From the Summer 2024 Sight and Sound.

What’s the difference between being dead and being alive? The answer may seem obvious, but if one regards A.I. Artifcial Intelligence as a living work by a dead flmmaker – a revamping of Pinocchio to recount the heartbreaking fate of a boy robot programmed to love his human surrogate mother — the many paradoxes arising from this become far too significant to ignore. Even the fact that the credited director is Steven Spielberg, working from a Stanley Kubrick treatment, can be traced back to Kubrick’s own proposal, motivated by Spielberg’s capacity to direct a child actor more quickly than he could have done (specifcally, before the child could visibly age) and by Spielberg’s ability to handle certain kinds of emotion. And given the flm’s postulate that anyone’s life can become a living death, whether one happens to be a human being in a coma (Jake Thomas as Martin Swinton, whose infrmity and absence provoke his parents into buying a robot to replace him) or a robot who can outlive and outlast humanity (the remarkable Haley Joel Osment as David), the task of separating people from robots may turn out to be as diffcult as distinguishing life from death, ‘natural’ love from being programmed, or even the happiest Kubrick ending (the hero is granted, after centuries of waiting, his ultimate wish) from the bleakest and most absurdist of all (humanity’s fnal gasp takes the form of a programmed robot’s Oedipal wet dream). A philosophical parable that makes me weep and a wrenching allegory about cinema’s illusory capacity to resurrect the dead, A.I. is a tragedy that celebrates a robot’s hope in the midst of mankind’s defeat.Insofar as Kubrick’s oeuvre largely consists of a cinema of doubts, part of its diabolical function is to overturn whatever certainties we might bring to it – including the simple cataloguing issue of whether one of Kubrick’s most ambitious projects, which he spent longer conceptualising and developing than any of his other flms, can be adequately identifed simply as ‘a film by Steven Spielberg’. (This is not to overlook Spielberg’s fingerprints, for better or worse. One example of the latter might be the flm’s failure to confront the villainy of William Hurt’s Professor Hobby, the inventor of David and his industrial duplicates.) Moreover, if we find that doubts about the future may be more useful than accurate prophecies (so Nineteen Eighty-Four beats Brave New World), and if we can label all stories that deal with such doubts as science fiction, A.I. is Kubrick’s fourth foray into that genre. It was, ironically, made and released only posthumously, in 2001, a year quite different from the one depicted in Kubrick’s most influential picture. Yet paradoxically, in contrast to the Cold War trappings of Dr. Strangelove (1964), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and A Clockwork Orange (1971 – which references Russia mostly through its polyglot slang), A.I., set in the 22nd century, is geographically the most provincial and isolationist of them all, never straying beyond the New York and New Jersey coastlines. (By contrast, its principal and far worldlier cinematic ancestor, Disney’s 1940 Pinocchio, incorporates Cockney and Italian characters and European settings.) One might even argue that the implicit misanthropy and xenophobia of A.I. – especially evident in the Flesh Fair sequence and explicitly expressed against humans – is, sadly, what makes it most characteristic of the 21st century. It arrives in and helps to defne an era in which mankind seems to be losing faith in itself, at the same time that global warming and artificial intelligence – the two major extrapolations offered by the flm – are confirming many of our most troubling doubts.