At 2,000 words, the Aldiss story is a slim, dark parable about the melding of human and machine. It concerns a boy desperate to obtain his mother's love, a love she is unable to give. That the child is a robot is withheld until Aldiss' O. Henry-style kicker. It's easy to see why that subject would attract the director of "2001" and "A Clockwork Orange." But I don't think anyone could have predicted the direction in which (at least in the first hour) Spielberg takes this material.

More than any other filmmaker, Steven Spielberg has presented childhood as an almost sacred concept, a province of innocence and imagination that he has devoted his considerable technological, narrative and emotional gifts to celebrating. The shock of "A.I." is that Spielberg, at least in the first section, has chosen to make a film about the monstrousness of childhood or, specifically, about the monstrousness of children's emotional dependence on adults. The second part, a journey through a nighttime future-world that bears more than a passing resemblance to that in "A Clockwork Orange," and the final sci-fi storybook coda, feel like different movies altogether.

"A.I." is set in a future dystopia. The polar ice caps have melted, flooding coastal cities and killing millions. Pregnancy is now licensed by the government and to fill the human void robots have been designed to take the place of everything from servant to lover to child. That's where Haley Joel Osment's David comes in. David is the creation of a scientist (William Hurt) who has envisioned robots that will not just perform tasks but that will feel human emotion. Henry Swinton (Sam Robards), who works for the company that created David, brings a prototype robot child home to his wife, Monica (Frances O'Connor), hoping that the robot will be a substitute for their own child, who's been cryogenically frozen until a cure can be found for his terminal disease.

Henry's impulse to offer a machine to a grieving mother as a substitute for her child is, on the surface, horribly callous. But you understand how Henry could be driven to it by the way O'Connor captures Monica's neurotic need to fill the void in her life. This woman (and, we can presume, her marriage) has been so devastated by the loss of her son that her gradual acceptance of David manages to be both horrifying and to make complete emotional sense. There's no getting around the fact that David is creepy, artificially chipper and obedient. His robot version of being a good "son" is to brightly ask docile little questions like "Would you like me to go to sleep now?"

Unable to eat food, he nonetheless sits at the table at mealtimes, miming Henry and Monica's motions. When he sees Monica with some spaghetti hanging out of her mouth he points and breaks into a forced, artificial laugh that's frightening precisely because there's nothing spontaneous in it. It's a machine's attempt to ingratiate itself with humans, and it's off-putting, even sinister. All during these scenes, Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski keep shooting David through distorting glass, breaking up Osment's beatific face into a fractured design that looks like the mating of high-tech and cubism.

In some ways, David is even creepier after Monica, deciding she wants to keep David, "imprints" him with the words that will make him bond with her. Osment does a lightning shift from his initial eager-to-please robotic affect to his preprogrammed idea of what a child should be: adorable and adoring, playing with a robotic teddy bear (which, in a morbid twist, has been given a gruff adult voice, supplied by Jack Angel), suffused with the uncontrollable emotions of childhood and above all clinging, his every action demanding "love me." These scenes wouldn't work if it weren't for Osment, who's phenomenal. It was obvious he was talented from his performance in "The Sixth Sense," but he shows a complexity and subtlety here that would be astonishing in a far more experienced actor. Osment isn't just a cute kid, he's an actor projecting an idealized and artificial image of what a cute child is supposed to be.

It's here that the tensions that finally undo the movie start. Spielberg directs these early scenes as a black-humored parody of child-rearing and of the loving family life he has always exalted. He is not working so much from the point of view of the child as from the point of view of the beleaguered adult. Just like a real child, David has been created to give love, but as with any child, that love constantly threatens to become a burden to his parents. We see how his unquestioning devotion to his "Mommy" both fulfills a longing in Monica and becomes a trap for her (in one scene, an almost lethal one). She simply doesn't have the love or energy or attention to answer his incessant need -- no one could. And it becomes even harder after her real son, Martin (Jake Thomas), is finally awakened from his frozen sleep.

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