Steven Spielberg (145 page)

Perhaps the most distinctive films made by DreamWorks have been its animated features, spearheaded by company partner Jeffrey Katzenberg.
Shrek
(2001, directed by Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson), a charming and irreverent fairy tale that satirized traditional Disney fare, became a popular sensation and led to a series of sequels. (
DreamWorks
)

Though underappreciated by audiences on its first release,
A.I. Artificial Intelligence
(2001) is one of Spielberg’s masterpieces, a complex meditation on the meaning of human consciousness and the dangerous possibility that it could be replicated. Haley Joel Osment’s incarnation of the robot who, like Pinocchio, wants to be a real boy is another of the superb child performances in Spielberg’s work. (
Warner Bros
.)

The horrific Flesh Fair sequence in
A.I.
, a futuristic holocaust, was part of Stanley Kubrick’s conception of the film before Spielberg took over the project following Kubrick’s death. Robots, including David (Osment) and Gigolo Joe (Jude Law) (
in left background
), are consigned to destruction for the amusement of a brutalized populace. (
Warner Bros
.)

The climactic scene in Spielberg’s futuristic thriller
Minority Report
(2002), when Tom Cruise, as a policeman confronting a suspect he thinks abducted his son, decides not to shoot him but to read him his Miranda Rights. Adapted from a Philip K. Dick short story,
Minority Report
began filming before the 9/11 attacks and the Bush administration’s resulting crackdown on civil liberties and proved remarkably timely in its depiction of “precrime” investigation. (
Twentieth Century Fox
)

Spielberg found many autobiographical overtones in his 2002 comedy-drama
Catch Me If You Can
, with Leonardo DiCaprio playing youthful con man Frank Abagnale Jr. and Tom Hanks as his FBI pursuer and surrogate father figure. Drawing on Spielberg’s early escapades, both actual and mythical, as a brash interloper in Hollywood,
Catch Me If You Can
also deals directly with his most obsessive subject, divorce and family breakup. (
DreamWorks
)

Spielberg, who rarely dated as a teenager, found when he began directing in Hollywood that he was suddenly attractive to young actresses. Frank Abagnale’s fraudulent role as an airline pilot brings him similar rewards in
Catch Me If You Can
. (
DreamWorks
)

A visitor to the United States who finds himself stranded in New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, Viktor Navorski (Tom Hanks) finds the resilience to survive with the help of some working-class friends in
The Terminal
(2004). This fable of immigration in an age when America often seems “closed” to newcomers was a lighthearted but eloquent reaffirmation by Spielberg of the nation’s true welcoming spirit. (
DreamWorks
)

Spielberg plunged America into the depths of war-torn chaos in
War of the Worlds
(2005). His updated version of the H. G. Wells novel about interplanetary invasion put Americans into the position of Iraqis faced with “shock and awe” from foreign conquerors. In the director’s darkest metaphor for the post-9/11 environment, Tom Cruise plays a working-class father struggling to protect his children, played by Justin Chatwin and Dakota Fanning. (
Paramount
)

Spielberg fully expected the firestorm of controversy that greeted his somber film about an Israeli hit squad avenging the murders of athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. The team of trained assassins in
Munich
(2005), played by (
from left
) Daniel Craig, Eric Bana, Ciarán Hinds, Mathieu Kassovitz, and Hanns Zischler, became the focus of vitriolic debate in the media over the ethics of targeted killing and the price of fighting terrorism. (
Universal
)

Old friends George Lucas and Steven Spielberg joined forces once again for the fourth installment of the Indiana Jones series,
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
(2008). They wore desert headgear for the shooting of the opening drag-race sequence in Abiquiu, New Mexico. (
Paramount
)