Critics project a fallacious binary opposition upon A.I. between the "cold artist" Stanley Kubrick, who had developed the project before his death, and the "warm populist" Spielberg, who brings it to the screen. That's the initial binary opposition that Spielberg's love erases.

In 1968, Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey anticipated such criticisms. In it, the computer HAL makes the startling admonition that it is "projecting" its own concerns about the mission onto his evaluation of the humans' behavior. It signaled Kubrick's ambiguous study of the human imagination's potential. Stilted imaginations disregard how Spielberg transforms the chill and thrill of Kubrick's epiphany into an embrace.

Spielberg updates HAL and his own E.T. - "others" that signified the polar realms of human projection - with the Mecha protagonist David in A.I., the most revolutionary characterization in the history of Hollywood movies. Have we been so coarsened that we can't realize that it's not that Kubrick would never stoop so low, but that he never reached so high?

Spielberg introduces David with a reaction shot of Monica, his future mother figure, recoiling - repulsion marking him as "other"/"monster." Meaning conveyed through spatial design, Spielberg expresses Monica's need to fill the absence of her son with a point-of-view shot of David lying in her son's bed. In shots matching the angle of those point-of-view shots, Spielberg cuts to Monica's son in a coma - detailing the space of Monica's projection. When Monica gives David his programming for unconditional love, edited as a shot-reverse-shot favoring neither "mother" nor "other", Spielberg concludes the sequence with a long shot of their shared embrace.

Haley Joel Osment, who plays David, becomes the most intimately explored figure and countenance since Maria Falconetti in Carl Theodor Dreyer's silent The Passion of Joan of Arc. Without benefit of her lack of makeup, Osment's performance also becomes the most uncannily naked and open since Falconetti's.

Janusz Kaminski, the cinematographer of A.I., explains how he and Spielberg achieved this: "For me, it all comes down to the light on a human face; that's where the mystery starts." In a baldly sensual scene, a group of boys inspect David with their hands and eyes after defining him as "Mecha" and themselves as "Orga" - underscoring the reflection of language to its psycho-social origins. "He's almost real!" exclaims one. "Mecha-real," counters another. We share their fascination, yet we also squirm at this invasion. Spielberg intentionally brings our role as spectators to light.

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I've never been so aware of a face on display as during the audacious dinner table scene that contains no dialogue. David explodes into laughter, which at first scares his "parents" but then triggers their own infectious laughter. David stops and stares at them with curiosity; he's processing irrational human behavior. My brother whispered into my ear after this scene: "He laughs. They laugh. We laugh." I hate it when people talk during movies, but I've never been so in love with my brother as at that moment. Even if critics don't "get it," my brother does.

This technique elicits unshakable emotions. In a halo of light, David looks up from Monica's lap and exclaims: "I hope you never die." Thanks to film, such moments never die. We won't lose the revelation of physical and emotional betrayal that plays across David's face when a knife jabs his arm. That shot cuts down all of our preconceptions, all of our defenses against connection.

By the time David calls out to his "mother" at the moment of his abandonment, "If you let me, I can be so real for you!" he's been made so real for us that our emotional response has not been cheaply manipulated. Spielberg brings us to a deeper place of understanding and reflection through his art.

He moves us beyond projection to spiritual connection. That essential Spielbergian province allows him to discover audacious truth in themes taken from Kubrick's fascinating-frustrating messes: A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Eyes Wide Shut (1999).

Spielberg's emotionalism makes immediate, intimate, and boundless the central moral question of A.I.. Lacking this breadth of life, Kubrick fouled up the Christian humanism of Anthony Burgess' novel A Clockwork Orange. What critic Gregory Solman calls Spielberg's "Renoir-ian open style" bests even Burgess on the topic of social construction of identity by dramatizing the complexity of our relationship to pop - the sci-fi setting flips Terence Davies' profound realist, autobiographical approach in "The Long Day Closes" inside-out.

The Flesh Fair, where Orgas engage in a public spectacle destroying Mechas, epitomizes the danger of movie "ultra-violence" on our sensibilities - where De Palma dared to tread in the ferris wheel sequence of the similarly genre-blasting The Fury. Spielberg presents the Flesh Fair spectators with images that recall the Nazis gloating over the ashes of Jews in Schindler's List, but here signals our role as movie spectators.

