Cinema has long been obsessed with the concept of machines that can think, feel and one day be indistinguishable from their creators. When done correctly, artificial intelligence as a cinematic device can serve as a perfect mirror for human anxiety, ambition and existential dread; at its worst, it’s a goofy stab at speculative fear mongering, nervously imagining a future where our place in the world is entirely nebulous.
The reality is probably somewhere in between.
Mhairi Aitkeen, an ethics fellow at the Alan Turing Institute, says it would be more realistic for movies to show “AI not as a character, but rather as systems in the background that might influence plot lines while not being the central focus.”
That doesn’t sound hugely entertaining. But as someone who’s been watching movies about AI — both rogue and otherwise — since I was a wee lad, I’ve made my own list of some of the best and worst films the subgenre has to offer.
Here are a few.
Best: “Her” (2013): While the concept of someone falling in love with an operating system sounds like something quirky and twee straight out of a Wes Anderson movie, in the hands of auteur writer/director Spike Jonze, it becomes not just a stirring metaphor for the heartbreak of watching your partner evolve past you, but a deep dive into the possible limits of intimacy when your person knows, literally, everything about you. “Her” is a stunning and groundbreaking picture that treats AI as both a blessing and a curse.
The movie “Her” (2013) is written and directed by Spke Jonze and involves a man falling in love with an operating system. (Courtesy photo, Annapurna)
Worst: “Mercy” (2026): A schlocky, real-time sci-fi thriller where Chris Pratt is accused of murdering his wife and has 90 minutes — while strapped to a chair — to prove his innocence before an AI judge, jury and executioner puts him to death. I’m not entirely positive that the movie comes out in favor of a surveillance state, but it certainly treats some inherently fascist ideas as worth exploring. Most of the film is shot from the POV of drones, social media feeds and CCTV, meaning it looks just as ugly as it sounds.
Best: “Blade Runner” (1982): What makes “Blade Runner” such a prescient piece of speculative fiction is that it takes its concept to its most logical conclusion, viewed through the lens of the best and worst instincts of human nature. If an invention like replicants existed in real life, we would love them at first. They would be our nannies, our sex workers and our fast food employees. Then, we would eventually resent them for not being us, hunting them for profit and sport. Are replicants AI? I’m not sure, but they’re definitely our future.
Worst: “Transcendence” (2014): Johnny Depp plays a scientist trying to create a sentient computer to help the human race transcend its own mortality, eventually uploading his own consciousness to a quantum machine. While the ridiculous screenplay attempts to touch on bleeding-edge tech like sentient nanoparticles and bio-printed organics, it’s all so goofily written that the science feels more akin to magic. With Christopher Nolan on board as a producer, there are some genuinely thought-provoking ideas, but the logic, plot and action sequences fail miserably.
There are so many fantastic movies that take the basic concept of artificial intelligence and expand it into unpredictable, innovative places. “2001: A Space Odyssey” is one of the first films in history to take an artificial character, HAL 9000 and give it terrifying agency. “The Matrix” took a red pill and a blue pill and turned them into a metaphor for expanding human consciousness. “Tron” imagined uploading that consciousness into a digital space for deadly fun and games. Meanwhile, “Ex Machina” imagines a future where humanity becomes so selfish and abusive that we are the ones who should be evaluated with a Turing test.
But if you’re looking for a terrible one to laugh at with some friends, you can’t go wrong with “Stealth.” It’s a bombastic brain freeze of a movie about the Navy uploading an AI into a stealth fighter, leading to lots of CGI dogfights and hilarious conversations about the morality of a plane. It’s highly entertaining if you’ve had a few drinks, but the soundtrack featuring Incubus, David Bowie and Kasabian is the real highlight.
Ultimately, the quality of a film about Artificial Intelligence relies almost entirely on the intellect and humanity of the writers. Because we are still so early into the life span of this technology, these stories work equally well as speculative fiction and as metaphors dissecting the morality and vulnerabilities of the human race. Moving forward, the most dramatically successful films focused on AI will be the ones that avoid surface-level sparkle and really unearth the psychological complications of coexisting with our own flawed, perfect creations.
Will people still want to pay me for my thoughts when ChatGPT can write a 700-word review in five seconds? I certainly hope so. At least that’s what Google told me to think.