At first I really didn’t know what to make of this movie. The entire beginning—which I’ve come to think of as the first act—seemed to me like it was setting up an entirely different story than where we actually ended up. I was actually quite bored in the beginning, I’ll be honest, or at least most of my interest came from my own thoughts about bionic children and not from the plot of the movie itself. It’s not until after David is exiled into the “real world” that the movie really felt like it started for me. And while I am disparaging it a little bit, I did find the change in setting to be really interesting for how it shifted my understanding of the story’s world. In the first act, while androids are apparently commonplace, everything else about the family’s home life is familiar and relatively commonplace—the mother makes coffee every morning, they eat dinner together, they throw a pool party for their son. It’s a very mundane perspective in a world that on the outside is very similar to Blade Runner.
A similar shift happens again in what I’ll call the third act—the part with the aliens. I honestly expected the movie to end with David at the bottom of the ocean pleading to the Blue Fairy forever, but instead it fasts forward 2,000 years until David is the only “real” boy left on Earth. I found the ending a bit strange and almost fitting, if I weren’t so mystified by the structure of it. It’s easy to think of it as in three parts, but in reality they’re very unbalanced, with the second part containing almost all of the plot. The other two almost feel like bookends in this regard, and ones that I’m not completely sure were necessary.
