If they only had a heart.

Forget the hairy primates in the newest Planet of the Apes remake. Never mind the most menacing alien Steven Spielberg has ever created. What's really creepy is the way human beings relate to the world around them.

THE BEST SCIENCE FICTION ISN'T ABOUT ALIENS OR robots. It's about humans, seen through the eyes of aliens and robots. Good science fiction probes the mystery of our humanity by imagining how we look to these strangers. In a pair of recent sci-fi flicks Steven Spielberg, Stanley Kubrick, and Tim Burton have us looking at ourselves through alien eyes--and the view is not flattering.

At first glance, Spielberg and Kubrick's A.I. looks like a remake of Pinocchio for the dot.com generation. David (Haley Joel Osment) is a sentient and heartbreakingly adorable robot that wants to become a real boy. Fashioned by a seemingly kind and wise Gepetto (William Hurt as Professor Hobby), this android child sets off on a perilous quest for the Blue Fairy, encounters a gallery of rogues and hucksters, and, like his Disney predecessor, finds himself trapped at the bottom of the ocean with his diminutive companion and sidekick.

Sci-fi fans have seen this tale of a cyborg in search of humanity before. Like the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz, Star Trek's own android Data (Brent Spiner) has long entertained fantasies of an "emotion-chip' that would transform him into someone who could laugh and cry and love as humans do. And in Bicentennial Man, Andrew (Robin Williams) is a household robot whose mis-wired circuitry provides him with a "heart" and enables him to grow into a person with more wit, grace, and humanity than most of the Homo sapiens he encounters.

BUT A.I IS DIFFERENT. DAVID ALREADY HAS A WHALE-SIZED heart, and his e-chip has been programmed to love unconditionally and eternally. The problem is, David's mommy (Frances O'Connor) and the other humans he meets--including his creator, Professor Hobby--are not capable of such steadfast love. They do not--perhaps cannot--return his affection. And so Spielberg and Kubrick's film, a grim fairy tale about abandonment, has more in common with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein than Disney's Pinocchio.

Indeed, in A.I. it's not the humanity of the android that's in question. It's the soundness of the human heart, that elusive prize so coveted by puppets, cyborgs, and tin men. Spielberg, who has made us feel the anguish and panic of lost children in E.T. and Empire of the Sun, has fashioned in David a waif as attractive and endearing as Eliot or Jim. What, then, is wrong with the humans in this tale that they cannot love this child as anything but a toy? What monstrous flaw in the wiring of the human heart allows his parents to discard him like a Pentium II?

In raising these questions, Spielberg and Kubrick's fairy tale is reminiscent of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner and Ira Levin's The Stepford Wives. Like the cyborgs in those films, David and his traveling companions--Teddy Bear (Jack Angel) and Gigolo Joe (Jude Law)--are toys made to entertain and comfort their owners but not to make any demands upon them. And when such playthings become tiresome or outdated, they are cast away, replaced by newer and improved models.

IT'S HARD TO WATCH THIS FUTURISTIC FABLE and not wonder how consumerism is already corrupting our notions of love or distorting the bonds tying us to each other. In a world where we are taught to love our new cars, CD players, and jet skis--and where the purchase of each toy is supposed to bring us friendship, intimacy, and lasting happiness--it's tough to remember that real love is hard and not at all like the warm, fuzzy feeling we get while opening a new present. In Following Christ in a Consumer Culture (Orbis, 1991), Father John Kavanaugh, S.J. argued that consumerism affects the way we love, even shaping how we relate to our spouses and children. We get used to loving things that make no demands on us; we begin to think of persons and relationships as commodities or toys to be acquired and discarded according to our needs or taste.

A.I. raises the specter of consumerism's corrosive effect on the tie binding parent and child and warns of the modern-day temptation to see our offspring as commodities. Reproductive technologies, genetic engineering, and cloning may soon make it possible to have "designer children"--perfect, undemanding creatures who look and behave in ways that please and fulfill their parents. In our consumerist culture it's all too easy to believe we should have the sort of children we want. But, as Spielberg and Kubrick's film seems to wonder, what sort of creatures do we become when we set out to make the job of parenting all play and no work? Could our toy children ever learn to love from such owners?

HUMANS ARE THE ALIENS IN TIM Burton's remake of Planet of the Apes, and--just like in the 1968 original--they've crash-landed on a planet where Homo sapiens are not the top primate, but lowly Sherpas and servants to their simian siblings. Based on a French novel by Pierre Boulle, both versions of the film follow the exploits of an earthling astronaut who finds himself stranded in a world where humans have been colonized and enslaved by gorillas and apes and chimps--oh my! Imagine Robinson Crusoe waking to find that he's a beast of burden on Animal Farm, and you've got the general idea.

Boulle and Burton use this role reversal to satirize a variety of human failings, including colonialism, racism, sexism, and the ecological rape of the planet--and to give us a sense of what it might be like to be on the receiving end of some of these very human sins. Suddenly dropkicked to the bottom rung of the evolutionary ladder, Capt. Leo Davidson (Mark Wahlberg) is incensed at being treated with the disdain and disregard that European colonials and their descendants have long shown the indigenous peoples and cultures they enslaved and ravaged, or with the contempt and arrogance that patriarchal and racist societies have exhibited toward women and people of color.

In the Charlton Heston version of Planet, the apes were a kinder; nobler species than their hairless cousins. More like Vulcans than Klingons. But in Burton's film they, like the livestock in Animal Farm, have taken on more "human" traits and offer an unflattering reflection of our species' worst tendencies.

Their leader, General Thade (Tim Roth), is an ambitious, arrogant, and militant chimp who becomes enraged at humans who make eye contact and entertains dinner guests by ridiculing the notion of Homo sapiens with souls. Meanwhile, most gorillas and orangutans and apes turn a blind eye to the cruelties and injustices of slavery and make vulgar jokes about the stench, stupidity, and promiscuity of humans. Even ape children seem mean-spirited, tossing rocks at captured slaves and ridiculing a liberal primate with one of the cruelest of epithets: "human-lover!" These apes are clearly not "evolved," but they are painfully familiar.

In their different ways both A.I. and Planet of the Apes offer meditations on what it means and takes to be human. The answer they provide is not so different from the lesson of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37). Through the eyes of abandoned children and colonizing primates we come to see that our real dignity as humans doesn't consist in any superiority over robots, aliens, or other species, but in our capacity to recognize, respect, and respond to the dignity and humanity of all others--whether they are like us or not.

In the introduction to Luke's parable about the stranger who comes to the aid of a wounded man, a lawyer asks Jesus, "Who is my neighbor?" Or: "Who deserves my love?" But Jesus responds with a very different question: "Who proved to be a good neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?" The one who heard and recognized his cries for help. The one who came to his aid. The one who loved. For, as both Pinocchio and Frankenstein's monster understood, love is what it takes to become a human, and to be a good neighbor.

By PATRICK MCCORMICK, an associate professor of Christian ethics at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.