Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick are both great movie directors, who are both very important in the movie history. The film A.I.: Artificial Intelligence is a special movie that combines these two unique souls together.

The $90-million film is based on Brian Aldiss’ short story “Super-Toys Last All Summer Long,” with an elaborate treatment and storyboards supervised by Kubrick in the early ‘90s, and a script written by Spielberg himself.

The protagonist David is played by Haley Joel Osment. David, who seems to be a normal human boy, is actually a robot with human emotions and intelligence. In the process of simply trying to love human beings, he is constantly encountering setbacks caused by the real people he has met. He then meets with more mechas in an adventure escaping the family of the human host, and continues to learn humanity in the predicament and experience the growth of the mind like a human teenager. The film contains the Pinocchio metaphor and the Kubrick-style dark tones, but Spielberg added a strong human warmth and innocent emotions, greatly reducing Kubrick’s pessimistic and gloomy style.

Time magazine wrote that A.I. “represents the collaboration and collision of two master filmmakers: Stanley Kubrick who spent parts of more than 15 years on the project; and Steven Spielberg, whom Kubrick finally asked to direct it, and who did, from his own screenplay,after Kubrick’s death in 1999” (Corliss 2001). The magazine concluded that the film was “fascination as awedding of two disparate auteurs…. Spielberg has the warmest of directorial styles, Kubrick among the coolest.”

After the death of Kubrick, Spielberg took this unfinished film and started writing the screenplay himself.“It was like getting my wisdom teeth pulled all over again, because Stanley was sitting on the seat back behind me saying, ‘No, don’t do that!’ I felt like I was being coached by a ghost! I finally just had to kind of be disrespectful to the extent that I needed to be able to write this, not from Stanley’s heart, but from mine. I was like an archeologist, picking up the pieces of a civilization, putting Stanley’s picture back together again.”(Los Angeles Times)

Kubrick had left a brilliant first, and third act, but the middle section had “pieces of a dream, but was scattered.” Working from notes that Harlan sent on to him, Spielberg “assembled these fragments into a living organism.” In shooting the actual film, he wound up using, he estimates, some 600 of Baker’s original storyboards. Steven Spielberg said that “I can’t know what Stanley knew. I can’t be who Stanley was, and I’ll never be who Stanley might have been,”, speaking in a sense to the Kubrick devotees. “But I can tell a really great story, and it’s too good a story to let it collect dust in Stanley’s archive.”

If this is a work done by Kubrick himself, it will be more sturdy and more penetrating, but Spielberg put a layer of warmth on it and made “A.I.” into a piece of mellow wine. Maybe Spielberg wanted to make this film have a glance of hope. The little boy’s attachment to love and his attempt to becoming a real human all show the brilliance of hope. But there is a paradox in it. This is what Kubrick wanted to discuss. It is the final difference between man and machine. If people say that only love can build human, but when the machine can love, then only being indifferent can build human, because humans have created such a machine that can love. What Kubrick wanted to tell is the fact that people are shuddering, that is, although the machine is cold, but it has a warm heart, oppositely, human doesn’t. Spielberg added a footnote to this, the warm machine was created by the cold people. About whether the last part of this film was originally written by Kubrick or added by Spielberg, there are different opinions. But even with the addition of a soft ending, it still has a hint of horror – this may be the Kubrick style that even Spielberg can’t erase.

This film is always highly controversial. Many critics like the film and gave applications without reservation, while others criticized this film directly. In 2001, when A.I. was first released, Peter Bradshaw said that “ It’s an almost laughably creaky museum piece.” He emphasized that “In any case, the whole idea of the robot as the avatar of future existence is about as cutting-edge as the Post Office Tower.” I am not agree with him because I never consider the idea of robot, or artificial intelligence is something out of fashion. On the contrary, it is a practical problem that we have to face and discuss now and in the future.

This movie attacked on the most frightening part of human beings, and have a deep meaning on the questioning of human love and machine love. Critic Chris Otsuki said that: ”The world needs films like A.I. that ask hard questions: that show us, like Ecclesiastes, what life is like if there is no love or faith or hope. Steven Spielberg’s films sometimes bespeak a genuine spiritual hunger. A.I. bespeaks the moral and spiritual famine of our age. May it sharpen the hunger of all who see it — and all who were involved in its making — that they might seek out the true food.”

I love watching science fictions, because it has often been called pop culture’s answer to metaphysics, a secular way to explore the myth of transcendence. Spielberg believes this, and it is probably why “E.T.” is his most popular film. “Science fiction does not have to go very far to connect with the spiritual,” he says. “Science fiction is about pure imagination, about dreaming. And imagination and dreaming are as close to basic beliefs as anything we can cherish.”