From Dekalog to A.I.: How Kieslowski's Masterpiece influenced Kubrick's Final Film

Film Analysis

“I am always reluctant to single out some particular feature of the work of a major filmmaker because it tends inevitably to simplify and reduce the work. But in this book of screenplays by Krzysztof Kieslowski and his co-author, Krzysztof Piesiewicz, it should not be out of place to observe that they have the very rare ability to dramatize their ideas rather than just talking about them. By making their points through the dramatic action of the story they gain the added power of allowing the audience to discover what's really going on rather than being told. They do this with such dazzling skill, you never see the ideas coming and don't realize until much later how profoundly they have reached your heart.”

-Stanley Kubrick for the foreword to Kieslowski & Piesiewicz, Decalogue: The Ten Commandments, London: Faber & Faber, 1991

For his final project, “A.I. Artificial Intelligence”, which he did not live to make and which was subsequently completed by his friend Steven Spielberg, Stanley Kubrick had in mind something more than a science-fiction narrative. It was to be a drama saturated with ideas, a philosophical meditation on law, morality, technology, and the conditions of human longing. In shaping it, Kubrick turned toward Krzysztof Kieślowski’s “Dekalog”, which he famously described as the most intelligent and moving work of its kind. This admiration was not mere cinephilia. “Dekalog” provided a structure—a philosophical architecture—that Kubrick could transpose into his own speculative idiom. Episodes 1, 2, and 5 in particular resonate with the parables of “A.I.”, where the biblical commandments are mirrored by Asimov’s robotic laws, and where human frailty is translated into the inexorable logic of machines.

The first episode of “Dekalog” stages the tragedy of a rationalist father who entrusts his son’s safety to computer models of ice thickness, only to witness the boy’s death. At once a parable of faith in science and of its fatal insufficiency, it is uncannily echoed in “A.I.” through the figure of Professor Hobby, who, after losing his own son, dreams of constructing an artificial child capable of love. Hobby’s speech about creating machines that feel becomes the speculative counterpart to the father’s lecture on the capacities of computers. Both scientists embody the same tragic faith in rational mastery: in Kieślowski’s case, the dream of predicting nature’s fragility, and in Kubrick’s, the dream of repairing mortality through artificial affection. Each is betrayed by the limits of science when confronted with the abyss of human loss.

The second episode of “Dekalog” renders the dilemma of uncertainty with piercing clarity. A woman, pregnant by another man, begs her husband’s doctor to tell her whether the comatose patient will live or die. If he survives, she will abort the pregnancy; if not, she will carry it. The doctor, knowing the gravity of his words, becomes the reluctant oracle of fate, forced to speak with authority where certainty is impossible. The Swintons in “A.I.” inhabit precisely this parable in speculative form: their son Martin lies cryogenically suspended, his recovery uncertain, while David, the robot child, enters their lives as a substitute. The parents’ decision to activate David is conditioned by uncertainty, and when Martin unexpectedly recovers, the substitution becomes unbearable. The same structure is visible: a family confronted with the limits of knowledge, forced to decide life and death in the shadow of radical opacity.

The fifth episode of “Dekalog” turns upon the commandment “Thou shalt not kill.” Through the juxtaposition of a senseless murder and a state execution, Kieślowski collapses the moral distinction between crime and punishment, exposing law as an institution that cloaks violence with legitimacy. In “A.I.”, this parable re-emerges through the subplot of Gigolo Joe, accused of murdering a woman and condemned to destruction. His plight demonstrates the impossibility of applying human law to artificial beings, just as the Flesh Fair, with its ritual dismantling of obsolete robots, reveals a society whose very sense of justice is grounded in sanctioned violence. The parallel is intensified by the presence of Asimov’s famous First Law—no robot may harm a human being—which here becomes a secularised commandment. Just as Kieślowski showed the divine injunction unraveling in human hands, Kubrick exposes the robotic law collapsing under human prejudice, cruelty, and error.

