A.I. is ranked among the TSPDT list of the 1000 greatest films ever made, the sight & sound poll of the greatest films ever made, the Cahiers du Cinema poll of 250 greatest films (& it's also the only Spielberg film to have made the list).
It may have been ridiculed when it first came out but now it's a very very highly acclaimed film, one of the most acclaimed films from the past decade. In fact it's the critical resurgence that proves to me that A.I. is indeed a great work of art, a film worthy of intense debate.
In a peculiar survey of critical reaction, Variety reported that the two most common modifiers used by other members of the fully-opposable thumbs-down tribe were variations on “hypnotic” and “boring,” “fascinating” and “frustrating” – another way of erecting an intellectual posture while acknowledging A.I. wasn’t the easily swallowed formula pap they’d been weaned on. Could they get away with that sort of dull literal-mindedness writing about any other art-form but movies?
Like most of Kubrick's films, A.I., a wondrously accomplished, ambitious and moving meditation on sentience, mortality and god, was denigrated to an almost incomprehensible extent when it first came out & a worrying number of mindless critics, desperately trying to justify their lack of understand & baseless generalisations, embarrassingly claimed that they “loved the Kubrick parts of it but hated the Spielberg parts,” as if an artistic collaboration like this film, which for my money stands as the greatest achievement of either artist, could be reduced to bits and pieces. There’s an irreducible complexity to a work of art.
The whole film itself plays out in this weird uncomfortable not-quite-happy, not-quite-sad tone, a result of Kubrick's chilly bleakness squaring off against Spielberg's warm-hearted optimism. Ultimately, A.I. achieves a level of profundity rarely seen in cinema, a haunting and evocative masterpiece that goes into the very heart & soul of what it truly means to be a human being.
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