In the images of a (comedian!) Black Mecha's disembodied burning face sliding down jail bars and David's reaction shot, Spielberg testifies to the buried traditions of Hollywood and American homespun violence (from the lynching fantasies of The Birth of a Nation to M. Night Shyamalan's 2000 Unbreakable). The stadium rock milieu also imaginatively witnesses the racist, homophobic 1979 Comiskey Park Disco Sucks! riot.

By paralleling the Flesh Fair spectators with the movie audience, Spielberg's understanding extends to the worst in us. He displays this by first manipulating our own prejudices (such as critics' bourgeois condescension), preparing us for the inevitable. Don't underestimate Spielberg's modernist technique.

In an awesome display of hope, Spielberg surprises us. David's cry, "Don't hurt me! I'm David! I'm not Pinnochio! I'm David! I'm David!" moves the Flesh Fair audience to save him. Suggesting faith in human potential, Spielberg extends this awareness into a moral challenge beyond the movie theater.

Every sequence, every shot in A.I. integrates personal, social, narrative, thematic, and (post)modernist lucidity through emotional transparency. That's why critics calling the film "frustrating" is, well, frustrating. They pretend insight by nit-picking the film's not-so-subtle shifts in its three-act structure or by scrutinizing David's motivations as Mecha. Such critical hubris would scorn Euripides his use of the chorus or the deus ex machina in Greek Tragedy! Art clarifies, rather than simplifies, life experience.

Spielberg marks the transition from the proverbial womb to the world with the movie's initial emotional gestalt, the scene of David's abandonment, followed by Gigolo Joe's introduction, the film's funniest scene that also ends poignantly. That confluence of emotional responses inspires awe and raises consciousness.

The last shot of the first act, in which we see David reflected in the side-view mirror of Monica's departing car, ties together the mirror motifs while finding a perfect emotional and spatial expression for David and Monica's dilemma, the components of which are light, projection, simulacra.

In this sequence, John Williams' score subtly replays the film's musical themes to an appropriate melodramatic pitch, but in the final shot he brings in a new element. The music shifts into a series of discordant piano notes - a jazz impulse maneuver as inspired as Williams' Brechtian accompaniment to the end of The Fury. These musical notes mimic David's confusion while raising audience awareness along with the narrative shift.

In addition, Williams prepares audiences for the parametric shuffling of pop archetypes in the film's second act that traces David's trek to become a "real boy" and regain his mother's love. Doing so, Williams elucidates the emotional connection between pop and the fairy tale motifs in the first act.

While the Flesh Fair exhibited pop's indulgence in dehumanizing violence, Rouge City, a neon playground of Freudian phallic symbols, exposes pop's indulgence in loveless sex. A murder sub-subplot shows us the consequence of this objectification when Gigolo Joe confuses blood for tears (the visual framing of which is impeccable Spielberg).

The Mecha sex toy Gigolo Joe ("What d'ya know?") reflects our sexual/romantic confusions. While White notes Joe's resemblance to David Bowie, one might also recall other pop romantic transgressors: the eighties New Wave makeup Andy Bell sports in the sleeve photo for the Erasure single, "Oh L'Amour," or Bryan Ferry's pomo-sexuality in his cover album of romantic standards, "As Time Goes By".

At the cock of his head, Joe emanates such classic Hollywood love songs as "Cheek to Cheek" from the Astaire-Rogers "Top Hat"; the vinyl crackle of the tunes a wistful au revoir to simpler notions of romance. The postmodern product of Joe's programming for sexually pleasing women reveals how pop simplifies the complexities of human desires.

To David, Joe's an E.T. Note Spielberg's recontextualizing of that film's famous moon image - a simulacra of a simulacra - at the moment David and Joe's fates connect. He's also a Lion, Tin Man, and Scarecrow all rolled into one, dancing through the storybook forest of gender ambiguity. (He might as well sing, "If I only had a soul.")

Jude Law plays Joe as a delicious pop confection. Law's performance, and Spielberg's conception of the role, surpasses the freedom-repression dialectic of Malcolm MacDowell as Alex in A Clockwork Orange. Law earns the ache of his coda, "I am. I was."

