Artificial Intelligence: AI(2001) directed by Steven Spielberg

1. Artificial Intelligence: AI(2001)directed bySteven Spielberg A highly advanced robotic boy longs to become "real" so that he can regain the love of his human mother.

2. Contents • Basic information • Plot summary • Movie themes of A. I. • Key vocabulary • Exercise

3. Basic Information David, an innovative Mecha created by Cybertronics and programmed with the ability to love. He is adopted by Henry and Monica Swinton, but a sibling rivalry ensues once their son Martin comes out of suspended animation. Osment was Spielberg's first and only choice for the role. Osment avoided blinking his eyes to perfectly portray the character, and "programmed" himself with good posture for realism.

4. Basic Information David's adopted mother who reads him The Adventures of Pinocchio. She is first displeased to have David in her home but soon starts loving him. an employee at Cybertronics and husband of Monica. Henry is reluctant to take David home, and soon sees David as dangerous to his family

5. Basic Information Henry and Monica's first son, who was placed in suspended animation. When Martin comes back, he convinces David to cut off a lock of Monica's hair. as Gigolo Joe, a male prostitute Mecha programmed with the ability to mimic love, like David, but in a different sense. To prepare for the role, Law studied the acting of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly..

6. Plot Summary • In the not-so-far future the polar ice caps have melted and the resulting rise of the ocean waters has drowned all the coastal cities of the world. Withdrawn to the interior of the continents, the human race keeps advancing, reaching the point of creating realistic robots (called mechas) to serve them. • One of the mecha-producing companies builds David, an artificial kid which is the first to have real feelings, especially a never-ending love for his "mother", Monica. Monica is the woman who adopted him as a substitute for her real son, who remains in cryo-stasis, stricken by an incurable disease.

7. Plot Summary • David is living happily with Monica and her husband, but when their real son returns home after a cure is discovered, his life changes dramatically. • The real son tricks David into doing dangerous things. The father feels that they must return David to the manufacturer for destruction, but the mother allows David to escape. • David hopes to become a real boy so that he can win back the affection of his mother who abandoned him. Then, he goes on a long journey hoping to find his “Blue Fairy”,who can make his dreams come true. For a time, David is joined on his quest by “Gigolo Joe,” a robot designed to be a male lover-Mecha.

8. Plot Summary • Finally, he finds “Blue Fairy” underwater, which turns out to be a statue. Believing the Blue Fairy to be real, David asks to be turned into a real boy, repeating his wish without end, until the ocean freezes in another ice age . • Millennia later – long after the extinction of the human species, the alien-looking futuristic robots grant him his wish, and the resurrected Monica and David, along with Teddy, spend an entire day together, doing all sorts of things. When it finally comes time for them to go to sleep, the resurrected Monica tells David that she loves him. With this knowledge, David himself also goes to sleep, content and happy at last.

9. Movie Themes of A.I. • It is at heart a film about loss. • Most obviously it is about a child rejected by his mother, but the robot boy David would have lost his mother even if she had not abandoned him. "Fifty years," the mother Monica tells her adopted son, is all she can be expected to live; and that is just a single sunrise and sunset to an immortal being. His journey in the film is a quest to find eternal love, which implies eternal life. The darkness at the core of A.I. is not the pain of abandonment but the knowledge that all things shall pass.

10. Movie Themes of A.I. • A.I. is also a film about the loss of the human race. • "Death by global warming" is a scenario common to many futuristic films, in which a Noah-like deluge drowns a greedy, politically incorrect world. What happens when the sun "breaks down,” — because life is no more? The great, unthinkable tragedy is not the loss of one life, but all life, and with it all that humanity has labored, fought, and loved.

11. Movie Themes of A.I. • The ending of A.I., in which David is given the chance to spend a single day with a reincarnation of his long-dead mother, is an explicit (albeit contrived) insertion of elements of the fable into science fiction. • The hope implicit in this fable is that the past is not lost to us; all that has happened has left a mark somewhere, like fossils in the earth, and perhaps one day we will find a way to recover them.

12. Movie Themes of A.I. • A.I. begins in a world inhabited by lonelyhumans seeking comfort and lovefrom robots of their own fashioning. • It ends in a world inhabited by lonely robots seeking comfort and love from humans of their own fashioning — flawed, short-lived clones, such as one of David’s mother Monica that the super-mechas create for David at the very end of the story.

13. Key vocabulary • Vocabulary Handout

14. Exercises • A. Discussion • Should human treat robot the same as other human beings?Why or why not?

15. Exercises B. Choose the appropriate word to fill each of the following blanks; change the form of verbs when necessary. (handout)

16. 1. drowned 2. required 3. emotions 4. programmed 5. jealousy 6. terminally 7. transforms 8. unconditionally 9. idyllic 10. breakthrough 11. miraculously 12. robotic 13. tease 14. abandons 15. quest B.

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