A.I. - Artificial Intelligence, according to Stanley Kubrick's 80 page scriptment.
   
By Alexander DeLarge

NOTE : I have been under the belief ever since Spielberg announced he
would take care of Stanley Kubrick's unfinished masterpiece that this
movie should not be made. I don't think anyone should do a Kubrick project
other than Kubrick himself, and much less someone who is overly sentimentalist and obvious like Spielberg...but then I read this scriptment.and it blew me away. And even though Spielberg would definitely not be my first choice, since I consider most of his movies nothing but mindless entertainment,
with an emphasis on "mindless", I still think there is no way he can foul this
up. This is way too good, and Stanley was pretty clear on the direction the
movie should take. Hell, even I could direct it and not foul up, that's
how detailed Kubrick was on the scriptment. So let's hope for the best.here's
the synopsis

The movie begins in a hard-edged future New York. The world has suffered
the disasters of global warming, and New York, as many other coastal
cities, is now submerged. This is a time when the world is over-populated
and people are not allowed to have but one child. David (Haley Joel
Osment) is a one of a new model of robots developed to have emotions.
These robots, however, are only programed to love their parental units.
The purpose of buying these robots is filling the adult's void when they
cannot have children.

David is adopted by the Swintons when their only daughter becomes ill and
has to be cryogenically frozen in order to be kept alive until a cure for
her sickness is found. Monica Swinton tries to love the little robot boy,
but she finds it too cold and pointless, and plunges deeply into
alcoholism instead. David feels the instant rejection of Monica (who he
affectionately reffers to as "Mummy" throughout the screenplay) and suffers because of it.

In a vain attempt to make her love him, he prepares his Mummy's alcoholic
beverages, without realizing that this just makes Mummy despise him even
more. It is obvious that at this stage of the film, David's mother is the
emotional centre of the film.

A few years later, scientists find a cure for the Swinton's daughter, and
she makes a full recovery. And now that they have their own little girl
with them, David has become redundant. In a heartbreaking scene, Monica opens the door for David and instructs him to leave and to never come back
unless he becomes a real boy. Hence, Kubrick's repeated jokes about
re-titling the movie "Pinnochio"

David eventually ends in a drowned Manhattan, where he meets Gigolo Joe a
man who tries to help him on his quest to become a real boy. Gigolo Joe
turns out to be a shape-shifting android, newer than David in design, and
also an emotional robot. Gigolo becomes the "blue fairy", so to speak, of
David's Pinnochio-like quest. Together, they find a place called Tin City
where robots are worked until their parts fall off (sort of like a
futuristic robot concentration camp) where Gigolo Joe is regarded as
dangerous because of his shape-shifting nature and immediately dismantled.
David becomes a prisoner of this camp, and he works as a slave until his
energy battery is worn down, and the rulers of Tin City don't bother to
replace it.

The following part of the movie takes place thousands of years
later, where the human race is nothing but a vague memory in the mind of
the new populators of the earth, the robots. During an archeological mission into what was once Tin City, these robots find David, and repare his energy
battery to help David recuperate. These robots have great interest in
David, regarding him as a link to a past they barely know anything about.
With their technology and using David's memory data, they manage to
construct a virtual version of the Swinton's New York apartment. However,
this apartment is constructed as David remembers it, or to be more exact,
as he wants to remember it. David's father is vaguely there, his face blurred
out of his head since he is of very little importance to David, and his
stepsister's room is nothing but a hole in the wall. Clearly, nothing will
stand in the way of David's happiness again.

We come up to the ending, which is actually two endings. Spielberg could
go either way, but knowing him, I think he'll be more inclined for the first
ending. In the first version, the movie ends with David walking towards his
Mummy, who sits on a chair, her back to the robot boy, as David brings her
a bloody mary, with a smile upon his face. The second version ends in a
darker note. The technical shortcomings of the robots make it impossible to keep David's fantasy alive, and the boy is forced to watch his mother disappear before his eyes.
    
Either way, even though we will never have the superior version (which in
my mind, will always be the Kubrick version), this is still a story worth
telling. That is why I give Spielberg my best and hope he doesn't foul
this up. Be careful, Steven. Do your best. The audience is watching. And on a
more personal note, I think A.I. is the perfect oportunity for a tribute
to the master himself. I would love to see those slow-paced close-ups once
again on the screen. Come on, Steven. Make Kubrick proud. Make us all
proud.