In science fiction, technological progress is often portrayed as bringing humankind ever closer to God in terms of understanding and exploiting the universe. At the beginning of Steven Spielberg's "A.I.," a scientist with the interesting name of Dr. Hobby (William Hurt) expounds before a group of underlings on the need to cross that last frontier of artificial intelligence: love. An employee wonders out loud if programming machines to love isn't morally objectionable. "Didn't God create Adam so that he might love Him?" responds Hobby, rhetorically, not realizing that he just answered the employee's question with a resounding "yes."

Steven Spielberg's tale of a robot boy programmed to love his "mommy" is a good example of how a movie's theme can overwhelm its content, but stylistically it's a considerable achievement.

Spielberg's conception of an ecologically ruined future where couples are limited to one offspring by law is immediately comprehensible; and the world of the robots, or "mechas" as they're called here, is rendered with believable dramatic force. David (Haley Joel Osment), the experimental robot child "who will love forever," is eventually turned out of the home where he has been sent to comfort a woman (Frances O'Connor) whose own son had been dying from a seemingly incurable disease.