SOURCE: O'Brien, Geoffrey. “Very Special Effects.” New York Review of Books 48, no. 13 (9 August 2001): 13.

In the following review, O'Brien offers a thematic and stylistic analysis of A.I.: Artificial Intelligence.

The persistent theme of Stanley Kubrick's movies is the obsessiveness of the human attempt to control the future—one's own or the world's—and the complicated ways in which that attempt fails. Fixated lovers (Lolita), solitary rogue-adventurers (Barry Lyndon), grandiose novelists (The Shining), nuclear strategists (Dr. Strangelove), military trainers (Full Metal Jacket), all the way down to the picture-perfect couple whose model of domestic joy is elaborately dismantled in Eyes Wide Shut: they are all there to enact some version of The Control Freak Brought under Control, the story of the inventor who invents his own doom, the entrapper who maneuvers himself into someone else's trap.

That the obsessive patterns within his films were mirrored by Kubrick's own slow...