The best movies about AI
For your weekend entertainment
In this newsletter I approach the future of AI from multiple points of view: policy, economics, technology of course, higher education, law, and more. One of those viewpoints or intellectual domains is culture, and I have a huge post coming up on that front.
But today I wanted to try something different along the cultural line. Let’s look at some cultural artifacts which have interesting things to say about AI. I’ll share a series of movies with commentary on what I found useful about them, as well as entertaining.
Let me know if you like this kind of thing, and I can follow up with more - AI in fiction, gaming, tv, documentaries, etc.
A few quick notes: Some of the movies are focused on AI, while others feature AI as one theme among others. Each is fiction, so I’m setting aside documentaries for now. I’ve arranged them in roughly historical order so you can see themes and ideas rise and change over time. I’ve also added some runners-up or alternatives. I’ll try to avoid spoilers.
Let’s start with an unusual one, from 16 years before the Dartmouth workshops decided to develop artificial intelligence. “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” (1940) is Disney’s take on a classic folktale of a young person getting control of magic and things going awry. Besides being brilliantly drawn and set to music, it’s also a good example of a human (or mouse) trying to handle programming logic. It ultimately displays our fear of autonomous machines as the follow logics we set out. It’s a very physical fear as well, connected to an intergenerational/power gap.
Forbidden Planet (1956) has so many things going on - a version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the first depiction of human heroes flying in a flying saucer, great electronic music, Leslie Nielsen playing a deadly serious character. I share it here because it features a friendly robot with some intelligence. Robbie is a hulking, slow-moving brute with its own logic and personality. Characters interact with it as if it were a person or a recalcitrant machine.
Note the limited anthropomorphic nature of the bot, with a torso, arms, and legs, but only computing machinery for a head and face. Despite the amazing! poster above, Robbie is benevolent, but nevertheless presents with a fearsome capacity for physical power. The character appeared in other movies and tv shows, beloved by many fans.
For a lot of older people 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) offers the most iconic and chilling example of AI gone wrong. The main plot of this Arthur C. Clarke-Stanley Kubrick collaboration concerns a human expedition to the outer solar system in a spacecraft run by a very soothing-sounding AI named HAL (a cute nod to IBM). Things… don’t go as planned.
The film depicts AI in an operational way, as HAL runs many of the ship’s systems, so much so as to make the astronauts largely redundant. That sense of competency gradually turns lethal. His intelligence is distributed throughout the craft; we don’t see his “body” until much later in the film, and it’s just a cabinet of memory cartridges. This semi-disembodiment makes for a change from decades of robot movies, like Forbidden Planet above. In a sense the spaceship is his body, resembling the human form to a degree, with a spherical leading module for a head and a long spine in its middle. Famously, HAL’s voice is always calm, even when describing or doing horrible things.
Runner-up: Ikarie XB-1 (1963), another Cold War space exploration adventure, but from the Soviet bloc. The titular spacecraft has a ship’s computer which is not so decisive as HAL but still interesting.
Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970) is a Cold War nightmare entirely about AI, and surprisingly few people have seen it. The plot concerns the United States turning over control of its nuclear weapons to a gigantic computer, only to find the Soviet Union has done the same. The two systems link up to run the world on their own, forming something new and dystopian. The computer scientists who built Colossus scheme to overturn it, including forming hidden romantic relationships in classic dystopian style.
This movie connects AI with war and the military-industrial complex, which is important for both historical and present-day purposes. It also offers an early visualization of the AI taking over the world idea. More, it explores different ways of embodying AI, starting with a gigantic complex, then distributing it through networks and devices.
Blade Runner (1982) returns to cinema’s depiction of robots, making them autonomous, competent, compelling, and doomed. These terminal creatures stalk through Ridley Scott’s famous cyberpunk noir landscape, struggling to survive beyond their expiration dates. Each bot struggles with the parameters of its intelligence. The android economy appears as one shot through with extreme inequality, sexism, and cruelty.
The film differs from the novel in so many ways, but retains Phil Dick’s preoccupation with the practical and philosophical relationships between robots and humans. Crucially, the plot turns on characters who look like people but who turn out to be robots, blurring the line between the two categories. It’s an interesting take on the Turing test and continues the conversation about human-AI overlap. (For Dick, ultimately empathy was what defined humanity, but not all humans possess or practice it.)
The Terminator (1984) famously presents a terrifying vision of AI. In the future a networked AI destroys most of the human race, then develops killbots to wipe out the survivors in the present and the past.
