To me, the unsettled reaction some people have to Close Encounters of the Third Kind is evidence that Spielberg is a great filmmaker. An audience could easily take it as optimistic and spectacular, but there are things about it that bother some people. The film's main character pursues an obsession at the expense of his relationship with his family, and instead is drawn into communion with complete strangers. It's a film about a man who sees something as divine, and responds to it as if it really were, even when it demands that he upend his life and torpedo his closest relationships. Many scenes are portrayed with bizarrely overlapping sounds, and the film's tone changes in odd swings throughout. It simultaneously suggests that what's really important might demand things of us that make us uncomfortable, that we are capable of great and terrible things when we believe something is important, and that such belief may be very confused, delusional, or a symptom of some illness.
Compared to Spielberg's other films, Close Encounters is less of a crowd-pleaser; A.I. is even less so. It too includes an unsettling element, which is Haley Joel Osment's performance as the android ("Mecha") David in the early parts of the film. He falls in the uncanny valley. The early scenes between David and his parents are not intimate, but cold and mysterious, almost ominous. In one scene when David talks to his mother, he appears as little more than a silhouette; his mother leaves the room to speak with his father, and now they're silhouettes.
The film clearly finds something perverse about what David is, but not because his "humanity" is in question. It's because of how he's used, first as an object for people to act out their feelings on, and second as something to be mass-produced, packaged, and sold.
Think about this film's premise: bereaved parents agree to take in an experimental Mecha as a treatment for their grief over the loss of their comatose child. The purpose of this Mecha is to receive love they want to give—even though they don't believe he has feelings. The father even says that if they don't like it, they can send him back. The underlying assumption of David's existence is that going through the motions of love is meaningful even if it's all just a simulation.
Eventually their first child, Martin, wakes up from his coma. The biggest difference between him and David is his cruelty, which he displays in how he treats David. But Martin thinks David has no feelings, so why does it seem like cruelty to us? Part of it is the film's manipulations. But again: even just going through the motions is meaningful. The imagination gives it significance.
Later on, people revel in displaying cruelty. At the "Flesh Fair," organic humans make a spectacle of destroying Mechas. Like David's parents and David himself, the characters feel some need to show off who they are, and they react with hostility when things are even a little different from how they imagine they should be. The film doesn't bother much with the question of whether David is "human." The film reveals that doubts about his "humanity" are reactionary: people's responses to injustice or personal loss become mediated by their disgust for David's offbeat performance of humanity.
So artificial things are meaningful. What we pretend is important to our real lives, somehow. That sounds nice--our favorite toys and robots (and movies) actually matter. But it means our own longings can be bought and sold, and that our performances of cruelty matter as much as our other performances.
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