRE guy. It's easy to think of him as a horror guy, but Escape From New York is not a horror film, nor is Big Trouble in Little China, or Elvis (a gig he got BECAUSE of Halloween!), or They Live, etc. They all exist, to varying degrees, in the realm of the fantastic, but through a "genre" prism, Carpenter's gotten to make nearly every kind of film he wanted.

Halloween, as he freely admits, gave him a career. I think he's tired of being asked about it at this point, but without Halloween, he wouldn't have gotten to play Howard Hawks all through the 80s, and he knows it.

EDIT: To bring it back on topic, I think Carpenter is less wrong about Halloween than most of its fans, and them being wrong about it is a big factor in his attitude toward it.

I don't want to hear any bitching by Carpenter. I rank two of his films as absolute classics and huge influences on me but this "they only gave me money to make horror..I'm trapped!" is bullshit. The only things Carpenter loves more than money are basketball and weed. He could of found any number of ways to advance his craft, to make any film he wanted, but he made the decision to keep on keeping on.

Except Westerns. And he made several anyway through the back door of sci-fi or horror.

In terms of career arc only, I liken him to John Badham. He started out very eclectic:

The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings (1976)
Saturday Night Fever (1977)
Dracula (1979)
Whose Life Is It Anyway? (1981)

Then the one-two punch of WarGames and Blue Thunder, which sort of hemmed him into summer entertainment for teenagers for many years. Eventually he did get to make a Western (The Jack Bull). I've long wished HBO would likewise allow Carpenter to make his own Jack Bull. (Course, Carpenter directing a Dark Tower HBO miniseries with Kurt as Roland is everyone's dream project.)

In the pre-release interviews for Live Free or Die Hard, Bruce Willis seemed very dismissive of Die Hard 2 and With A Vengeance. He said something along the lines of "the first being the only good one" and the only good part of DH2 was the fight on the airplane wing. I disagree with him on that. I thought both were very fun movies and had that intensity that 4 was lacking.

I seem to recall Francis Ford Coppola saying (I think it was on the DVD commentary?) that he felt Sofia Coppola did a good job in Godfather III and that the critic's reaction to her performance was an indirect attack at him.

Am I the only one who thought that the resurrection of Monica in AI was in no way real? The DNA thing was a story the future mecha fed David so they could give him what he wanted and observe the results. We see them watching he and Monica on their monitor, the same one in which they watched him interact with the Blue Fairy. If the Blue Fairy isn't real, there's no real reason to assume that Monica was either. They wanted to learn more about humans, and observing his interactions with the memory of his mother was the closest they could get. They're interested in studying him, not giving him his wish.

I think people are viewing the end from David's perspective. From David's perspective, he got to spend one last day with his mother and go to sleep. He got what he wanted, even if she wasn't the REAL Monica. From David's POV, it doesn't matter.

I do think you're right though, the future mechas were using him as a guinea pig. The ending is a little complicated, thematically, I think.

For me, the saddest part is when David falls asleep and Teddy is still walking around. David was basically Teddy's Monica, and now he has to live alone.

A.I. is a more interesting movie then a lot of people give it credit for.

It may have been for marketing purposes more than anything else but I was kinda stung when Clooney seemed to throw the cool, idiosyncratic OCEAN'S TWELVE under the bus to promote the more mainstream OCEAN'S THIRTEEN.

I've been looking for quotes but can't track any down.

The part about that that I'll "agree" on is that it's the only one of the movies that really feels like a 30s pulp story. Particularly in its over-the-top nature and its backwards, xenophobic view of Asia.

Not saying that wasn't 100% intentional either.

And I do enjoy it, just not as much as 1 and 3.

(I love this subplot that Litmus and I have going on. I'll try to think of something clever to retort later)

Bruce Willis is one of the great EPK horseshitters. He's a fucking world champion at this. Every single movie he is doing at one particular time or another is his "best." He dismisses his previous work a lot and badmouths his critics at every chance he gets. I still remember the shit he was slinging back when The Fifth Element opened to less than stellar reviews, and he hasn't exactly continued to rave about that one as a favorite.

