A.I.
I suppose I'm kind of biased in a way, it was just a couple of days after Kubrick died that someone wrote a piece called "The Lost Films of Stanley Kubrick" and covered all of the stuff he wanted to make but never did, like Napoleon, The Aryan Papers, etc. I had heard of his A.I. project before, but knew nothing about it except the title. The article had some actual details about it, and it sounded like it had so much potential. I was really, really bummed about it. I've loved sci-fi for as long as I can remember, and 2001 A Space Odyssey had been one of my favorite movies since I was a little kid growing up in the 1970s. I had always wanted Kubrick to go back and do another futuristic sci-fi movie, it broke my heart to find out how close he came to doing it... A.I. was going to be his next movie, but then he died. Damn. Not too long after that I discovered a website about all things Kubrick, and it had a lot of info about A.I. Including some actual plot info and such.
About a year later when the news hit that Spielberg was going to direct A.I., I was really happy to hear it. The article from right after Kubrick's death had mentioned that even Kubrick himself actually wanted Spielberg to direct it while he produced, but Spielberg had refused. It was very frustrating to hear all of the "Who the hell does Spielberg think he is, how dare he take over Kubrick's movie after his death?!?!?! The schmaltzy hack, he has no business doing this!" I tried to clue people in when I got a chance, but few if any listened.
When A.I. came out, I thought it was amazing. Next best thing to getting a proper Kubrick sci-fi movie. Everyone and their brother came out of the woodwork to call it a piece of trash, saying ignorant b.s. like "It's obvious Kubrick's original story ended with David trapped under the ferris wheel, and then Spielberg added a bunch of stupid crap about aliens, LOL." I knew those people were idiots, because the website I'd read almost two years earlier had mentioned that towards the end of the story the android is frozen in ice and discovered 2000 years later by highly evolved mechanoids which had replaced the now-extinct humanity. It was just another lesson in life that taught me how so many people today have become overly jaded, overly cynical, quick to criticize. People now get more pleasure out of tearing movies to pieces than from simply sitting and watching them.
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