The ending may be the best scene from Spielberg's/ Kubrick's career.

Few scenes have divided opinions more extremely than A.I.'s ending but I'm afraid I'm in the minority in this one because I think this may be single greatest scene from Spielberg's career. I've said this before & I'll say it again, A.I. is Spielberg's masterpiece, his most ambitious & thought provoking film to date & the key to the film's success was Stanley Kubrick. It's no secret that Kubrick was a better filmmaker than Spielberg but it's also no secret that they were polar opposites. But miraculously, this film brings out the best in both artists. A.I. (like Pinocchio) takes an artificial creation on a journey of humanity and in doing so, it tries to understand the very nature of the human condition. Those who say that it should have ended a few scenes earlier or that the bits with Gigolo Joe are the best parts might as well be speaking to me in a foreign tongue. A.I. is a philosophical meditation on sentience, mortality and god and frankly, through all my subsequent viewings, it continues to move and speak to me more than any feature I’ve seen since.

I think the problem with the ending is that people believe the supermecha's b.s. story about creating Monica for a single day. The Monica they create is nothing like the one we saw from before, she's a fake designed only to unconditionally love David, just as David was created to unconditionally love Monica but both David & the audience bought it, which is why everyone complained about this being a happy ending. Is this our understanding of love? Programmed obsession? In fact the ending is visibly ironic. We see David make Monica some coffee, we see them play hide and seek together, we see Monica give David a haircut - or at least that's what it looks like (If you recall in the 1st Act, it's David who cuts Monica's hair), we see David tuck Monica in bed (and not vice versa), we see them celebrate David's birthday (as opposed to Martin's) and here we see Monica looking at David's paintings whereas in the 1st act, it's David who's observing Monica's family photos. All the events are repeated, except now the roles have interchanged. David is the one who's needs are being fulfilled. He's playing the role of the human this time. The supermeccha's are doing precisely what Prof. Hobby was doing before, but in subtler forms. They give David what he wants while they observe him to see what happens. He's the last connection with humans, they study him.

Fake Monica tells David she loves him, he cries, then contentedly crawls into bed next to her dead body and dies (i.e. self-terminates). Now that in itself is a tragic ending but it gets darker the more you think about it. Jonathan Rosenbaum nailed it in his review, saying the ending sparks a feeling "too terrible to name". Love is an illusion. It's not some mystical chemical bond between 2 individuals, it's an utterly solitary fixation. David doesn't even realise that his mother has been replaced. None of what happens at the end is "real", the Monica is just an empty vessel, a product of David's imagination, but David believes it, and is happy to "go to that place where dreams are born". This may be Kubrick's bleakest ending because it shows how self-delusion can result in wish fulfilment.

Everyone complaining that David took the Pinocchio story too literally has completely missed the allegory Spielberg has presented here. David's quest to find the Blue Fairy is symbolic of man's eternal search for the god he created. In a moment of sheer beauty at the bottom of the ocean, we see the blue fairy's face dissolve into David's suggesting that she exists within him. A.I. is filled with religious symbolism ( including its circular narrative , inspired by the biblical parable about the story of Eden ). The ending (when David finally encounters the Blue Fairy) is Spielberg's version of heaven, when man finally encounters god, face-to-face. Only difference is it's a complete illusion here, a Freudian wet dream, with all sorts of extremely creepy sexual undertones which can only be attributed to Kubrick, given he's explored all of this before in the Shining.

When the fake Monica dies, A.I. addresses what modern philosophers (such as Camus) would label as the only important question in life: the genesis and exodus of humanity itself: suicide. To be or not to be? David self-terminates and accepts death because he understands that he no longer has a purpose in the world - something the supermeccha's have yet to accept. Now is when you can call him "real", a mortal. Recognising death is what makes us alive (something Joe indicates when he says - I am I was). As Heidegger pointed out, this results in a hugely important and seemingly paradoxical thought: freedom is not the absence of necessity, in the form of death. On the contrary, freedom consists in the affirmation of the necessity of one's mortality. It is only in being-towards-death that one can become the person who one truly is. Concealed in the idea of death as the possibility of impossibility is the acceptance on one's mortal limitation as the basis for an affirmation of one's life.

Audiences took the mecha story as "truth", and so left disappointed, faulting Spielberg for putting a "happy ending" onto the film, when he did the exact opposite. He simply shot it from David's emotional p.o.v., in a sequence that is cousin to the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey. But there is another level of metaphor in A.I. that few sci-fi films have dared to touch. The central question of Collodi's Pinocchio fable has always been "What does it mean to be human?" A.I. finds dark and sobering answers.

Regardless of your reservations about his past work, Spielberg makes an awful lot of other film-makers look timid and negligible by comparison and that's something that's not easy to do. At the very end, he's simply reaffirming the bed room sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey and in doing so he locates the unspoken moral of all fairy tales. To be real is to be mortal; to be human is to love, to dream, and to perish.

Dying next to your lover's corpse; that is indeed the most human of all acts.