With both my girls going home early, I had enough of the night to myself to really make it an enjoyable evening, without cutting short on night rest. Just past nine thirty now, and I just finished watching one of my absolute favorites: Steven Spielberg’s AI: Artificial Intelligence.

This movie is not just any story, but the creative product of two of the greatest minds in cinematographic history: Stanley Kubrick first showed it to Steven Spielberg in the year George Orwell chose for his all time greatest novel, 1984. Spielberg loved it, and from then on, the two of them kept bouncing ideas off one another, to improve what was already a great story. Both Kubrick and Spielberg felt that the other should direct the movie, a game of ping pong that became a moot point when Stanley Kubrick died in 1999, at the age of seventy, after having just finished Eyes Wide Shut with Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise. I’m afraid that was a movie which I never could get to the end of, even though Nicole always has been highly intriguing to me….

AI on the other hand was: Finished by Steven just a mere two years after Kubrick died, it became a classical fairy tale with a very futuristic twist to it. Stanley’s widow had asked Steven to finish the project, and Spielberg could think of no better way to honor his lifelong friend. Thus, a masterpiece in the movie industry became reality, even though Spielberg’s team had to really pull out all the stops in order to make this happen: cars and amfibycopters had to be designed and built, numerous large sets had to be created, Industrial Light and Magic was contracted for the special effects and CGI, and Stan Winston was brought in to do the special robotics stuff. I’m not sure he had much to tinker with the following two, Jude Law and Ashley Scott playing Gigolo Joe and Gigolo Jane, just two of the many special services robots roaming the future world:

But Jane is just an extra, and Joe is more like the main guys sidekick: he tags along with robot kid David, who is let go of by mother Monica in a heartwrenching scene, because she has to let him go but can’t stand having him disassembled by the robot factory. Together with Joe, David goes on a quest to find the Blue fairy, who he thinks can make him a real boy, so his mother will love him. That is slightly sidetracked, into a very remote and unforeseen ending, which shows this movie was shot in a pre 9/11 reality: the far future still shows the twin towers of the World Trade Center, encased in ice up to about two thirds of the total number of floors.

In between normal story elements, quite a few new age related viewpoints surface in the movie, for those who are partial to those kinds of things. And then there is of course the very deeply moving moment between Monica and roboboy David, that one moment she decides to have him imprint on her as his mother. Had she known what was to follow, I’m sure she’d have thought twice about it:

Yes I know, you nitpickers: this photo doesn’t show that exact moment. But the one that does has been taken against the light, thus leaving the actors rather poorly visible…. So you’ll have to make do with this….

And having written all this, my coffee is about depleted, and my writing inspiration will soon go the same way. So rather than spend the remainder on you, I’ll just post this one, and devote myself to a little one-on-one with a dear friend….

Good Night, Y’All!

Dre’