Spielberg: Artificial Intelligence: A.I. part 4
At the end of Act III, David and his robot big brother Joe have escaped the Flesh Fair and are back in the woods. David declares his goal: to find the Blue Fairy of Pinocchio. David’s search for the Blue Fairy is, of course, the "search for the father" that Joseph Campbell writes about — in David’s case, literally so. He’s temporarily replaced his "mother" with a nanny-bot, he’s replaced his "evil" brother Martin with his "good" brother Joe, and now he’s going to replace his "bad" father Henry with his "good" father Prof Hobby — although he doesn’t know that yet.
Spielberg: Artificial Intelligence: A.I. part 3
At the beginning of Act III, A.I. appears to change protagonists for a third, or even fourth, time (if you count the prologue). Since this kind of structural gambit is unprecedented in Spielberg, it’s tempting to assume that it began with Kubrick, who performs a similar serial-protagonist stunt with 2001 and has multiple protagonists in Dr. Strangelove. But the serial protagonists in 2001 are four individuals all reacting to the same stimulus (namely, the monolith), whereas the protagonists of A.I. are all looking at a question ("what does it mean to be human?") from a different point of view. In the end, of course, they’re all fakeouts: David is the protagonist of A.I., and when we see parts of the narrative from other points of view, it’s only to give us some contrast or perspective to David’s struggle to become "real."