Fabulously Flawed Films: Steven Spielberg's A.I.: Spielberg Channels Kubrick

I have a real penchant for films that just don’t quite work. This is different from enjoying films that are just terrible for their sheer campiness (i.e., Chronicles of Riddick). Rather, in these cases I think films become interesting because the scope of their ambition is so massive that even in failed execution they have something to offer, either in light of the films they could have been, or in terms of what they teach about the craft of story telling.

Stephen Spielberg’s film A.I. is not just one such film to me, but perhaps one of the finest examples out there of a “fabulously flawed film.’ I know some of you will be shaking your heads already, either because you saw A.I. and the film made you angry or frustrated (I have had more arguments about A.I. with people than any other film ever) or just because you read the bad reviews. I actually saw A.I. twice in its opening weekend (and own the DVD) because it is such a complicated, cruel, peculiar and brilliant mess of a film. Divided into three sections, it is really three short films with radically different moods and messages.

In A.I.’s first section a prototype of a robot boy is adopted by a family. This section is the most like Stanley Kubrick's work (Kubrick, in case you didn't know, dreamed of making A.I. for over 20 years before talking to Spielberg about working on it. The project was finally handed over to Spielberg in its entirety after Kubrick's death) in that it is slow and stark and horror comes in the sudden and infrequent bursts of actual emotion from the characters. This first section ends with the robot boy being abandoned in the woods, as his family is no longer comfortable with him, but his adoptive mother is unwilling to take him to be destroyed.