linguistic:paraphrasing, structural:reformatting
1999–2012: Master of technology

In 2001, Spielberg and Tom Hanks produced Band of Brothers, a ten-part HBO miniseries based on Stephen E. Ambrose 's book of the same name. It follows Easy Company of the 101st Airborne Division 's 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment. The series won a Golden Globe for Best Miniseries. In the same year, Spielberg returned to science fiction with A.I. Artificial Intelligence, a loose adaptation of Brian Aldiss 's 1969 short story " Supertoys Last All Summer Long ". Stanley Kubrick had first asked Spielberg to direct the feature in 1979. Spielberg tried to make it in the style that Kubrick would have, though with mixed results according to some critics. The plot revolves around an android, David (Haley Joel Osment) who, like Pinocchio, dreams of being a "real boy". Critics thought Spielberg directed with "sentimentality", and Roger Ebert wrote, "Here is one of the most ambitious films of recent years but it miscalculates in asking us to invest our emotions in a character, a machine." The film won five Saturn Awards and grossed $236 million worldwide. Jonathan Rosenbaum highly praised the film: "If the best movies are often those that change the rules, Steven Spielberg’s sincere, cockeyed, serious, and sometimes masterful realization of Stanley Kubrick’s ambitious late project deserves to be a contender... If A.I. Artificial Intelligence —a film whose split personality is apparent even in its two-part title—is as much a Kubrick movie as a Spielberg one, this is in large part because it defamiliarizes Spielberg, makes him strange. Yet it also defamiliarizes Kubrick, with equally ambiguous results—making his unfamiliarity familiar. Both filmmakers should be credited for the results—Kubrick for proposing that Spielberg direct the project and Spielberg for doing his utmost to respect Kubrick’s intentions while making it a profoundly personal work." A. O. Scott called it "the best fairy tale–the most disturbing, complex and intellectually challenging boy's adventure story–Mr. Spielberg has made" and chose it as the best film of the year.

Spielberg followed A.I. with the sci-fi neo-noir Minority Report (2002), based on Philip K. Dick 's short story of the same name about a group of investigators who try to prevent crimes before they are committed. The film received critical acclaim. Ebert named Minority Report the best film of 2002, praising its craftsmanship: "here is Spielberg using every trick in the book and matching them without seams, so that no matter how he's achieving his effects, the focus is always on the story and the characters... Some directors place their trust in technology. Spielberg, who is a master of technology, trusts only story and character, and then uses everything else as a workman uses his tools." However, critic Todd McCarthy thought there was not enough action. The film earned over $358 million worldwide. Also in 1992, he released Catch Me If You Can, based on the book of the same name by con-artist Frank Abagnale. Leonardo DiCaprio played Abangale; Christopher Walken and Tom Hanks starred. Spielberg said, "I have always loved movies about sensational rogues—they break the law, but you just have to love them for the moxie." The film was a critical and commercial success.

Spielberg worked with Hanks, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Stanley Tucci in The Terminal (2004), a lighthearted comedy about an Eastern European man stranded in an airport. The film was praised for its production design and was a commercial success, although reviews were mixed. In 2005, Spielberg directed War of the Worlds, a co-production of Paramount and DreamWorks, based on H. G. Wells 's novel of the same name; Spielberg had been a fan of the book and of George Pal 's 1953 film. Starring Tom Cruise and Dakota Fanning, the film is about an American dock worker who is forced to look after his children, from whom he lives separately, as he tries to protect and reunite them with their mother when extraterrestrials invade Earth. Spielberg used storyboards to help the actors react to computer imagery that they could not see and used natural lighting and camerawork to avoid an "over stylized" science fiction picture. The film was a box office hit grossing over $600 million worldwide.

Spielberg's Munich (2005) is about the Israeli government's secret retaliation after eleven Israeli Olympic athletes were kidnapped and murdered in the 1972 Munich massacre. The film is based on Vengeance, a book by Canadian journalist George Jonas. It was previously adapted for the screen in the 1986 television film Sword of Gideon. Spielberg, who personally remembers the incident, sought advice from former president Bill Clinton, among others, before making the film because he did not want to cause further problems in the Middle East. Although the film garnered mostly positive reviews, some critics perceived it as anti-Semitic; it is one of Spielberg's most controversial films to date. Munich received five Academy Awards nominations: Best Picture, Best Film Editing, Best Score, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Director for Spielberg. It was his sixth Best Director nomination, and fifth Best Picture nomination.

