Steven Spielberg's career as a director has been one of almost profligate variety: from mechanical sharks to the
Normandy invasion, from Indiana Jones to the Warsaw ghetto, not to mention the slave ships, the angry dinosaurs and the
second worst Pearl Harbor movie ever made. But every so often he comes back to the figure of a lonely boy facing the
incomprehension and cruelty of the adult world. In the sentimental film Artificial Intelligence: AI (2001) based on a futuristic tale, the central character is an 11 year-old
highly advanced robotic boy named David. Monica is the woman who adopted him as a substitute for her real son, who remains
in cryo-stasis, stricken by an incurable disease. 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, but David still holds his never-ending love for his
"mother." Two thousand years later, David requests to recreate Monica out of her DNA, although she could live for one day
only.
The central plot of this story is the experience of David who is to be abandoned and betrayed by his parents who adopted
him. Spielberg asks us to identify with a young boy, who exiled from the only home he knows and forced to find his way in a
strange and unsympathetic world. Spielberg’s fantasy about human replica probes into the inconsistent nature of human beings.
This movie tells you how to feel, especially when we see David, who has a similar yearning like Pinocchio’s, set out to find the
blue fairy who will transform him into a real boy.
Movies are not real, but few moviemakers have been as adept at finding original ways to counterfeit human emotion as
Spielberg. But here Spielberg confronts a crucial and difficult question: Do the virtual selves we project into the world, on
screen and elsewhere, bring us closer to knowing who we are, or do they distract us from our search for that knowledge, what
we are and what we will become?
【題組】55. What question is to be solved by Spielberg?
(A) Why the Robot Boy needs a Mom?
(B) Why the Robot Boy needs to be reprogrammed?
(C) How does the Robot Boy imitate human Life?
(D) What is the fate of Artificial Intelligence?
(E) Has Spielberg’s film let human beings better understand themselves?