Weekend Watch: Spielberg's spooky sci-fi sleepers

Steven Spielberg has a reputation for crowd-pleasing uplift, and rightfully so. Even "Schindler's List" had enough of a "Hollywood ending" that "Seinfeld" got a decent gag out of it.

But Spielberg does go dark. And when he does, buckle up.

His 2001 movie “A.I.” is neither for actual kids nor for kids “at heart.” It's a brutally effective existential dread generator, a disturbing meditation on humanity's folly and cosmic insignificance hiding beneath a lavishly-produced and star-studded Hollywood fairy tale.

Which is probably why it's one of Spielberg's least commercially and critically successful outings.

Which is not to say it's not well worth your time. Try to get the final scene between Haley Joel Osment (the artificial boy David) and Frances O'Connor (his “mother”) out of your head. It's a moment of tenderness staged before a black hole.

"A.I." confronts us with our duty toward our creations. Most obviously, of course, it asks us to ponder the popular question of whether a significantly advanced artificial intelligence could be deserving of some kind of autonomy. (The movie should come with a trigger warning for robot abuse).

More broadly, though, you can take it as being about our autonomy. We don't like to think of ourselves as creatures, because that comes with implied obligations to a creator. David's quest to be real mirrors our own frantic attempts to forget how real we are. In both cases, the journey ends in illusion.

Spielberg's 2005 "War of the Worlds" also hides a howling void at the bottom of the popcorn bucket. When the aliens come, they don't waste time scaring us; they don't even bother getting out of their eerie tripod spaceships.

Just a causal zap from the onboard death ray, and fleeing, screaming humans are turned into a pile of dust. The dust evokes 9/11 (shooting commenced two months after the third anniversary), as does the greater New York City setting (Tom Cruise's protagonist is a longshoreman whose backyard affords a view of the Bayonne Bridge). Most chillingly, so do the homemade missing persons posters plastered by the Hudson Ferry terminal.

Cruise as always is inexplicably good at being both Tom Cruise and a convincing everyman. Here, his trademark cockiness is muted by his genuinely terrifying struggle to save his estranged kids from unthinkable calamity — all the while warding off thoughts of his own helplessness. To watch Cruise hold back tears as he sings "Little Deuce Coupe" to his terrified, exhausted daughter (Dakota Fanning) is to be reminded that the world's biggest star can also act.