Part 7 of 8
There is not a director on Earth that doesn’t want to win an Academy Award. This desire may not wholly drive their filmmaking (and it shouldn’t), but if someone says they detest the idea of accepting a golden statuette they are lying. One does not need a bookcase full of Oscars to prove they had a great film career, but it provides a certain je ne sais quoi that filmmakers may otherwise not get. If a prominent or well-established director has gone several years without winning, there may actually come a point where they start taking on more prestigious fare to get some awards attention. This may not be the conscious reasoning behind directing Oscar bait, but I’ll bet the desire for recognition plays a significant role. One example is the career of Martin Scorsese. After three decades of directing great films but not getting squat in return, the early ’00s saw him taking on projects like Gangs of New York and The Aviator. (Intriguingly, he finally won with the über-Scorcesian crime film The Departed.) Steven Spielberg went on his prestige binge in the ’90s, and since he came out the other end with two Best Director awards (Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan) that meant he could spend the next decade making slightly stranger—and in many cases, more ambitious—films.
In particular, the first two films he made as he entered the “aughts” were a couple of science fiction films with a then-novel concept: they had ideas. Let’s face it: at this point in his career, Spielberg can probably get enough money to do whatever he wants. A.I. Artificial Intelligence and Minority Report are both films that ingeniously utilize his technical and visual mastery with his storytelling abilities in order to create first-rate science fiction. These are films that do nothing but take risks, and as a result they have become rather divisive. (A.I. in particular.) I am a fan of both films, and I think they are two of the more interesting films he’s ever made. They are not only fascinating entertainment; they paint a picture of a director who refuses to settle with mediocrity.
A.I. Artificial Intelligence is an interesting case because it initially came from the mind of the man who made one of the great idea-centric science fiction films of all time. Since the ’80s, legendary director Stanley Kubrick had been working on an adaptation of the short story “Super-Toys Last All Summer Long,” written by Brian Aldiss. Kubrick had long seen the project as a futuristic retelling of Pinocchio, in which a robot child wishes desperately to become a real boy. As invested as he was in the material, it was never a project that he felt was ready to enter the production phase. That remained the case until he saw Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, and at that moment he knew special effects had advanced to the point where his Pinocchio story could now be told to its fullest extent. Yet the biggest obstacle—in his mind—was that he was not the right director to tell this story. Feeling Spielberg’s sensibilities were more in line with his ultimate vision, he offered him the project in 1995. Shocked and appalled that the great Stanley Kubrick was pushing a project into his arms, Spielberg declined the offer.
Of course, Kubrick’s film never came to fruition. The last film he’d make would turn out to be Eyes Wide Shut in 1999, and after that his Pinocchio project was left unproduced. Feeling indebted to Kubrick, Spielberg set out to make sure that the film would finally see the light of day. A.I. Artificial Intelligence—released two years after Kubrick’s death—is undoubtedly a Steven Spielberg film, but one could see just how well the story fit in with Kubrick’s oeuvre as well. In many ways, it is a perfect hybrid of what both directors do incredibly well. Rarely do the Spielbergian and Kubrickian elements clash; they instead complement each other far more often than not.
In many ways, A.I. Artificial Intelligence touches on just about every theme imaginable; most of all the question of what separates humanity from their robotic creations. A recurring theme in Kubrick’s films was always dehumanization, and how human beings can have their individuality and desires removed so that they may fit the conformist role that society asks of them. Alex of A Clockwork Orange became ill at the very thought of sex or violence, while the soldiers in Full Metal Jacket went through a rigorous training process that turned them into near-clones of each other. Even their names were replaced with such nicknames as “Joker,” “Gomer Pyle” and “Cowboy.” A.I. Artificial Intelligence cuts right to the chase and introduces a world full of robots designed to do one thing and one thing only. In the case of David, he was made only to love his mother. Whoever that turns out to be.
The audience watches as David (Haley Joel Osment, who is incredible here) is adopted by a couple of needy parents (Frances O’Connor and Sam Robards) who are in danger of losing their son. After he grows to love his mother—and essentially feed on the love she gives him—the family abandons him because his artificiality poses a danger to them as a family. Believing that his “mother” will love him if he becomes a real boy, David goes on a quest to find the Blue Fairy he read about in Pinocchio. Along the way he meets the robotic prostitute Gigolo Joe (Jude Law) and his human inventor: a man by the name of Allen Hobby (William Hurt).
