[In the following review, Arthur perceives A.I.: Artificial Intelligence to be an unsuccessful amalgamation of Spielberg's optimism and sentimentality and Stanley Kubrick's pessimism.]

It was certainly not a match made in heaven, nor in any other unearthly realm save perhaps the corporate boardrooms and high-tech workshops of Tinseltown. Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg, together at last. The Prince of Bleak and the Emperor of Ice Cream. Two absolute potentates of cinema ruling kingdoms notoriously disparate in commercial clout, thematic climate (cloudy/sunny), production tempo (slow/fast), and the social stamp of their admiring subjects (elite/hoi polloi). Nonetheless, the eagerly anticipated and—given its eerie creative synergy—aptly titled A.I: Artificial Intelligence marks the culmination of a 20-year friendship conducted mostly by phone and fax. The film was spurred by Kubrick's reported hunch that his endlessly delayed project was finally more suited to Spielberg's sensibility, and by the latter's desire to honor the work of a dead master. Part wish-fulfillment dream and part moving-picture Rorschach test, A.I. has generated enough partisan critical heat to solve the energy crisis in California, if not in Hollywood.

Given the sheer quantity of advance publicity, bolstered by the most extensive and intricate Internet campaign to date (for a summary of A.I.'s “alternative fiction,” check out www.cloudmakers.org), its basic premise may already be as familiar as a classic fairy tale. Set in a techno-future America inundated by melting polar icecaps, where childbirth is licensed by the state to avoid overcrowding, A.I. follows the “spiritual” journey of a prototype robot designed by Cybertronics, which specializes in high-end cyborg helpmates. The company places him in the affluent, cloistered home of a prominent employee as compensation for the loss of a biological son, cryogenically frozen while awaiting a cure for his fatal disease. David, played by perpetually slack-jawed Haley Joel Osment, is a perfect human simulacrum, programmed with all the positive attributes of a normal kid: lacking the customary mix of defiance and manipulation, he is hardwired with “a love that will never end.” The exclusive object of this love is Monica Swinton (Frances O'Connor), who is at best ambivalent toward the new arrival and otherwise behaves with startling hostility, the least sympathetic mom in the annals of Spielbergian family drama. As Brian Aldiss, whose tiny 1969 source story underwent numerous script transformations, has confirmed, it's about a boy who “whatever he does, cannot please his mother.”

When David's flesh-and-blood “brother” is brought back to life, he doesn't stand a chance in the ensuing sibling rivalry. Ill-equipped to handle the devious, malicious tactics of real pre-teen monsters, he is summarily abandoned by Mom in an archetypal forest with only his faithful robotic teddy bear for company. Another of Spielberg's “lost boys” in search of parental nurturing, David must navigate a cruelly futuristic environment, bristling with pockets of lower-class technophobia, to find Pinocchio's Blue Fairy, who he believes will magically turn him into a real boy capable of sustaining his mother's love. Befriended in their adventures by Gigolo Joe (Jude Law), a sex machine on the lam for a murder he didn't commit, they ricochet from a vicious “Flesh Fair,” where discarded “mechas” are annihilated for the viewing pleasure of rural yahoo “orgas” (organics), to the CGI splendor of a zippy Oz called Rouge City. Their quest ends in a partially submerged Manhattan where David meets his scientist maker, attempts a form of robo-suicide, and comes face-to-face with the mythical fairy in an underwater Coney Island.

A.I. is divided into three well-marked chapters, each with its own dramatic arc and distinctive visual facade. Unlike Spielberg's earlier calculated thrill rides—or for that matter, the relentlessly entropic pull of Kubrick's narratives—the storytelling here is awkward, sputtering, full of gaping plotholes and unresolved gambits, most notably the fate of Gigolo Joe. Still, it bears the writer-director's sentimental imprint, his faith in the salvific force of childhood imagination. In the epilogue, which constitutes the third section. David is revived after 2,000 years by a breed of glistening extraterrestrials, super-machines intent on studying him as the sole surviving witness to the long-extinct human species. At last, his singular wish is granted … sort of. The machines clone undeserving Mom from a lock of her hair preserved by Teddy, and David gets to spend one perfect day basking in the radiance of maternal plenitude. If not quite a real boy, he achieves an idealized emotional harmony we humans unconsciously crave but can never fully realize in our adult lives.

Thus the fairy-tale circle is closed, the passage from stability to danger to self-recognition and redemption retooled for a possible future of sentient machines. As is common in Spielberg films, the risks entailed in producing this closure are considerable, and the contradictions arising from it speak powerfully, if inadvertently, not only to metaphysical themes that pervade his entire career but to anxieties at large in current cinema and, by extension, contemporary society. Regardless of how Spielberg is assessed as an artist, his blockbuster creations have acquired a monumental cultural significance that can't be denied. If we looked to Kubrick for private, barely admissible truths about our atavistic natures, we look to Spielberg for a symbolic reflection of our public face. The two filmmakers converge on questions of what defines us as fallibly human, even as they reach vastly different conclusions. For Spielberg, the core of human identity lies in emotional receptivity, and few directors have done a better job of portraying youthful expressions of fear, joy, shame, trust, loneliness, and awe. On the other hand, intelligence, the rational mind, is suspect precisely because it is “programmed” rather than “felt”—recall Elliot's rebuttal in E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial to the assertion that the alien thinks what he thinks: “No, he feels what I feel.” With several notable exceptions, the demonstration of intelligence is reserved for passive, ineffective adult characters or figures manifesting cynical attributes of greed or personal ambition. When children in Hook or E.T. are told to “Grow up,” the demand is understood as pernicious since to be an adult is to lose the capacity to feel; conversely, young Jim in Empire of the Sun, whose feral smarts are a defense against grief, is admonished: “Try not to think so much.”

