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Yeah, I agree with Goon--I thought the ending was very depressing in that way, and also the fact that no more humans inhabited the Earth after only 2,000 years. New York City in decay (with the pre-September 11 Twin Towers and everything) looked absolutely dreary/miserable as the robots flew out of David's watery tomb.
************WARNING--SPOILERS AHEAD!!!*****************
The movie rubbed me the wrong way in that it seemed like a wierd hybrid of two totally different director's styles. I know Spielberg and Kubrick were friends before Kubrick's death, and the movie clearly shows Kubrick's influence and Spielberg's earnest attempts to frame the film in Kubrick's vision. However, try as he might, Spielberg will never be another Kubrick, and vice versa. Kubrick might indeed have been aiming for the warm, touchy-feely ending that is so characteristic of many of Spielberg's films, but Kubrick's style is by nature very dark--thus, his ending carried that undertone of darkness (as Goon so astutely pointed out re: the "mother-becomes-toy" theory) despite David's night of feeling loved.
To be fair, though, I do think the film had some really intelligent insights about human nature--some that bordered on nihilism that I don't personally agree with, but thought were insightful anyway. The movie conveyed throughout how innately selfish we are as a species, how we rely on technology to "play God" by defying death and cloning our humanity artificially (even with the selfish "gimme gimme gimme love" that characterized David the robot). The humans in the picture were driven by selfish impulses, which they transferred to their own artificial creations--David had the eros love that bases itself on what other people (like his imprinted "mother" could do for him emotionally, rather than what he could do for other people). Jude Law's robot in Gigolo Joe was the only character that seemed to defy this notion by giving other women (including abused women) pleasure, but his character wasn't explored fully or completely enough for the movie IMO.
The movie also implied at the end (even though, yep, the ending itself did smack of corniness) how our selfishness and technological superiority combined can lead to our very end. The movie never explained why humans were extinct--was it as a result of a Terminator-like sci-fi future in which robots learned to destroy humans, or were the robots the only remnants of a humanity that destroyed itself by very real means (nuclear holocaust, mass depletion of natural resources, global warming/ozone layer decay, etc.)? Kubrick probably made a deliberate attempt to leave this ending ambiguous for us to ponder this possibility--which I think is a very cool aspect about this movie.
So in short, although I don't think the movie was as inspired as Full Metal Jacket or as moving as Schindler's List, I think it was an okay effort. Two bombs seems to be fair enough.
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