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

Character

Culture

Music

21 March 2025

4 min read

Lady Gaga’s battle for authenticity

A new album, and interviews, reveal her progress.

Jamie Mulvaney

Jamie is Vicar of St Michael's Chester Square, London.

A black and white photo of a woman about to open her mouth to sing.

Ladygaga.com.

'Bridled' isn't the first word that comes to mind about Lady Gaga. She has never struck me as being someone restrained and confined. But in a wide-ranging interview in the New York Times, she recently spoke about how the music industry 'bridles' women in music: "they talk to you a lot about your look and what the aesthetic is for the album and the “brand” of music. That started to affect how I made music.”

Whether it's others' beliefs that her more adventurous personas were the real her, or that the 'normcore' (as she puts it) of acting in A Star is Born was a sellout, she is keen to own for herself the definition of authenticity. And, two decades on, she is determined finally to match her relentless authenticity with authority. In interviews with both the New York Times and the Times of London, she has described herself as 'the boss’.

Emerging from several significant personal battles, not least the price of fame itself, Gaga is well-placed to be an authority on authority and authenticity. The jazz musician Miles David said, “Man, sometimes it takes you a long time to sound like yourself.” By returning to her pop roots in her new album Mayhem, she is eschewing the fear of what others might think. Gaga reflects that however romanticised the tortured creative can be, it is unhealthy, and she didn't enjoy this past self when making music, contrasted with the joy of making music from a more contented place now.

When fame is so caught up with artistry (her first album in 2008 was The Fame, reissued a year later as The Fame Monster), she is communicating a sense of peace at where she has arrived in her career. Brittany Spanos reviewed her new album in Rolling Stone by saying “Gaga feels like her most authentic self from start to finish on this album: There’s no characters, concepts, or aesthetic impulses overshadowing the songs,”. This chimes with what Gaga said in her interview in the New York Times about how her work had previously taken over her: “I was falling so deeply into the fantasy of my artwork and my stage persona that I lost touch. I changed my name and refused to live outside my art, but gravity brought me home.” She may be iconic but she is not her own iconoclast: she is comfortable with myriad expressions without being defined by them.

For someone bothered about authenticity, it was an authentic friendship that inspired her to have hope to emerge more fully from her battles.

Now, the 'Perfect Celebrity' as one of the tracks on her album is called, she invites us to think about our relationship with those in fame, but also the battle for authenticity as one who is famous: “The way that we feel about celebrities, whether good or bad, is just part of the entertainment now. So you need to acknowledge that and then also acknowledge that there are now two selves. The real you, in private, and the one you project to the world. And this is something a lot of people face nowadays — which part of myself should I value more?” Gaga recognises the necessity of the platform and image for her work, but “It feels further away from who I am.”

This disconnect between the authentic self and the one portrayed is one we all face - Gaga says: “There is just more of a stage for everybody now. Everyone has the opportunity to have fame." Is it possible for people growing up today to discover who they are, when a version of fame is enmeshed with themselves?

For Lady Gaga, Jonathan Dean writes that being able to experience 'realness' saved her life. “I mean my fiancé, his mother, my family. Friendships — the real ones. Going to the store, making dinner. That is what made my whole life more rich.” She pauses. “I wouldn’t say fame made my life more full.”’

In particular, she credits her now-fiancé with her general wellbeing. If you listen to The Interview podcast from the New York Times, the moment she breaks down in tears is when she is asked how she knew that Michael was genuine. She said it was because he wanted to be her friend. For someone bothered about authenticity, it was an authentic friendship that inspired her to have hope to emerge more fully from her battles.

Being saved by fullness of life through friendship is something that Jesus spoke about. He chimes with Gaga's reflections on an industry that sought to take so much from her, when he says: "The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”

Lady Gaga's experience will be more extreme than most of us will endure, but we all have those places where things are taken from us and given to us, destructive and creative. It is noteworthy that her sense of own human flourishing, and being her 'authentic' self has come through relationship. And that's surely something to sing about.

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