This thriller dives into the scary physical possibilities of previous robots, using the Governator’s hyperdeveloped, hypermasculine body and, ah, limited acting range to produce a brutal threat. Visuals sometimes display the robot’s mental processes, proceeding along decision paths, giving us more glimpses of AI logics. He’s also networked, part of the omnicidal AI.
The Matrix (1999) returns to Colossus’ theme of AI taking over the world and turning it into horror. The difference here is that AI builds a virtual simulation of our world and traps human minds within, whereas in Colossus the world is objective and known. This sets up the classic dystopian story of forlorn rebels struggling to undo the nightmarish order. They must master both the virtual and analog words in order to do so
Runner-up: The Animatrix (2003) has some excellent shorts. I’m most interested in “The Second Renaissance,” the origin story for The Matrix, which depicts humanity creating a new AI order, then warring against it.
WALL-E (2008) strikes me as a posthuman movie, where AI is in the protagonist’s seat. The story depicts an Earth abandoned by humans, who have fled to a comic-dystopian spaceship, but the main actors are several robots. Which is interesting of itself.
I’m also fascinated by how the film makes two very different robots, WALL-E and Eva, appealing to mass audiences. Each has a very different physical design, one junky, the other Apple-sleek. Neither has a human voice, really, yet many people find them both adorable. It’s the opposite of 2001’s HAL or The Terminator.
Runner-up: the delightful Robot and Frank, about an older man given a robot to help him through physical and/or mental decline. Trust me; it’s a treat.
Ex Machina (2014) begins by setting up a Turing test experiment involving two programmers and a robot running AI, then becomes a story about power and gender. AI becomes a tool for objectification as well as resistance to it. It’s interesting to pair the female AI-bot, placed in a space of increasingly sexist threats and violence, with the male, hyperviolent Terminator seeking to assassinate a woman for her childbearing potential. Note, too, that the movie returns to themes of inequality, with the lead programmer/founder/CEO as a godlike figure.
Ex Machina picks up on the gendered nature of Turing’s proposal, an underappreciated part of the test, as Audrey Watters points out.
Runner up: Moon (2009) features an AI-backed floating robot which presents as both frightening and genial. Voice by Kevin Spacey, which might shape the audience’s views.
Her (2013) might offer the best approximation of how generative AI works in practice. The story involves a man having a romantic relationship with his phone’s operating system - i.e., an AI application. Now that we have services like Character.ai and especially Replika this seems quite prophetic.
AI is bodiless, like HAL, but also utterly humane: friendly, supportive, challenging, thoughtful, romantic, erotic… until the end. Without spoilers, I’ll say it’s a version of the classic American story ending, on steroids.
Runner up: Blade Runner 2049, which isn’t a great film, but has some lovely design.
Dune (2021-2024) is one adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic science fiction novel. Among the many, many things going on in this story, there’s a backstory about AI abolition. Before the main story starts humanity went on a Butlerian Jihad, a mass movement to remove thinking machines. (The name points to Samuel Butler, his “Darwin among the Machines” and Erewhon) In the story proper we perceive that there is no AI, indeed barely any computing at all. Instead, humans have developed advanced internal skills, such as the calculating mentats. In a real sense this is a movie about the ghost of AI, the deliberate absence of AI.
Runner up: the wild David Lynch adaptation.
Movies I haven’t seen but would like to: I’ve heard Transcendence is awful, but I’m morbidly curious. A.I. Rising has better reviews and an Eastern European perspective. After Yang is a robot story about a family dealing with grief, I think. Jung-E is a South Korean film about mercenary AI robots. Another South Korean film is Wonderland, a comedy (!) about an AI representing dead people. Blank concerns an AI-run writer’s retreat. Marjorie Prime depicts AI used to assist people with declining memories. Archive is about a scientist trying to recreate a deceased love one with AI. … this paragraph is worthy of a film fest or a post on its own!
Movies I have seen and not on my list: Spielberg’s AI is interesting in. forensic way, a misfire on so many levels that it feels like a cry for help. The Creator is an astonishing disappointment being ultimately just dull. I, Robot plasters an action thriller over Asimov’s thoughtful stories.
What do you make of this list? Any other films to add? Could you use this in a class? And would you like me to do followup posts on other AI stories?
(Ex Machina poster by DNA Films / Film4 Productions - http://cdn.collider.com/wp-content/uploads/ex-machina-uk-poster.jpg, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=46469200; Dune Movie Poster (#16 of 23) - IMP Awards, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=68273917; Terminator poster by May be found at the following website: http://www.impawards.com/1984/terminator.html, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22186885)
Thanks to the pointer to Colossus, a movie I'd never heard of. My favorite is Ex Machina, which seems most relevant to our current times, both factually and metaphorically.
a movie about glambase would bang!!