When Stephen Spielberg took the helm of Stanley Kubrick's long-awaited Artificial Intelligence: A.I. project, upon the latter's
death, many said that they were an unlikely match--Spielberg, the quintessential crowd-pleaser, an awkward fit with the dark toned Kubrick. Let
Spielberg get his hands on a story about whether a robot boy could love and be loved and there was no way he'd handle the outcome as Kubrick would
have. But this actually seemed a misreading of two of the elder director's seminal films. What, after all, does 2001 turn on but the moment
when HAL becomes not just intelligent but emotion-laden, even jealous? And, though A Clockwork Orange is best remembered for its dystopic
setting and extreme violence, in fact it is a meditation on whether human free will, even though it leads to such results, is not preferable to a placid
roboticism. In the event, though the ending of A.I. is problematic for a variety of reasons, its rationale is not wholly inconsistent with those
prior works of Kubrick.
On the other hand, it is hard to think of a less sensible choice of directors for a story by the paranoid, maybe even schizophrenic, Philip K. Dick than Mr. Spielberg. The set-up is rather
simple--it is in fact just a short story in Mr. Dick's version: John Anderton, a policeman in the not-too-distant future, arrests people before they can
accomplish the murders that three "pre-cognitive" mutants predict they will commit if given the chance. But when the precogs next predicted
murderer turns out to be Anderton himself, he takes it on the lam and tries to prove the system wrong. In the process he discovers that the precogs do
not necessarily render a unanimous prediction, that there is sometimes a "minority report", which raises the possibility that both he and some of the
men he has imprisoned might never become criminals at all. Now, anyone familiar with the work of Mr. Dick will know where he's headed with this.
And anyone familiar with the films of Mr. Spielberg will know that he--to his credit--is not capable of following. For if Mr. Dick's dark vision is true
then men don't actually have free will, but follow along inexorably on predetermined paths. Meanwhile though, if Mr. Dick is wrong and Mr.
Spielberg right, then the internal logic of the story itself, that which makes it grimly compelling, is corrupted.
We're left then with a short story that is brilliant, though terrible, whose conclusion we must reject utterly as anti-human, and with a film whose
conclusion is comforting at the expense of a more fascinating, though uncomfortable-making, coherence. In effect, Mr. Spielberg has redeemed Mr.
Dick's philosophy but only by damaging his art. Both works then are flawed, in opposite ways, and perhaps the best way to enjoy them is together, so
that the tension between the artists becomes a part of the story itself.
