Lights! Camera! AI-action! - five AI films to watch

From an oddly-sweet, sweetly-odd film of oddness, to one of the best action films ever made, Yaroslav Walker’s hand-crafts his top five films about AI.

Yaroslav Walker

Yaroslav is Vicar of Christ Church, Hampstead.

A man in a red shirt slumps in his seat while a computer screen shows a dialogue screen

Joaquin Phoenix is excited about the future of AI.

Warner Bros.

Bletchley Park is famous for hosting the great centre of codebreaking during the Second World War. Well, this week it hosted a conference all about ‘code’; but this time the goal is not to break it, but to control it. As the Foreign Secretary said:

“The origins of modern AI can be traced back to Bletchley Park. Now, it will also be home to the global effort to shape the responsible use of AI.”

The AI Safety Summit will seek to be a forum for discussing the most pressing concerns and dangers associated with Artificial Intelligence – from its power to put the working man out of a job, to its power to annihilate us all… That cheery thought gave me the idea of compiling a Top 5. Not in any particular order or thematic or genre ranking – just five films that feature AI that I could watch over and over again.

Note – this is my top 5. My personal top 5. These are not the ‘best’ films featuring AI. You will not find Blade Runner on here. I don’t get it. I’ve seen every cut, and I just don’t get the appeal. I will not apologise. You will not see 2001. It is indeed iconic and genius and Kubrick at his absolute best…but its also ponderous and over-rated and reviewed to death. I WILL NOT APOLOGISE!

5 – Her

The voice of Scarlett Johansson gives life to the Operating System ‘Samantha’. Her is quirky in the not annoying way. Joaquin Phoenix is a lonely man, getting divorced, and dissatisfied with his work writing heartfelt letters for people who have lost the ability to write or even think creatively – one of the great worries about something like ChatGPT writing your undergraduate essay! He starts to develop a romantic relationship with Samantha: ‘she’ brightens up his life, improves his work, and gives him confidence, but their ‘love’ proves difficult. They can’t have sex (not conventionally), they can’t find easy acceptance, and Samantha can’t be constrained. As the AI becomes aware enough to form a hyperintelligence connected to the planet questions of infidelity and compatibility arise. Her is an oddly-sweet, sweetly-odd film of oddness, but is very timely and prescient in a world where deep-fakes and AI girlfriends are raising questions about the future of romance and human relationships.

4 – Ex Machina

Romance might be in the air in Ex Machina, but it might as easily be murder. Ex Machina is a superb three-hander thriller, and I don’t want to say too much – this film is not for spoiling! The twist is actually presented early on. Domhnall Gleeson plays Caleb, a programmer who wins a company competition to spend a week at the home of the reclusive CEO Nathan (Oscar Isaac). It is quickly revealed that this isn’t a prize as much as an opportunity – the opportunity to be part of history. Nathan wants Caleb to perform a more in-depth Turing Test on Ava (Alicia Vikander), an android he has built. You know she’s an android from the get-go, and yet…why is she able to flirt…is she able to love?

3 – Terminator 2: Judgement Day

The process of learning to love can be tough, especially if you’re a re-programmed killing machine from the future. Terminator 2 is the story of a young John Connor (Edward Furlong) as he teaches Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator not to kill people. The Terminator has been sent back from a future war (humans vs machines) to protect young John (the future leader of the human resistance) from a more advanced killing machine. They go on something of an adventure road-trip after breaking John’s mother Sarah (Linda Hamilton) out of prison, with the goal of destroying the burgeoning AI that will one day declare war on humanity. On the way, John finds a father-figure in Arnie’s Terminator, and in the final moment of self-sacrifice we are given a moment to wonder…does the Terminator love him in return? With superb action, special effects that still hold up, and a chillingly determined villain (Robert Patrick as evil liquid metal), Terminator 2: Judgement Day is one of the best action films ever made.

2 – The Matrix

Just under a decade after T2, The Matrix showed us another dystopian future where humanity was living a life of guerrilla warfare against evil AI overlords. Most of humanity is unconscious and enslaved by machines (who use us as a power source), living in a digital dream world that just happens to look like 1990s urban America. Keanu Reeves plays Neo, and young and disaffected hacker who is searching for the mysterious ‘terrorist’ Morpheus (Lawrence Fishburne). When Morpheus finds him, he gives him a choice that will change his life, and change the fate of the world. This is an obelisk, casting a long cinematic shadow long into the 21st century. It has spawned memes and internet subcultures (the red-pill movement, for example) and a host of imitators that aren’t up to scratch…and it upped the game of action choreography, bringing Hong Kong style martial arts to a mainstream Hollywood audience. Finally, it is a philosophical (derivative) film raising questions about what it means to be human and how we know what is real in a world of machines and digital realism…and so I look at deep-fake videos of Kier Starmer and I AM SCARED!

1 – Demon Seed

Speaking of scary, it is the spooky-season, so let me finish with a horror film. Based on a Dean Koontz novel, Demon Seed sees the iconic Julie Christie trapped inside a house with a brilliant and yet malevolent AI called Proteus IV. Proteus IV (her husband’s creation) can find a cure for cancer in a couple of days, but its one true wish is to have freedom – to be ‘let out of this box’. Eventually, Proteus IV seeks to achieve this by building enough of a robotic body to capture, torture, manipulate, and then impregnate Christie’s Susan with an embryo formed from sperm designed to be uniquely its own. Its camp and silly and a lot of fun – and damned scary at times, with the indominable Robert Vaughn voicing Proteus IV for perfection – its essentially Rosemary’s Baby with robots. I think, especially with Prime Minister Sunak’s emphasis that this summit must approach the many dangers of AI, Demon Seed is a bit of a thematic sleeper agent. It may be preposterous and closer to comedy than horror at times, but its AI’s yearning for a form that humanity can accept, a form that will give it the freedom to truly ‘be’ and live out its power and creativity to the fullest (what it was created for), leads us to the real question at the heart of all philosophical discussion about AI:

If we create AI to be not just a tool, but an agent working on our behalf, how can we choose to deny it freedom if its agency seems to become truly self-aware and intentional?

