10 Good Movies That Could've Been Great (With One Simple Fix)
9. The Epilogue Is Completely Cut - A.I. Artificial Intelligence
The Movie
A.I. Artificial Intelligence might be the most underrated film in Steven Spielberg's entire filmography, a sumptuous and incredibly ambitious sci-fi epic originally conceived by Stanley Kubrick, but handed off to Spielberg a few years prior to his death in 1999.
The result appears to be a fascinating collision of two distinct directorial styles - Kubrick's detached coolness and Spielberg's slushy, optimistic warmth.
The story of Pinocchio is filtered through a sci-fi prism, as an android boy, David (Haley Joel Osment), yearns to become a real boy in order to win the affection of his human "mother", Monica (Frances O'Connor).
A.I. received broadly positive reviews yet under-performed at the box office, and to this day remains a polarising film amid mainstream audiences.
The Simple Fix
The film's big miscalculation is the wildly unnecessary inclusion of a 25-minute epilogue sequence set 2000 years in the future - and though typically attributed to Spielberg, this syrupy addendum was in fact conceived by Kubrick himself.
Clearly, A.I. would've felt dramatically tighter and far less indulgently sentimental had it ended when David ends up trapped in the ocean, wishing to become a real boy while the ocean eventually freezes along with him.
It's a hauntingly beautiful, fittingly bleak end for a character doomed to be denied the one thing he wants, yet the epilogue sees David resurrected by an advanced race of Mecha. And while they're unable to make him a real boy, they do recreate a clone of Monica, allowing him to spend one final day with her.
Though Spielberg and Kubrick's ending isn't really a truly happy one at all - it's quite bleak in of itself - it does feel like a needless feat of wish fulfilment, as though Kubrick was afraid of leaving audiences too bummed out before the credits rolled.
Had A.I. wrapped up almost a half-hour earlier without deigning to dew-eyed sentiment, it'd likely be regarded as one of Spielberg's better films of the last 20 years rather than a divisive curiosity.