What’s problematic from the audience’s perspective is that David is, in fact, a robot. They are fooled into caring about him and his emotions, but the fact of the matter is he doesn’t have any emotions. At least none that are real. David doesn’t actually love his mother; he has been programmed that way. His desire to become a real boy is not because he genuinely wants to be a human being; he sees that as the quickest way to regain the affection of his mother. A.I. Artificial Intelligence exists in a universe where robots do only as they are instructed to do. If they eventually take over the planet, it won’t be because they wanted to. It would be because the humans programmed them to do so. A robot apocalypse would only be a consequence of our own ambition.
People have a tendency to complain about the film’s ending, though I found it quite beautiful. Spielberg has a knack for creating ostensibly happy endings that—when more thoroughly examined—isn’t actually all that happy. People may complain that the final 20 minutes or so of A.I. Artificial Intelligence feel tacked on, but the joy David feels when placed in this false reality only highlights his own artificiality. While it is true that he is able to love and be loved by his mother one last time, it is a moment just as fake as his own existence. None of it is real—just as he was never and could never be real—but when the film comes to an end he has achieved exactly what he was programmed to achieve. It may not be his real mother, but he can’t process that. All it takes is an image. Robots are superficial that way.
No one would ever mistake A.I. Artificial Intelligence for an action movie. Yet Spielberg’s subsequent feature, the Philip K. Dick-inspired Minority Report, is a blockbuster thriller in every sense of the word. Despite the large-scale and frequently dazzling setpieces, the film has just as much going on upstairs as his previous film. Touching on several aspects of post-9/11 paranoia, Minority Report is about a future where privacy and free will have become a thing of the past. John Anderton (Tom Cruise) works for PreCrime, a police force which uses the visions of three “precogs” to predict when someone is going to commit a murder. When such a case is suspected, the police intervene and arrest the killer before they’ve even done anything. Call it a “preemptive strike,” nudge nudge.
Minority Report is one of those films that you remember is great, but only when you watch it again do you realize the hugeness of Spielberg’s accomplishment. As with many of his previous films, he explores a world where those in power create systems and policies that are intended to promote uniformity at the expense of individuality. (Anderton cannot even walk down the street without being surrounded by “personalized” advertisements that yearn for his business.) The PreCrime system completely neglects someone’s ability to choose against murder—an outcome which is entirely plausible, as shown in the film—and instead elects to remove this wild card from the equation. For this government, there will only be absolute order and nothing else. If that means the complete invasion of one’s privacy, so be it. A true sense of calm and isolation doesn’t come until film’s end, as we see the freed precogs in their new lives. Their cottage sits in the middle of nowhere, untouched by the technology and chaos of the city. For once, nobody is watching them.
Subtext aside, Minority Report is a superbly-directed film in which everyone is at the top of their game. Tom Cruise is terrific as Anderton; a man who begins to question the system he’s championed for so long once it points the finger at him. (It helps that this is a better role for him than, say, a New Jersey dock worker.) This film also allowed Spielberg to go all-out for the first time in many years, a chance he never got with A.I. or the prestige pictures of the late ’90s. This is a future that feels fully-realized; it finds a near-perfect balance of the shiny chrome environments found in most sci-fi films and the gritty “used future” of more dystopian fare. Robots are not called upon to perform tasks like in A.I., but the humans are themselves becoming the robots.
The early ’00s were undoubtedly a time when Spielberg was testing himself, and exploring just how far he could reach within the boundaries of the mainstream. (After these two films, he would then take it down a notch with Catch Me If You Can and The Terminal.) He wasn’t interested in treading familiar territory or even just cashing a paycheck. Spielberg wanted to come into the decade challenging himself in new and exciting ways. Perhaps that is why Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull didn’t succeed: it was all too familiar. Gone is the time when Spielberg could fully devote himself to a film like that. He’s more interested the ambition of A.I. and the bleakness of Munich than he is in the wacky adventures of an aging archaeologist. Ultimately, that’s something to be admired. Once a filmmaker strikes creative (and financial) gold, it could be awful tempting to just recreate that success again and again. Spielberg is a great filmmaker because he grows completely bored at the notion of familiarity. When something is fresh and ambitious, he’s more willing to dive in headfirst.
Next week: We’re done with his directorial credits! Next week, I’ll examine his impact as a producer/executive producer. Also, a preview any projects on the horizon.
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