Kubrick once encouraged this kind of trenchant collaboration from Peter Sellers as James Mason's doppleganger in Lolita (1962) - even more incisive than Sellers as the surreal power figures in Dr. Strangelove (1964). The failure of the untalented Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut to express such emotion dulled what was so ostentatious a Freudian dream movie. The mystery of an expressive face is part of what makes movies like dreams.

Frances O'Connor, who plays Monica, may have clinched the part because of her uncanny resemblance to Jessica Harper - a film geek fetish. But in such moments as Monica deciding whether or not to hold David's hand during an "operation," O'Connor presents Monica's longing as soulfully as Harper singing "Old Souls" in De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise.

William Hurt, who plays David's inventor, sketches both a lifetime and a true revelation about the human folly of capitalism in the choked delivery of these lines: "My son was one of a kind. You're the first of a kind." Such intimacies give emotional prescience to Spielberg's massive sci-fi visions, such as New York flooded by the greenhouse melting of the ice caps.

These faces, shaped by the art of acting and recorded by the art of film, make our eyes light up - as do David's when he places his face inside of a replica's shell, a visual nod to De Palma's explosion of cinematic identification in The Fury.

The way our subconscious makes narrative sense out of a series of distinct images, projected in invisible, deliberate place, creates dreamscapes out of Top Hat, The Birth of a Nation, and E.T.. The sex orgy, interchangeable women, and recurring Christmas decorations in Kubrick's final film made us think: "Wow! This movie is saying that other movies are like dreams. Deep!" Tired thoughts like that were the only thing keeping our eyes open during Eyes Wide Shut. Spielberg manages this conundrum fully. His dream movie plays like a dream.

Spielberg makes us think and feel at the same time. Picture Spielberg examining Kubrick's notes for A.I. on the intellectual relationship between Freud and fairy tales, dreams and cinema. Then, imagine Spielberg's revelation that Kubrick's interests connect with his own personal concerns for childhood fantasy worlds (The Color Purple), faith (Indian Jones and the Last Crusade), mother figures (Saving Private Ryan), his adopted Black children (Amistad), romantic love (Always), and pop culture (1941). (Not for nothing does David share the name of Kubrick's Star Baby in 2001: A Space Odyssey.)

The imaginative process of Spielberg's realization elicits fresh responses to such overt Freudian symbolism as David's reflection in a representation of a mother and the later sequence in which David cuts a lock of Monica's hair followed by a close-up of an eye at scissors-length from a hand. Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel's infamous eye-slicing stunt didn't cut as deep as Spielberg's emotional acuity, having a mother feign injury to protect her child from an angry father.

Spielberg discovers that such life moments link to the mysteries of both our need to love and be loved and our desire to transcend our mortality that the human imagination strives to understand through art, philosophy, religion, mythology, fairy tales, or Freudian psychology. The shot of a suicide plunge as a teardrop reflected on Joe's visage encapsulates the history of this human endeavor.

Spielberg elicits the fullest philosophical and emotional meanings out of film's manipulation of time and space. That spiritually elevates the sequence of David confronting and then destroying his replica (a digital double) or the shot that trucks from a long shot of David centered between rows of packaged replicas into a cataclysmic close-up. During such moments, our imaginations commune with Spielberg's.

The third-act ascendance of A.I. into cinematic transcendence - popularly known as the film's "coda" - has become the most controversial, argued, and misunderstood movie conclusion since 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Not surprisingly, critical detractors dismiss Spielberg's coda as a saccharine, simplified rip-off of Kubrick's Star Baby finale to 2001. "Art" snobs all of them, jealously protecting the sanctity of their (signifying ownership) film milestones, they actually disparage Kubrick's pop-art dream. For those watching with eyes, mind, and heart wide open, the ending of Spielberg's A.I. is that dream come true.

Fans of "pop" nihilism - hipsters and film geeks - would prefer the film to end with David's suicide or his eternal prayer to the Blue Angel in an underwater cage. Such endings would only verify David's "otherness." Critics and hipsters want a climax that supports, to be frank, their privilege and bigotry. They dream of David's disillusionment to sustain the illusion that for many in the world constitutes a living nightmare.