In the mid-2000s, Spielberg scaled down his directing career and became more selective about film projects to undertake. In December 2005, he and his partners sold DreamWorks to media conglomerate Viacom (now known as Paramount Global). The sale was finalized in February 2006. In June 2006, Spielberg planned to make Interstellar, but abandoned the project, which was eventually directed by Christopher Nolan. During this period, Spielberg remained active as a producer; producing 2005's Memoirs of a Geisha, an adaptation of Arthur Golden 's novel of the same name. Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis executive-produced the animated film Monster House (2006), marking their eighth collaboration. He also worked with Clint Eastwood for the first time, co-producing 2006's Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima with Robert Lorenz. Spielberg served as executive producer for 2007's Disturbia, and the Transformers film series. In that same year, Spielberg and Mark Burnett co-produced On the Lot, a reality and competition show about filmmaking.

Spielberg returned to the Indiana Jones series in 2008 with the fourth installment, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Released nineteen years after Last Crusade, the film is set in 1957, pitting Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) against Soviet agents led by Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett), searching for a telepathic crystal skull. Principal photography was complete in October 2007, and the film was released on May 22, 2008. This was his first film not released by DreamWorks since 1997. The film received generally favorable reviews from critics, but some fans were disappointed by the introduction of science fiction elements which were uncharacteristic of the previous films. Writing for The Age, Tom Ryan praised Spielberg and George Lucas for their realistic 1950s setting—"The energy on display is impressive". It was a box office success, grossing $790 million worldwide.

Starting in 2009, Spielberg shot the first film in a planned trilogy of motion capture films based on Hergé 's The Adventures of Tintin. Spielberg had long been a fan of the comics, and per Michael Farr, Hergé "thought Spielberg was the only person who could ever do Tintin justice." The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn was co-produced by Peter Jackson and premiered in Brussels, Belgium. The film was released in North American theaters on December 21, 2011, in Digital 3D and IMAX. It received generally positive reviews from critics and grossed over $373 million worldwide. The Adventures of Tintin won Best Animated Feature at the 69th Golden Globe Awards. It was the first non- Pixar film to win the award since the category was introduced.

Spielberg followed Tintin with War Horse, shot in England in the summer of 2010. It was released four days after Tintin, on December 25, 2011. The film is based on Michael Morpurgo 's 1982 novel of the same name and follows the long friendship between a British boy and his horse Joey before and during World War I. Distributed by Walt Disney Studios with whom DreamWorks made a distribution deal in 2009, War Horse was the first of four consecutive Spielberg films released by Disney. It had an acclaimed response from critics and was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture. In a review for Salon magazine, Andrew O'Hehir wrote, "at this point in his career Spielberg is pursuing personal goals, and everything that's terrific and overly flat and tooth-rottingly sweet about War Horse reflects that."

Spielberg returned to the World War II theme, co-producing the 2010 miniseries The Pacific with Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman. The miniseries is centered on the battles in the Pacific Theater. The next year, Spielberg co-created Falling Skies, a science fiction series on TNT, with Robert Rodat. Spielberg also produced the 2011 Fox series Terra Nova. Terra Nova begins in the year 2149 when all life on the planet Earth is threatened with extinction resulting in scientists opening a door that allows people to travel back 85 million years to prehistoric times. In the same year, he produced J. J. Abrams 's Super 8.

Spielberg directed the historical drama Lincoln (2012), starring Daniel Day-Lewis as President Abraham Lincoln and Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln. Based on Doris Kearns Goodwin 's book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln and written by Tony Kushner, the film depicts the final four months of Lincoln's life. The film was shot in Richmond, Virginia in late 2011. and was released in the U.S. in November 2012. Lincoln was acclaimed and earned more than $250 million worldwide. It was nominated for twelve Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, winning Best Production Design and Best Actor for Day-Lewis's performance. Donald Clarke from The Irish Times praised the direction: "Against the odds, Spielberg makes something genuinely exciting of the backstage wheedling."