There may never have been a Reverse Shot if not for A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Steven Spielberg’s one-of-a-kind science-fiction saga became a rallying point for a number of cinephiles when it was released in 2001, including us. We were still talking about its mysteries and the misconceptions around it a year later when we first met and decided to start a publication devoted to film.
All these years later we are still thinking about A.I. And one of the questions that inevitably comes up is just how the film manages to engender so much profound human empathy while remaining an essentially cold, remote work largely told from the point of view of robots. In this original Reverse Shot movie, we examine the radical empathy Spielberg creates.