To oversimplify a bit, Kubrick's films suggest that emotions are never pure; they are unalterably messy, governed by unconscious drives, rife with contradictions—in some sense, all humans embody the twin prerogatives of Private Joker's peace symbol and “Born to Kill” motto in Full Metal Jacket. Moreover, emotions are “produced,” constructed rather than inherent, and thus can be faked or dissembled. The issue is partly one of personal autonomy, how free we are to act and thus transcend our limitations, in a universe teeming with unseen forces either benign or malign. As a modernist, Kubrick knew it was fruitless to deny the shaping pressures of the mechanical and the artificial, and he consistently staked out territory where all systems, even that of representation, begin to break down. Spielberg's romanticism struggles to take cinema beyond cinema, to naturalize spectacle and achieve a state where artifice disappears in a flood of raw sensation. Asked about his technique in Schindler's List, the director responded: “I tried to pull the events closer to the audience by reducing the artifice”; or as the mathematician in Jurassic Park put it, “Life has a way of breaking out of all artificially imposed boundaries.”

Despite the humanist Spielberg's unfamiliar dilemma of making a machine more heartwarming than any mortal character, telling themes and motifs from a host of his previous films are sewn into the fabric of A.I. There is the mystical light show as harbinger of the Beyond (Raiders of the Lost Ark, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Always), the magical resurrection or second coming that smacks of New Testament theology (start with Jaws and go from there), watery immersions or baptisms that restore a character's will to live (Always), surrogate fathers (you name it), injunctions to “Go home” (E.T., Hook, et al.). Perhaps most crucially, A.I. revisits as it crowns the child's fantasy of a primal scene, the site of its own conception, an idea dangerously flirted with in the Spielberg-produced Back to the Future but lurking in the shadows of Hook and other films.

Two scenes register initially as profoundly un-Spielbergian, perhaps even self-critical. In the midst of the Flesh Fair's postmodern demolition derby, a brutal entrepreneur voices a pro-life credo that in previous films would have framed the director's philosophical stance: “Purge yourselves of artificiality … Robots are an insult to human dignity.” Couched as a condemnation of spectacle, or at least spectacle devoid of empathy, the scene provides a negative template that celebrates the humanity of David's programmed consciousness; as the film's advertising tagline proclaims, “His love is real, but he is not.” Spielberg's opposition of technology and storytelling, craft and imagination, manufactured violence and manufactured love, is palpably spurious. Contrary to the self-serving allegory proposed in Schindler's List, Amon Goeths' factory of death and Oskar Schindler's factory of life (“They say no one dies here”) are equally integral to Hollywood's Dream Factory ethos.

A.I.'s best scene takes place in the womb. Having wended his way in a submersible helicopter through the detritus of the sunken amusement park, David stops in front of a plaster statue of the Blue Fairy. Trapped by a weblike collapsing Ferris wheel, he sits for an eternity, or until purgatory freezes over, begging her to “Make me into a real live boy. Make me real.” It is a plaintively impossible request because David is a robot, and on another level, because he is a moving image, a stenciled pattern of light on a flat screen. No amount of wishing upon a star—or in this case an idealized mother in the form of a Madonna icon that bears a sneaky resemblance to Audrey Hepburn's angel in Always—can bridge the gap between illusion and reality. In this privileged moment, Spielberg admits to something he is frequently at pains to disavow: that movies are themselves robotic, artificial, suspended in time. (In 50 years Haley Joel Osment will be a senior citizen, but he will remain 12 years old in A.I., a boy who couldn't, not wouldn't, grow up). If falling short of a Kubrickian insight, it is as close to a gesture of resigned pessimism, a flaunting of ultimate limits, as we're likely to get from Spielberg. Needless to say, after a slow fade David is saved from repetitive limbo, this time to give birth to his own mother as loving simulacrum.

Spielberg is forever trying to transport us to some Other place: Neverland, Never Again Land, Dinoland, Fatherland (Hook, Saving Private Ryan, the Golden Age of studio directors), Founding Fatherland (Amistad), the Hereafter, Sea World, the Third World, now Futureworld. As invigorating and culturally symptomatic as certain of these excursions have been, the realm they ultimately refuse to inhabit is the Commonplace, the quotidian world of everyday life. This is doubly regrettable since Spielberg has shown an extraordinary grasp of how families interact, or rather fail to interact—early scenes in E.T. and Close Encounters are brilliantly chaotic in their psychosocial dynamics. Call me crazy, but the project I'm waiting for, Spielberg's last frontier, would treat the family as something more, or less, than a metaphor, an instrument of personal psychodrama, or a launching pad to fantasy. Like David, I keep hoping for this deity of cinema to “make it real.”