Yet these resonances are not mere homages; they amount to a deeper treatise on commandments themselves. Both Kieślowski and Kubrick reveal that laws—whether Mosaic or Asimovian—are inadequate to contain the messiness of desire, mortality, and ambiguity. In “Dekalog”, the law is perpetually broken by the circumstances of life; in “A.I.”, the law is perpetually exceeded by the very humanity machines are built to mimic. The tragic irony is that commandments exist to stabilise morality, yet they collapse when confronted with the reality of longing.

This longing itself is the hinge that binds Kieślowski and Kubrick. In “Dekalog”, characters long for certainty, for clear moral direction, for divine or rational guarantees that life refuses to provide. In “A.I.”, longing is embodied in David, the artificial child who seeks endlessly to become “real” so that his mother will love him without reserve. Here the metaphor deepens: David’s yearning is not a path toward maturity but a closed circuit, an Oedipal loop from which there is no escape. Freud’s model of psychic development depended upon the child’s eventual negotiation of the Oedipus complex: the painful acceptance of separation from the mother, the sublimation of desire into social bonds, the entry into the symbolic order of law. David, however, cannot complete this process. His programming condemns him to eternal fixation upon the mother, unable to separate, unable to sublimate, unable to enter into law. What Freud diagnosed as a stage to be overcome becomes, in Kubrick’s allegory, an eternal condition.

From a Lacanian perspective, David is trapped in the endless “demand for love” that structures subjectivity but is normally mediated through symbolic lack. For Lacan, desire is born of absence, of the impossibility of ever fully satisfying the demand for the Other’s love. In David’s case, this absence is never allowed to function productively; instead, his code turns it into a perpetual loop. His quest for the Blue Fairy is structurally equivalent to Lacan’s notion of the objet petit a, the unattainable object-cause of desire. But whereas humans circulate around this object, redirecting their desire and entering culture, David remains fixed, unable to displace or sublimate. He is condemned to literalise what in human life remains symbolic: the impossible pursuit of unconditional maternal love.

The darkness of this allegory becomes clear in the film’s ending. Long after humanity itself has disappeared, David remains, still praying to the Blue Fairy, still yearning for the mother. The species has perished, but its most infantile demand persists in the machine it created. What survives is not human maturity, not wisdom or transcendence, but the incapacity to let go, the refusal to accept death, the hunger for unconditional love. Kubrick’s pessimism is evident: civilisation ends not with a triumphant overcoming of mortality but with the eternalisation of its most immature fantasy.

In this sense, David functions as a metaphor for civilisation’s own inability to mature. Individually, humans grow by negotiating separation, accepting loss, and sublimating desire; collectively, civilisation grows by creating institutions that allow life to continue in the face of fragility. Yet the Oedipal loop persists: religions, technologies, ideologies all promise the return of absolute love, the guarantee of safety, the erasure of death. David is the crystallisation of this civilisational trap: a technological creation that cannot grow, that can only repeat the demand for love, forever. Humanity projects its own immaturity into the future, ensuring that what outlives it is not its creativity but its refusal to grow up.

Seen in this light, “A.I.” is less a fairy tale about a robot boy than a modern “Dekalog”, a cycle of parables in which commandments collapse and longing becomes catastrophe. It inherits Kieślowski’s structure while transposing it into the speculative idiom of robotics, where Asimov’s laws function as the new tablets of stone. The result is not homage but philosophical continuity. Kubrick recognised in “Dekalog” the most penetrating diagnosis of the human condition, and in “A.I.” he sought to universalise it: the parable of a species unable to transcend its own immaturity, condemned to repeat the cry for certainty in a universe that offers none. Spielberg, in completing the film, reinforced this lineage by embedding musical echoes of Preisner and Górecki, situating “A.I.” within the Polish metaphysical tradition that Kieślowski had embodied. What emerges is a work that stands as both a continuation of the “Dekalog” and its speculative rewriting: a treatise on commandments divine and algorithmic, on longing human and artificial, and on civilisation’s tragic refusal to grow beyond its own ruin.

Muzika, scene, paning shots, Allan Hobby, deset zapovijedati su kao Asimovi zakonit robotici, Joe don't kill, false witnessubica,