The waters came quickly

There are a lot of takeaways a person could have from his first viewing of A.I. Artificial Intelligence in 19 years, and only second overall.

Mine was what the humans did, or did not do, as they saved themselves from the ocean levels rising.

As we know from the opening narration, the movie takes place in an unspecified future time when the polar ice caps have melted and have left Earth with a lot more water than it had before. Most if not all climate change theories, though, posit a steady increase over time, a steady loss of the shorelines and, eventually, the cities situated close to them.

Given how much water engulfs Manhattan -- like, up to maybe the 20th floor of the skyscrapers -- A.I. must take place in a very distant future indeed if we are going to go with this idea of a slow encroachment.

But even if there was a sudden increase in temperature that made the water levels rise more rapidly over a shorter period of time, they still wouldn't flood the cities in some gush of unexpected water. Humans would have time to get their affairs in order, wouldn't they?

And so it was that I became a bit fixated on why the makers of the Pinocchio-themed section of Coney Island did not have time to disassemble their creations and move them inland.

Now, if you lose your house to a fire, you take only a handful of beloved belongings with you, if that. Kind of depends how quickly it all happens. But if you lose your house to the equivalent of creeping damp -- something that will destroy it, but over a long period of time -- you take everything that isn't bolted down, and even some things that are.

I argue that those who made this wondrous Pinocchio land would have enough love for what they had made -- the same love that Geppetto has for his own creation -- that they would uproot it from its moorings in Coney Island and move it to -- I don't know -- Davenport, Iowa. Or wherever they planned to create New Manhattan -- because that's what humans do, what they have always done. Make new versions of old places they had to leave.

It's certainly nice for the story that the blue fairy is still down there, able to endure 2,000 years of the hopeful stare of our robot boy David -- which remained one of my most profound moments of melancholy during this viewing. But in reality, she'd probably be somewhere inland, enduring that version of the death of the human race.

Is it a major plot point? Worth writing a blog post about?

Nope.

But those are my thoughts on a Saturday morning in August in the great pandemic of 2020.