A.I. Artificial Intelligence

• 1. Introduction

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  A.I. Artificial Intelligence arrived in theaters on the 29th of June 2001, carrying the weight of two filmmakers' visions and nearly three decades of troubled development. Stanley Kubrick had first acquired the rights to Brian Aldiss's 1969 short story "Supertoys Last All Summer Long" in the early 1970s, yet the film he imagined never reached a set under his direction. When Steven Spielberg finally released the finished picture, critics and audiences found themselves arguing about who had made what, and why it moved them or failed to. At the center of it all stood an eleven-year-old android named David, played by Haley Joel Osment, programmed with the capacity to love and incapable of stopping. What does it cost to build a child who can feel but cannot die? How does a film born from the imagination of one director and delivered by another carry the fingerprints of both? And what happens when the machinery of grief outlasts the species that built it?

• 2. Kubrick's Elusive Dream

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  Stanley Kubrick hired Brian Aldiss himself to write the first film treatment, beginning a collaboration that would sour badly. By 1989, Kubrick had fired Aldiss over creative differences. Aldiss later remarked, "Not only did the bastard fire me, he hired my enemy instead," referring to Ian Watson, who joined as writer in March 1990. Bob Shaw had briefly served between them, leaving after six weeks because of Kubrick's demanding pace. Watson gave Kubrick a story treatment within three weeks of being hired, and finished a ninety-page treatment in May 1991.

  Kubrick kept calling the project "Pinocchio" rather than A.I. He handed Watson a copy of Carlo Collodi's novel for inspiration, describing the film to Watson as "a picaresque robot version of Pinocchio." Sara Maitland, brought on to give the film mythic resonance, confirmed the same habit: "He never referred to the film as 'A.I.'; he always called it 'Pinocchio.'" Kubrick also asked Maitland to give the story a feminist fairy-tale focus during pre-production in early 1994.

  The practical obstacle that stalled Kubrick longest was technology. He believed no child actor could convincingly portray David, and he thought computer-generated imagery was not yet capable of creating the character either. Producer Jan Harlan recalled an attempt to build a robotic boy: "We tried to construct a little boy with a movable rubber face to see whether we could make it look appealing. But it was a total failure, it looked awful." After the release of Jurassic Park, with its innovative CGI, an announcement came in November 1993 that production would begin in 1994. Kubrick brought on Dennis Muren and Ned Gorman, who had worked on that film, as visual effects supervisors, but he was displeased with their previsualization and with the cost of hiring Industrial Light and Magic and Stan Winston Studio.

  In 1995, Kubrick offered the director's chair to Spielberg. Spielberg declined, choosing other projects and convincing Kubrick to remain at the helm. The film was then shelved again while Kubrick committed to Eyes Wide Shut.

• 3. Passing the Torch

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  Kubrick died in March 1999, and the project shifted decisively. Producer Jan Harlan and Kubrick's widow Christiane approached Spielberg to take over. By November 1999, Spielberg was writing the screenplay himself, working from Watson's ninety-page treatment. It was his first solo screenplay credit since Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977.

  Pre-production stalled again briefly in February 2000, when Spielberg weighed directing Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Minority Report, or Memoirs of a Geisha instead. The following month he announced A.I. as his next project and committed to Minority Report as a follow-up. He brought back concept artist Christopher "Fangorn" Baker and moved toward production.

  Ian Watson, who had been with the project since 1990, reported that the final script was strikingly faithful to what Kubrick had developed. Watson stated, "The final 20 minutes are pretty close to what I wrote for Stanley, and what Stanley wanted, faithfully filmed by Spielberg without added schmaltz." Spielberg himself told film critic Joe Leydon in 2002 that the attribution had been badly misread by critics: all the parts audiences assumed were Kubrick's were his own, and the parts they accused him of softening were Kubrick's. He named the teddy bear and the entire last twenty minutes as Kubrick's contributions, while claiming the darker Flesh Fair sequence as his own. Kubrick had told him, "This is much closer to your sensibilities than my own."

• 4. Making David Real

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  Haley Joel Osment was Spielberg's first and only choice to play David. To inhabit the character, Osment avoided blinking his eyes and, as described, "programmed" himself with good posture. The choice to cast a human actor rather than build an animatronic came only after Spielberg and the crew watched Osment's performance in The Sixth Sense. Before that, Spielberg had hired Stan Winston to build an animatronic of David.

  Jude Law studied the movements of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly to prepare for Gigolo Joe, a male prostitute mecha originally conceived by Watson as a G.I. character. When Watson suggested the change to a male prostitute, Kubrick joked, "I guess we lost the kiddie market." Julianne Moore and Gwyneth Paltrow were considered for Monica Swinton before Frances O'Connor was cast. Jerry Seinfeld was originally in consideration to voice the Comedian Robot before Chris Rock took the role. Robin Williams voiced Dr. Know, and Meryl Streep voiced the Blue Fairy.