Critics and hipsters reject the necessary role of Spielberg's coda in the philosophical structure of A.I. This lack of imagination results in a knee-jerk refusal to appreciate the felicity of Spielberg's developing a cohesive narrative and emotional arch to the time/space poetics of the coda. We've stopped expecting poetry in pop, but Spielberg shows us why we deserve it - even why we need it.

Art involves such fantastic appreciation of life experience, which is why popular audiences might have a more immediate entrance into the emotional texture of the film's coda than snobs and hipsters. That's the soul of Spielberg's achievement.

However, art also investigates the nature of its medium. The negligence of film critics and geeks to tackle the "movie-ness" of the coda squanders an unheralded opportunity to engage the emotional responses of the audience with a profound re-imagining of cinema's role in our lives. Without such essential aesthetic investigation, A.I. exists in an ice age.

In the coda, Spielberg, with genuine mythic hubris, claims the imagination as the spiritual realm where the cinema can connect us. Then, his final shot eliminates any validity to attacks accusing Spielberg of banality. In that shot, Spielberg dreams a primal dream of sublime benevolence. The imagination - and therefore the spirit - never felt so free.

(If you haven't seen the film, there are spoilers ahead. If you have, prepare to board the mother ship.)

An aerial view of ice age desolation and Mecha perpetuation begins the coda's perceptually exciting play with the concrete recorded elements of cinema: time and space. In a single fade to white, Spielberg moves the story 2000 years into the future, after the Mecha civilization took the place of primacy left by humanity's extinction. He introduces the evolved Mecha as they fly through the camera - as if it didn't exist - into the frame of the projected image. The shot establishes film's manipulation of real time and space into a metaphysical perspective. Spielberg's aerial and sci-fi audacity also conveys the wonderment of film still possible in the digital age.

Such wonderment derives from Spielberg's imagination while exciting the audience's. When the evolved Mechas uncover David from his icy tomb, they, like Monica, recoil from this "other." Then, Spielberg visualizes the heartbreaking horror of David's apparent fate: to be the eternally punished scapegoat of the imagination's failure. David, finally free to make contact with the wish-fulfilling Blue Fairy, discovers that this plaster simulacra of human fantasy crumbles at his touch. The physical world seems incompatible with such imaginative flights. Yet, by eliciting emotional responses to this image, Spielberg also exhibits faith that the imagination, by uncovering the meaning of film images, is as inherent a recorded element of cinema as time and space.

That faith extends to the narrative. A Mecha, responding to David's unfathomable, irrational need to make contact with the fake Blue Fairy, accesses David's memory bank and shares what he finds with the other Mechas. Corresponding to the cinematic experience, the Mechas observe these memories as projections in their minds. These flashing images depict close-ups of the faces - "where the mystery starts" - of the Orgas and Mechas that David met in his adventures.

Based on this information, the Mechas create an environment in which to observe David and discover the motivation for his first free action. They come up with a curious space - a distinctly cinematic one. The Mechas place David in a replication of Monica's family home true to every detail, except that the family isn't there. An animated, interactive Blue Fairy fills that absence. In this space, as in film, memory commingles with the imagination. The stained-glass color and light design serves more than a sci-fi narrative purpose by establishing the sequence as imaginative spectacle.

Spielberg's coda continues by exploring film narration and spectatorship. The Mechas observe David via a projection on a circular screen - a scientific or novelty impulse harking back to pre-cinema kinescope or camera obscura. The Mechas, unlike us, are unmoved by David's demand on the Blue Fairy: "If you can bring others back, why can't you bring her [Monica] back?" Their mechanical responses demonstrate the same lack of imagination as the snobs and hipsters in the audience of "A.I."

The Blue Fairy tells David that she cannot bring Monica back because a genetic sample is needed. Then, David's Mecha Teddy bear enters the frame through shadows into the Blue Fairy's spotlight. One film critic - the best one - wrote to me that he hopes to write an entire piece on Teddy, a semiotic neuter and phallus plaything that Spielberg's spatial profundity places beyond symbolism ("I'm not a toy!" Teddy growls at one point). The shot of Teddy handing David a lock of Monica's hair - the remnants of the castration scene - elicits fits of sobbing.

We're moved because David's quest to transcend "otherness" - and the mortality that "self" signifies - through love, is also our own. In response to David's rationale, "Now, you can bring her back," the Mechas finally participate in their experiment: "Give him what he wants." Their imaginations piqued along with ours, it's the first time one of the evolved Mechas speaks out loud.

