Reply #26: You loved AI?

[gratuitous]

Correct, you are wrong. If that wasn't the absolute worst premise for a movie of all time, then I'd hate to see something worse. Regardless of how the boy comes into the house (and the contrived nature of that set-up was just wretched), nobody would ask that monster in. Yeah, it's cute how he's eight years old and all when you take him in when you're 32. But when you're 40, he's still . . . eight years old. When you're 50, he's, uh, eight. Never progresses past third grade. Never hits puberty. Never matures. Never does anything but exists as an eight year old. You're 64 and you've just barked your shin on the coffee table, hopping toward to bathroom to get some ibuprofen, and here's litte Marblehead with drawing number 8,759 in a never-ending series of drawings of "Mommy and Me." Get out of the way, you little shit!

Spielberg took this over from Stanley Kubrick, a project that Kubrick had kicked around for years before he died. My guess is that Kubrick didn't have any idea how to get into or out of the set-up, which is why the story never got done. Spielberg took it on, and should have just burned the footage and moved on to something else of a more enduring quality. Say a remake of "1941" with an all gerbil cast.