10 Movie Moments You've Always Misunderstood

3. The Creatures At The End Are Robots, Not Aliens - A.I.

What Everybody Thinks

Steven Spielberg's sci-fi drama concludes with android boy David (Haley Joel Osment) buried in the frozen ocean, wishing to become a real boy.

Some 2000 years later, humans are extinct and an ice age has ravaged the Earth, while a race of what many believe to be aliens resurrect David from the ice.

Wishing for him to teach them about humanity, they agree to resurrect his "mother" Monica (Frances O'Connor) for a day, ending the film on something closer to a happy note than simply leaving David in the ice forever more.

Still, the ending left many joking that Spielberg just couldn't make a sci-fi film without shoehorning aliens into it somehow.

The Truth

Yet the entities who thaw David out aren't aliens at all, but robots - or Mecha, more precisely, which have evolved into a silicon-based lifeform known as Specialists.

Sure, the Specialists look vaguely like the traditional "grey" aliens we're all familiar with, but the movie is literally called Artificial Intelligence - it is about how technology will ultimately outlast humanity as the dominant entity on Earth, if not the universe.

You can wring your hands over what the precise definition of "alien" would be in this context, but the creatures we see are absolutely evolved from the Mecha.