Why was Steven Spielberg accused of “wrecking” Stanley Kubrick’s script?
From the outside looking in, having one of the greatest directors in history stepping in to finish a project developed with the intention of being helmed by another of the greatest directors in history is a win-win situation, but Steven Spielberg still came in for a fair amount of flak after bringing a Stanley Kubrick movie across the finish line.
Rather cruelly, though, it would take the Dr. Strangelove and Full Metal Jacket filmmaker’s death for the project to gain any real traction, with Kubrick passing away in March 1999 at the age of 70, several months before the release of what would turn out to be his final feature, Eyes Wide Shut.
Kubrick’s meticulous nature meant that he was hardly barrelling through one movie after the other, and he’d been toying with an adaptation of Brian Aldiss’ short story Supertoys Last All Summer Long since the early 1970s after acquiring the rights. Familiar with reinventing the face of visual effects through 2001: A Space Odyssey, he would sit on the film for decades as he waited for computer-generated imagery to catch up to his vision.
Eventually giving up, he handed what would eventually become A.I. Artificial Intelligence off to Spielberg in 1995, but it was his death that sparked the sci-fi back into life. Seven months after Kubrick was shuffled off this mortal coil, the existential epic was being fast-tracked towards the big screen with his replacement holding the reins, but the end result proved to be plenty polarising.
Whereas the originator of A.I. was known for their cold, calculated, and often distant approach to character work and storytelling, the person who ended up directing it was famed for their optimistic, sentimental, and often saccharine approach. It was an uneasy blend of two wildly differing styles and aesthetics, with the movie constantly struggling to reconcile that divide across its 146 minutes.
It created a strange dichotomy where Kubrick devotees were heavily critical of Spielberg for watering down, diluting, and significantly altering the former’s signature techniques, whereas supporters of the latter were praising him for making A.I. a more emotionally-driven, relatable, and – ironically – human story.
That placed Spielberg squarely in the crosshairs, and as a result, he was forced to clarify that he didn’t tank Kubrick’s vision by injecting the film with too many of his own sensibilities. “I, of course, get criticised for carrying the film 2,000 years into the future and they assume that’s how I wrecked Stanley’s movie,” he opined to the Directors Guild of America, before explaining why that most definitely wasn’t the case.
In fact, Spielberg revealed that Kubrick quite literally told him, “You should make this, not me, this is much more your sensibility than mine,” which instantly negated any lingering beliefs cinema’s most noted purveyor of crowd-pleasing mass-marketed entertainment had taken the scissors to his contemporary’s vision and brazenly reworked it into his own image.
A.I. isn’t a terrible movie by any stretch, but neither is it particularly close to being a great one. Kubrickian and Spielbergian are famed cinematic terms in their own right, but the fact they mean completely opposite things ensured that smashing them together in the same production was always going to create a schism, something that’s very true of the visually impressive but noticeably hollow Artificial Intelligence.