  Filming was set to begin on the 10th of July 2000 but was delayed until August. Most of the film was shot on sound stages at Warner Bros. Studios and at the Spruce Goose Dome in Long Beach, California, with a few weeks on location at Oxbow Regional Park in Oregon. Spielberg adopted Kubrick's secretive approach, refusing to give cast and crew the complete script, banning press from the set, and having actors sign confidentiality agreements. Jack Angel, who voiced Teddy, recorded his lines entirely out of context, receiving only the direction to sound like Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh, but "very wise and old and stoic." Social robotics expert Cynthia Breazeal served as a technical consultant during production, and Hans Moravec had served in the same capacity for Kubrick's development phase.

• 5. A Score Between Two Worlds

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  John Williams composed and conducted the film's original score, performed by the Hollywood Studio Symphony. The soundtrack album was released by Warner Sunset Records in 2001 and featured singers Lara Fabian on two songs and Josh Groban on one. A complete score was later issued by La-La Land Records in 2015.

  Williams described his work as "an homage a Kubrick," weaving in echoes of György Ligeti's choral music, which Kubrick had used in 2001: A Space Odyssey. He also included a quotation of Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier, a detail Kubrick had specifically requested. The score was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Music Score at the 74th Academy Awards. Roger Ebert called it "unusually restrained, modernist," while Leonard Maltin, who was generally critical of the film, still singled out Williams's music as "striking." Critic A. O. Scott noted that it was "as layered, dissonant and strange" as the film itself. The rock band Ministry appeared in the film performing the song "What About Us?", though that song did not appear on the official soundtrack album.

• 6. Reception and the Question of Authorship

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  A.I. opened in 3,242 theaters in the United States and Canada on the 29th of June 2001, earning $29.35 million in its opening weekend at number one. It went on to gross $78.62 million domestically and $157 million internationally, for a worldwide total of $235.93 million against a production budget of $90-100 million. In Japan it opened on 524 screens and grossed almost two billion yen in its first five days, the biggest June opening in that market at the time, selling more tickets in its opening weekend than Star Wars: Episode I, though grossing slightly less.

  On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 76% approval rating based on 201 critics. Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave it a "C+." A. O. Scott described Spielberg as attempting "the improbable feat of melding Kubrick's chilly, analytical style with his own warmer, needier sensibility." Leonard Maltin called it "a curious and uncomfortable hybrid." Brian Aldiss, who had been fired by Kubrick during development, admired the result nonetheless, though he remarked of the ending, "it's so long since I wrote it" and wondered what Kubrick's version might have looked like.

  The film attracted sharply divided notices. Roger Ebert first gave it three stars, calling it "wonderful and maddening," then later upgraded it to four stars and added it to his "Great Movies" canon in 2011. BBC film critic Mark Kermode, writing in January 2013, apologized to Spielberg for "getting it wrong" when he first reviewed it in 2001 and came to consider it Spielberg's "enduring masterpiece." Filmmaker Billy Wilder called it "the most underrated film of the past few years." Ian Watson observed that the film ranked as the fourth-highest earner worldwide in its year, but attributed its relatively weaker domestic performance to American audiences finding it "too poetical and intellectual." Watson also noted that a widespread critical misreading treated the advanced mechas of the final twenty minutes as aliens rather than evolved robots.

  In a 2016 BBC poll of 177 critics from around the world, the film was voted the eighty-third greatest film since 2000. In July 2025, Rolling Stone ranked it number 61 on its list of the 100 best films of the 21st century.

• 7. The Ending Nobody Agreed On

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  No element of A.I. generated more debate than its final twenty minutes. In the film's closing movement, set two thousand years after David becomes trapped beneath glacial ice near Coney Island, evolved mechas called the Specialists resurrect David and recreate Monica from the strand of hair that Teddy had kept in his pocket. The recreated Monica can live for only one day and cannot be revived. David spends that day with her, and as she falls asleep she tells him she has always loved him.

  Critics who found the ending sentimental assumed it was Spielberg's addition to Kubrick's darker material. Spielberg pushed back directly. In his 2002 interview with Joe Leydon he stated that the entire last twenty minutes was "completely Stanley's," along with the first thirty-five to forty minutes set in the house. Watson confirmed from the writing side that Kubrick's version ended the same way Spielberg's does, with advanced mechas reviving Monica for a single day. Sara Maitland, however, offered a complicating detail: Kubrick never began production on A.I. partly because he had a hard time making the ending work.

  James Berardinelli, while acknowledging the film as "consistently involving," described the finale as "far from a masterpiece" and argued the outstanding question remained where Kubrick's vision stopped and Spielberg's began. David Denby in The New Yorker faulted the film for not adhering to the Pinocchio character as he understood it. Armond White of the New York Press took the opposite position, praising David's journey into "the final eschatological devastation" as reaching the philosophical depth of Borzage, Ozu, Demy, and Tarkovsky. The Saturn Awards gave Spielberg's screenplay its Best Writing prize, while the film also won Best Science Fiction Film at that ceremony.