Have you ever watched Steven Spielberg's 2001 sci-fi drama A.I. Artificial Intelligence and noticed all the similarities in style to Stanley Kubrick's work? Well, there's a reason for that. A bit of cinematic history: A.I. was actually one of Kubrick's unrealized projects, which he handed over to Spielberg back in 1995, and in this video essay by Really Dim, we get to see all of the stylistic similarities between A.I. and Kubrick's films in a side-by-side comparison.


Perhaps the most interesting thing about drawing similarities between Spielberg and Kubrick is that the two directors couldn't be more different in terms of how they make films. However, they actually became friends after meeting back in 1980. Fast forward 15 years, and Kubrick decided to give Spielberg the opportunity to make A.I. a reality, in part because the technological advances in CGI weren't up to snuff for David's android character when Kubrick first started developing the film in the 70s, but also because he thought Spielberg could make a film that "embodied the joys of childhood."

A.I. will always be a strange collaboration between two filmmakers that, though they respected each other's work, had entirely different approaches to filmmaking. But in the end, they each gave something incredibly important and incredibly unique to the project, which is why A.I. will be remembered as quite an anomaly in cinematic history—the product of two cinematic geniuses forming an unlikely collaboration to make a pretty decent film with generally positive reviews.

Source: Really Dim