Word: kubrick
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Even when A.I. meanders or stumbles, it is fascinating as a wedding of two disparate auteurs. Kubrick took five, seven, a dozen years to make a movie; he optioned Brian Aldiss's short story "Supertoys Last All Summer Long," on which A.I. is based, in 1983. Spielberg has shot multiple films in one year, and in his spare time he helps run the DreamWorks film studio. Spielberg has the warmest of directorial styles; Kubrick's is among the coolest. One aims to seduce the audience; the other wanted to bend moviegoers to see it his way, or to hell with...
...Kubrick was a scholar of hubris. That was his persistent theme: the dream of being other, or more, than we are. The ambition that seems honorable in your standard movie hero is often revealed as idiot obsession in a Kubrick protagonist. He falls in love with a living doll (Lolita) or himself (Barry Lyndon), with an idea that may be decent (justice, say, in Paths of Glory), even artistic (writing a novel, in The Shining). But Kubrick sets him the sort of test and trap that real-boy Martin sets for David: a man must learn the limits of hope...
...like the Terminator, are designed to destroy. In the A.I. world, robots are made to give pleasure and, in David's case, offer joy. Gigolo Joe is a sex machine, David a love machine. The toy boy's sole purpose is to give and elicit affection. His obsession (in Kubrick's terms) or dream (in Spielberg's) requires him to do everything to achieve Monica's love--after she renounces him, after she abandons him, after she's gone. The woman is unworthy, but she's all he has, all he needs to get back...
That's an old-fashioned theme, but so is robotics. The Aldiss story (in which a couple contemplate dumping their robo-child as soon as the state allows them to have a real one of their own) was published in 1969 just a year after Kubrick's 2001 was released. These days, artificial intelligence has been overtaken, as scientific hope and ethical threat, by genetic engineering. A.I., set far in the future, conjures up popular worries 30 years in the past...
...well, sixth sense for the hint of ecstasy or despair in a glance. Inhabiting such a character, letting humanity seep into him: that's not artifice. It's a fine actor's art, and enough to make any mother love him. Not to mention his two fathers, Spielberg and Kubrick...