Napoleon

“Spielberg Using Kubrick Script for Napoleon Series,” was the headline in the Arts, Briefly section of the Times (NYT, 3/5/13) The announcement about the television series is a significant footnote to film history since the last and only time Spielberg and Kubrick worked together was on A.I. Artificial Intelligence which as the Times commented “Mr. Spielberg was producing for Mr. Kubrick, and which he directed after Mr. Kubrick’s death.” The short Times notice came with its own bit of science fiction beginning with Times reporter Dave Itzkoff's comment, “While another collaboration between Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg would seem to require a time machine, a Ouija board of some sort of interdimensional extraterrestrial monolith, plans are nonetheless under way for these two celebrated filmmakers to work together again.” Though A.I. did gross $235 million at the box office, it’s one of Spielberg’s most underrated films, primarily due to the unpopular notion that underlies its script: that consciousness can exist without the body. Moviegoers don’t like to hear that someday the race may endure as bits of data in a cosmic computer. As A Clockwork Orange, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Eyes Wide Shut all attest, Kubrick was not only a futurist, but a visionary about the fate of human consciousness. Talking about consciousness, Spielberg’s direction of the Napoleon script, which dates from l961 (the last great epic about Napoleon was Abel Gance’s l927 silent epic) could end up being a profound way of carrying on Kubrick’s legacy.