About Die Hard though, he's particularly schizophrenic. On the EPK for Die Hard 2, which you can see for yourself on the 2001 DVD, he talks about it being a "bigger, better picture" than the first one.

He said similar things while doing press for WAV.

And I think we all remember his comments regarding Die Hard 4.0 and the PG 13 rating. To offset fan unrest, he went as far as to say that despite the PG 13, it was still a hard core action picture, you didn't notice the rating and it was "as good as, if not better than the first!" (!!!!!!)

EPK and junket dicksucking is the Hollywood norm. But, as far as artists not being good barometers of their own work is concerned, I would say Bruce Willis is textbook.

Do you really think the racial carictures in Temple are all that different from the other films, Erix? I mean every single German person in Raiders & Last Crusade is either a Nazi or shady Euro-trash. And every Arab person is either a jolly guy in a fez (like Sallah) or a treacherous person with a big beard. They were just showing an evil cult (who actually existed by the way, but exaggerated in the film) as being bad guys. They also showed us the good, peaceful Indian villagers in contrast.

I totally remember those quotes. Once Kevin Smith showed up, there went all the supposed DH thrills and intensity.

Thats a bingo, though, I disagree on the future mechas' motives. I'm of the opinion that the future mechas get all they need from David the second they share his memories. Allowing David to fulfill his programming was a gift, and the real last word on the altruism of the robots as opposed to the selfishness of the humans.

You also have to wonder at the history that followed after David gets trapped. Does Dr. Story go public with the fact that the David model can actually grow to love? Does that eventually lead to a change in attitude towards the mecha? And does that, in a sense, make David a sort of Christ figure to the future mecha, someone who made a sacrifice so that they could be free? And which would in essence turn the final scene into a sort of pieta?

They come off as more extreme to me. Because the movie is like this proto-Gunga Din pastiche. Like, remember those bits in The Majestic with Bruce Campbell (AKA - the only really good thing in The Majestic)? I think Temple Of Doom captured the spirit of that much more than the others. And that was always the intention of the Indy films, wasn't it? But both Raiders and Crusade feel more like Bond movies. Yes, the villains are Euro-Trash. Just like most of the Bond villains.

....

By the way, this AI dialog is really interesting too guys. Just keep right at it. I'm riveted.

I'm gonna pour a little ice on this fire and say I've read all your well thought, intelligent comments, and I thought about it, and I still hate Temple of Doom for everything other than heart tearing jokes.

Yes, and even if it is real, it's (she's) as manufactured as he is. That's the brilliance of the movie's ending to me. It comes full circle. He was made by humans to fill a gap of love missing from someones life. At the end, machines make a human to fill the gap missing in his life. In both circumstances, the solution is temporary, manufactured, and (naturally) artificial and therefore ultimately

I don't know. I guess someone could go, "oh, how sweet" but I see it as a bleak, cold, bitter stance at human programming and love in general, not to mention our species tendency to fill whatever we think we need with manufactured things. And yeah, at the end of the whole thing, while David has his brief moment of bliss, Teddy clearly sits on the fake bed and looks out the fake window and wonders, "so, now what?"

I don't know if it's bleak as such, is it? I always thought the underlying conceit of the film is that love is the defining characterization of the human race, nothing else can even come close to imaging it, and even the most sophisticated, advanced kind of artificial life forms would be unable to achieve such a thing. The idea of "Love" essentially dies with us. That's kinda cool, I think.

The ending to AI is bleak, but that's overshadowed by its total stupidity. A clone created from someone's hair has the person's original memories and personality? WTF? How did that happen? The power of Jesus? And then that clone can only survive, due to some universal Jesus magic-science, for 24 Earth hours? I hate that!

Here's what should have happened, as I've said before: the future robo-people clone David's mom from her hair. The clone, however, is an infant, with no memories. Since David loves her because he imprinted on her DNA, he loves the copy just as much as the original, and essentially gets his wish. However, he must now raise the child, effecting a reversal of their original roles. Ta-da, happy ending.

