Martin, the real son.
What a horrible kid! She should have left him in the woods and kept David. Martin seems like the type to grow into a serial killer.
shareI agree. He was a bit of a monster.
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MovieChat Forums > A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) Discussion > Martin, the real son.
He was supposed to represent all that was wrong with humanity.
shareRare to see such a malevolent kid from Spielberg.
shareMartin ruined everything.
shareThe kid and the mother were annoying as f...
shareIn a way, it was Martin who propelled the story forward.
I mean, wasn't it Martin's idea to have his mother read Pinocchio to both him and David, sowing the seed in David's mind about becoming a real live boy?
Martin displays the angst of his dwindling species, the angst of a child afraid of being replaced by a 'perfect' android, and the neurotic confidence of a son who knows he's the only child his parents are ever going to have. He's their Golden Child, their Only Ever, and he may even understand that as a person he's a bit of a sh*t. Unfortunately that all makes him very much the product of his parents. David is who David is, because his 'parents' made him that way. The same is true for Martin.
shareRuined the entire movie for me. Couldn't figure out why they would want a second (AI or not) son when the first was coming back home so soon. And why The boy was so obsessed with the mother when she wasn't that great to begin with. And yes I know the Pinocchio story.
shareThe didn't know Martin would be coming home at the time. As far as they knew, there was yet no cure for whatever Martin had that forced the family to put him into an induced coma (or perhaps suspended animation?). It was never made clear what exactly was wrong with Martin, iirc. But yeah.... Martin coming home was a surprise. Had they known ahead of time, they likely would never have considered having David... But the trauma of losing a child made them want for the joys of parenting again.
shareTo be fair we don't know the actual passage of time. Remember Kubrick was attached to this project, he of the 'Bone that turns into a Spaceship' segue that covers millions of years in a few seconds. In this film 2000 years passes within a few phrases of a Ben Kingsley narration, and when it is over Humanity is extinct, and all that it ever was is now entombed in ice. It could very well have been a few years, or even a decade, that Monica loved David. It doesn't really matter, David proved that part of the experiment when Monica started the imprinting protocol. And then Martin showed up again to screw everything up.
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