A.I. at 25: What Spielberg's Flawed Masterpiece Got Right About Artificial Intelligence

Steven Spielberg returned to science fiction this summer with Disclosure Day, an optimistic movie about aliens and empathy and why we all can’t get along.

Starring Josh O’Connor as a U.F.O. whistleblower and Emily Blunt as a weather lady who learns she has a mysterious gift, Disclosure Day saw the near 80-year-old Hollywood heavyweight worrying about life on Earth and wondering what might happen if we all looked up from our phones and into the skies. 

If you’ve seen that one and are on the lookout for a little more genre spectacle delivered with Spielberg’s unique touch, look no further than A.I. Artificial Intelligence, a flawed but fascinating masterpiece that celebrates its 25th anniversary this June.

Written by the sci-fi legend Brian Aldiss and originally dreamed up as a feature by Stanley Kubrick in the 1970s, it’s a movie packed with prescient ideas about our ever-cozying relationship with A.I. and one that feels more resonant today than it did to audiences who flocked to see it a quarter century ago. 

In the piece below, I dig a little deeper into how the movie got made and look at what it accurately predicted (so far) about A.I. and our ever-evolving connection to it.

How Spielberg ended up directing Kubrick’s movie

As a movie, A.I. blends two distinct narratives. The first is a classic sci-fi parable about the human capacity to outsource the love and affection in our lives to powerful tech companies (yeah, as if). The second is a fable about a robot boy named David who asks for nothing more than his human mother’s love. When Aldiss’ short story was first published in Harper’s Bazaar in the 1960s, both of those ideas were very much present. Then, Stanley Kubrick bought the rights in the 1970s, and brought Aldiss along to help him expand it into a modern take on Pinocchio, the wooden boy who wants to become real.

Despite successfully bringing 2001: A Space Odyssey to the screen in 1968, the director was unconvinced that the technology existed at the time to bring Aldiss’ story to life, and so A.I. was shelved. Then, in the 1980s, Kubrick began to discuss the movie again with a young Steven Spielberg; and after seeing a little picture called Jurassic Park in 1993, he finally conceded that CGI had caught up with the images in his head. When Kubrick passed away in 1999, just before the release of Eyes Wide Shut, all of his meticulously detailed production work was given to Spielberg along with his blessing to direct.

Is A.I. more Spielberg or Kubrick?

That’s a question that’s still up for debate. Watching it back today, the best parts of the movie are the most contained — in other words, the first and final act, both of which zoom-in on David and his mother. They are also the parts that feel the most Kubrickian, especially the horror-coded early sequences when David (brilliantly played by Haley Joel Osment) appears as both a sympathetic character and an eerily unpredictable one.

The opening shot of the futuristic car speeding through the forest is particularly reminiscent of Kubrick’s opening to The Shining, but there are no shortage of Spielbergian flourishes in those early sequences, too: not least given Janusz Kaminski’s unmistakable cinematography and the phenomenal performance that the director draws from Osment, who was just 11-year-old at the time.

The least convincing portion is easily the middle third, which is also frankly the part that feels the most Spielbergian and heavy handed. Even in the harrowing scenes at the Flesh Fair, where unwanted robots are rounded up and mutilated for sport, you can sense the film losing its nerve when it should really go for the jugular. This becomes even more apparent when David and Joe (a pleasure-bot played by Jude Law) travel to Rouge City — a sequence that cries out for something on par with the horrifying donkey transformation in Disney’s Pinocchio, but one in which we actually just get the guy from Entourage driving some frat boys through a giant mouth, as well as a CGI Einstein voiced by Robin Williams. Granted, partying and debauchery have never been Spielberg’s forte, and either way, the movie more than makes up for it in the final stretch. 

Spielberg only recently confirmed that the beings who save David from his watery grave are not aliens at all but David’s vastly advanced descendants. This is why they view the more primitively designed robot as a deity: because he was made by a human hand. In the closing sequence, David’s wish finally comes true and he gets to spend a single day with his mother after two millennia of heartbroken waiting. As endings go, it’s a relatively happy one. It’s also one that feels like a perfect mix of light and dark — or in other words, both filmmakers' sensibilities. 

What the movie says about A.I.

Needless to say, A.I. leaves you with plenty of ideas to chew on — and less than you’d think about what we should fear from the threat of A.I. then what A.I. should fear from us. For now, the most prescient aspects of Aldiss and Kubrick’s story are the ones we get to see outside David’s home. At the Flesh Fair in particular, David meets a selection of defunct and out of date models, including a nanny, a newscaster, and (bizarrely) a comedian played by Chris Rock. There’s also Joe’s introduction as a Pleasure Bot, and the noirish scene when one of his clients is murdered in a crime of passion. 

The ideas lurking under all of those moments are ones that have plagued sci-fi writers for decades — namely, that the first wave of A.I. robots will try their best to do what we program them to, and that we'll eventually hate them not for messing up but for doing their jobs too well. Spielberg inevitably spins this into a story about xenophobia and persecution — just watch that scene in the cages at the Flesh Fair again and tell me it isn’t designed to make you think of another Spielberg movie. 

What has A.I. gotten right so far?

The greatest sci-fi question in this movie is whether humans will ever have the capacity to reciprocate a robot’s programmed love, regardless of how genuine it might be (are we all not effectively pre-programmed by nature to love our mothers, after all?). For the most part, the movie seems cautiously optimistic that the answer to this question is yes; which, if the current epidemic of loneliness and the growing reliance on chatbot relationships is anything to go by, is an idea that has already been proven right a few times over.

There’s a famous story about an early chatbot system named Eliza in which one of the computer scientists who designed it asked his secretary to give it a go. The story goes that after exchanging a few questions, she asked her colleague to leave the room so she could continue the chat in private. That happened in 1966, around the same time that Aldiss was writing the short, so we shouldn’t be in any way surprised about how prevalent such relationships have become in the last few years, as the machines have become exponentially more advanced and our society more atomised.

Whether or not the jealousy factor will become a thing when these things start to step off the screen and into the real world (it is only a matter of time) will be fascinating to see. 

Something tells me it’s going to feel a lot more like Kubrick.