The main point of the ending is that experience of the world has shattered David to the point that he's willing to enter oblivion clinging to a delusion--that his mother loves him--that he's been made painfully and repeatedly aware of the fact that it is a delusion. It's the worst fate possible from an epistemological perspective and presents us with the view that people are ignoble beasts and the mechas are truly innocent by virtue of the fact that they are, in no way, human. The more a mecha tries to be human, the worse it becomes. It's both a nihilistic and Hobbesian ending by design.

I remember watching a cable retrospective on Spielberg's filmography where he talked about the ending to AI and how it was exactly as Kubrick had intended and not something he tacked on. That doesn't really offer any conclusion as to how Spielberg reads that ending.

I have fun thinking about that such discussions were what Kubrick had intended all along. People would be much less likely to read a Kubrick film's ending as a happy one. In general, it's to be expected. But by having Spielberg do it... it becomes a debate.

You can either roll with that, or you can't. Kubrick intended ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE to function as a science fiction-clothed fairytale, and that's one of its most fairytale-esque story elements.

Sure, which is so interesting. Which authorial voice--and both are quite present--has the upper hand?

For what it's worth, I think Kubrick ultimately desired for ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE to have something resembling the tone of the final product, with its strange mixture of Spielbergian "heart" and bleak ideas. Kubrick's fervor for the project had been sincerely boosted by E.T.: THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL, a film of which Kubrick was very jealous. He wanted to create a competing fairytale, and of course, since he was Stanley Kubrick and a devoted pessimist, his fairytale was imbued with decidedly bleak notions about humanity. But even so, he desired an emotional warmth for the project because he was exploring the genre of fairytale, even if he was ultimately subverting it.

As such, that's why Kubrick offered it to Spielberg twice before his death. He had doubts about his abilities to effectively give ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE some genuine heart. And, looking at the storyboards and production designs that Chris Baker had produced for Kubrick in the mid-90s, Kubrick certainly intended the visual style of the film to be what it is; the Kubrick-approved images seem almost directly reproduced in the film, as though Spielberg was afraid to stray from what Kubrick envisioned the project to be.

To quote A.I. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE - FROM STANLEY KUBRICK TO STEVEN SPIELBERG: THE VISION BEHIND THE FILM (what a long-winded title, but an excellent book!) regarding the ending:

The ending encompasses Kubrick's desire to combine an exploration of immortality through Artificial Intelligence and DNA with a future fairy tale of magic and enchantment represented through dream, imagination, and memory. The ending also has the ambiguity associated with Kubrick's films: not all is as it seems. David's journey is purposeful and successful, yet in actuality it is futile. The ending is as much an illusion as David's delusion of his own mother. His desire and affection has failed to be reciprocated, other than in his dreams, and instead his odyssey has exposed him to mankind's cruelty, greed, exploitation, and depravity. One cannot fail to notice that humankind has become extinct.

The fairy-tale narration ends in the simulation, but the film ends with the camera pulling back to reveal the apartment in a black void. David's perfect moment remains captured in its own time -- for outside of this simulation, it is impossible for David to become a real boy. Mommy is dead and he is alone, forever trapped in an icy world where the SuperMechas are still unable to resurrect humans for more than a day. As with Bowman's captivity in the bedroom at the end of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, the simulation has the 'timelessness of a dream.'

David's construction of Monica, resurrected by the SuperMechas, is how he was programmed to see her emotionally, with a 'love that will never end'. He is a robot 'caught in a freeze-frame' of unwavering devotion and love; a robot who will continue to 'chase down his dreams'. His desire and self-delusion are no different from the love and loss that drove Professor Hobby to 'resurrect' his own dead son, or the love and loss of Martin that drove Monica to use David as an artificial son-substitute.

Both David and Monica are now artificial creations on which a loved one has projected their imagined image, their perception, rather than acknowledging the reality. In 2001, the 'characteristic of the "magical" aspect of the film is that the human properties built into [the super-computer] HAL have a had a "curse" laid on them.' David is ultimately a tragic figure, doomed from the outset -- like Professor Hobby and Monica -- to want what he cannot have. In his case, his curse is having been programmed with a very human trait of pursuing a false wish and desire, drive by the emotion to love.