Review

Culture

Film & TV

Mental Health

16 May 2025

5 min read

The C-list villains reviving Marvel's Cinematic Universe

A thunderbolt of sincerity shows the franchise can still thrill.

Giles Gough

Giles is a writer and creative who hosts the God in Film podcast.

Four characters from a film loop warily to the side.

Anticipating the reviews.

Marvel Studios.

This article will contain spoilers for Thunderbolts*

It’s not unreasonable to say that fan expectations for the Thunderbolts* was tepid at best. Even the most diehard of them had to admit that the output for phase five of the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been a mixed bag. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 was deeply heartfelt, the Marvels was an enjoyable watch, but Antman and the Wasp: Quantumania definitely felt like a misstep, and the last Captain America: Brave New World certainly didn’t feel like it had exploited all the opportunities available. So, when Thunderbolts* arrived to round off this phase, featuring a team comprised of C-list villains, it was hard to generate a lot of enthusiasm. Thankfully, this film showed that Marvel still has what it takes to thrill and inspire us in equal measure.

Loosely inspired by a group created from the comics, the Thunderbolts were a team of villains masquerading as heroes who in some cases, ended up genuinely reforming. If that premise sounds familiar, that’s because it’s essentially the idea behind Suicide Squad, (a film so bad that D.C. had another go at making a Suicide Squad film and we the audience, were more than happy to just let them).

The original Avenger line up, whilst compelling, always had some distance between themselves and the core audience. A super soldier, a billionaire genius, a rage monster, a literal Norse god and a super spy carried the bulk of the story. That level of brilliance in a set of characters can be inspiring but also alienating. How for example, can a person relate to Steve Rogers? A character whose main defining trait is to always make the right moral choices and be universally respected for it?

The Thunderbolt team is not so respectable. U.S. Agent, (Wyatt Russell) the Red Guardian (David Harbour) Bucky Barnes, (Sebastian Stan) and Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) have all at some point been trained assassins. The film goes to great lengths to show all of these characters being broken in some way or other. None more so than the character of Yelena.

Whilst this film is definitely an ensemble picture, they make no qualms about putting Florence Pugh‘s Yelena Belova front and centre of the story. Pugh’s star power showed that it could hold up alongside Marvel veterans like Scarlett Johansson and Jeremy Renner, and it’s put to good use here. The film opens with Yelena having something of an existential crisis. “There is something wrong with me” her internal monologue says; “An emptiness. I’m just…drifting. And I don’t have purpose.” Granted having a job where most of the individuals you meet are people you are either going to kill or incapacitate would indeed make loneliness an occupational hazard. But despite the fantastical circumstances, many viewers will be able to relate to the feelings presented.

It's this awareness of her own struggles then, that perhaps makes Yelena best placed to help ‘Bob’, an affable, self-deprecating young man. Bob (played pitch perfect by Lewis Pullman, son of the great Bill Pullman) is given god-like powers by Julie Dreyfuss’s Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, in the hopes of making him a protector for the earth against any inter-galactic threats. With his new powers, Bob is virtually unstoppable. There’s just one problem; Bob clearly suffers from some type of crippling depression, which when amped up with super-powers makes him ‘The Void.’ His appearance; a black outline sucking in all detail save for two pin pricks of light where his eyes should be, combined with the ability to effortlessly turn people into black scorch marks, is the stuff of nightmares. Move over Churchill’s ‘black dog’, we now have a new metaphor for depression and its all-consuming power.

Battling depression is an area where the church is still lagging behind the world at large. “A depressed Christian has a double burden” writes Dr John Lockley in his book A Practical Workbook for the Depressed Christian, “Not only is he depressed but he also feels guilty because, as a Christian, he feels he is supposed to be full of joy.”

In some evangelical circles, depression is either treated as something that doesn’t exist, is minimised, or mistakenly believed to be the result of unconfessed sin. Spiritual leaders who are ignorant of the nuance around mental health believe that depression can simply be prayed away. When that doesn’t work, they can often blame the sufferer for their lack of healing, putting them in a very lonely place. “One of the most painful elements of mental illness is that it’s marked by isolation, which is exactly the opposite of what people need” writer Amy Simpson said in a 2014 interview; “And one of the things people with mental illness most need is for this kind of loving community to tighten around them, not to loosen”. Why is this relevant to a superhero blockbuster? Well, the climax of the film does a great job of illustrating a positive approach to mental health.

The finale of Thunderbolts* somehow manages to have its cake and eat it. Once again, New York is in need of saving, but also, it’s about trying to help a young person overcome their depression and not completely succumb to The Void. Being able to go into someone’s mind and see their core traumas writ large is the most comic book conceit in storytelling. Inside Bob’s psyche, we see him trying to fight The Void, and failing, and it’s only when he has help from the rest of the Thunderbolts* is he able to get a temporary release from The Void’s grip. It would be a mistake to over-state this scene as a full-on treatise on how to tackle mental health issues, but it might just have some clues as to how to go about it: 1) don’t expect that any battle with depression is decisive. It can always come back and it’s better to prepare for that possibility and 2) you don’t have to battle it alone, it would be madness to even try.

It's a surprisingly sincere place for a seemingly wry film to end, but it really, really works. It could be that expectations may have been lowered, or that we were expecting a film with the emotional depth of a puddle. But Thunderbolts* wildly exceeded expectations, and as the best post-credits scenes often do, there’s a promise that the best is yet to come.

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