Before bringing Monica back, the Mecha, voiced by Ben ("The list is life") Kingsley, explains that genetic cloning taps into the time/space continuum, allowing the resurrected to retain their memories and personalities. Then, Kingsley explicates the purpose of these experiments: to solve the mystery of what humans call "spirit." Spielberg sets the scene in a trompe l'ol in which the digital sky seen out of a window changes from day to night. The mystery of "spirit" is also a cinematic one. Thus, there is a caveat. When the resurrected fall asleep - something a Mecha cannot do - they die, never to return.

Unimaginative incapacity to connect meaning to feeling, criticisms abound that Spielberg uses trite narrative string-pulling to "manipulate" audience emotions. The internal and meta logic is actually philosophically rigorous. Monica's "spirit" departs linear time/space because when she sleeps, she dreams - an entrance into the eternal continuum.

Following this, the coda layers film narration and spectatorship into an indivisible imaginative connection. Spielberg's montage condenses the day David spends with the resurrected Monica to minutes, yet his piquant images communicate a lifetime - such as the blissful ones of Monica drying David's hair or of Monica and David celebrating his BIRTHDAY (do I have to spell it out?).

In another, David illustrates the story of his adventures to Monica with paintings of the faces that touched his/our/Spielberg's imagination. Spielberg shows us David's paintings, like storyboards for a film, in a panning camera movement that ends with Monica's expression of astonishment. Her imaginative response: "I've always loved you," even as she falls asleep. David cries tears as real as our own.

Kingsley narrates the entire sequence, revealing the source of the narration at the beginning of A.I. as Mecha. That establishes a particular point of view for the film's tale. The entire story has been a Mecha myth about the origins of their own spirituality. By uniting our imaginations with the Mecha's, Spielberg rediscovers the human spirit and reaffirms the human imagination.

The social binary structures that inhibit our imaginations fraught David's journey with peril: Mecha/Orga, immortality/mortality, love/sex. Spielberg's final shot transcends these binary structures fully. In it, David lies next to the sleeping/dead Monica. Holding her hand, he also sleeps/dies. David's death is a total transgression.

Kingsley's narration over the final shot: "And for the first time, David went to the place where dreams are born." What we witness isn't cathartic purgation. David doesn't die so that we have don't have to. His death challenges our imaginations: to understand and to act. Thus, Spielberg's metaphysical contemplation attains political and personal consequence. Spielberg took action by making this movie. The very last thing we see in A.I.: a title reading, "For Stanley Kubrick."

The camera zooms/trucks out of the bedroom window, framing the image of David in bed with Monica like a movie. The shot fades out in an iris that surrounds the light of the bedroom - and then engulfs it. Spielberg fades out cinematic distancing, giving death the meaning our Flesh Fair movie culture removes. The final fade to black signifies the end of the film. Yet, Spielberg's reviled narrative stops-and-starts imply that there are no endings. David's story doesn't end after death. Our imaginative awakening must operate in our lives after the movie.

That will not be easy. Spielberg uses a very subtle spatial strategy to access the sublime. He repeats a motif from "The Fury" in which De Palma crosscuts Gillian scratching a wall and Robin scratching the arm of a chair, signifying a psychic link. Earlier in A.I., Monica spies on David looking at her family photographs that include her cryogenically frozen son. The camera closes in on her hand scratching a wall. The motif continues as Monica learns that her real son has been cured. When she abandons David, Monica repels his efforts at physical contact. Those who don't believe Monica's love for him miss that her and David's motivations are beyond familial love so that it includes romantic, sexual, and spiritual love. Spielberg won't divide sex from love. David holds Monica's hand, physically filling the absence shown by prior scenes. Spielberg's sensuality transforms taboo into movie ecstasy.

Teddy enters this frame-within-a-frame, climbing onto the bed. Spielberg's mise-en-scene becomes mise-en-abime. Identifying with the androgynous Teddy, we share his basic spatial quandry: is he going to watch or can he join in? Spielberg's spatial imagination heightens our emotional investment in Teddy. Our imaginative leap mirrors Monica and David's la grande morte, the Mechas' mythmaking, and Spielberg's faith in the audience.