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?

Article

Community

Culture

Football

Friendship

15 August 2025

4 min read

As the season starts, here's why fans go mad for football

The game is part of life, but not all of life

Henry Corbett

Henry Corbett, a vicar in Liverpool and chaplain to Everton Football Club.

A football stand displays a long banner with text on it.

Everton F.C.

“I hate football,” said the mother of two mad keen footballing children. The clue to the hatred is maybe in the ‘mad keen’. Why do children and adults care so much about football?

“That Champions League music is so pompous…!”

“It’s only a football match! They make it too important. If their team loses then they are miserable for the whole weekend.”

“We can’t plan holidays until the fixtures come out.”

The money spent, the jobs refused, lost or short-changed, all because of football. A giant banner at a recent Everton home game read “I simply love you more than I love life itself”.

And there is football manager Bill Shankly wisdom: “Football is not a matter of life and death. It’s more important than that.” At least that was a typical Shankly quip, hyperbole for effect.

Why do some of us love football so much?

It often goes back to childhood. Playing with mates, scoring a goal, saving a goal, enjoying the togetherness, the shared aim, the friendships formed. Then there’s that first experience of going to a match. Up the stairs and there before you is a great huge rectangular expanse of green grass. Back in the day, it was maybe not so green, but still way more impressive than your back garden or the local park. Then comes the drama, unscripted, of the game. The sways of emotion, the joy, the frustration, and all experienced as part of a bigger community. When you kick a ball with your mates aged 50, or go to a game aged 80, you are doing something that connects you with your childhood enthusiasm, joy and wonder.

Then there are the family connections. You may have gone to that first match with your Mum, Dad, Grandad, older brother or sister. When Everton supporters were asked about their feelings at the last Premier League game at Goodison Park, again and again they referenced family members who they had gone to the match with. Some passed away, some no longer able to go, even some whose ashes were buried behind the goal.

There are the great memories of games seen or even played in. That win from 2-0 down, that last minute goal, the euphoria of a Cup win against the odds. And the memories are shared ones, with family, with friends. Football can write some miserable scripts, 0-0, 0-1, 0-6, but it can also write some wonderful memorable dramas.

Love for family, for friends, for a team, for players is a deep emotion and when that love is linked to victory or defeat the stakes are raised.

There is another reason which can touch us all, football-lovers or football-haters. Deep down we all want to be winners in life, not losers. The feeling of victory, not defeat, is such a treasured one. And the win, or loss, is a shared one: we are part of a group together, an identity together. Love for family, for friends, for a team, for players is a deep emotion and when that love is linked to victory or defeat the stakes are raised. In life we want goodness to win over evil, kindness to win over cruelty. The reason every Church shows the symbol of the Cross is because there was the ultimate demonstration of purposeful love, the sacrifice for the sins of the world, down the ages, across the world. When the apostle Paul writes to beleaguered, persecuted Christians facing death at the hands of Emperor Nero, he tells them “We are more than conquerors,” more than winners.

Football, playing or watching, taps into that deep feeling of victory. “We’re on the march with (manager’s name here!) army…. And we’ll really shake them up when we win the FA Cup…” When my team faced the prospect of relegation I wondered why I was feeling butterflies, and more than butterflies, in my stomach. Why did I care so much about this game of football, and the result at the weekend? Yes, because it affected people’s lives, because it would mean loss of income and job losses at the club if relegation happened. But also, because the feeling of defeat, of failure, would hang over us, and that feeling goes deep, to the pit of the stomach.

So why do some of us care so much? Because football taps into deep feelings; of family and friendship, joy and elation, togetherness and identity, and that wonderful feeling of victory… or the sorrow of defeat. Those feelings go deep. The problem is that football, unlike the Cross, sometime delivers, but definitely doesn’t always. That’s a reason why the mum of those those two mad-keen football-loving children should try and make sure that her two sons have other interests besides football, another faith beside faith in their team. Football is part of life, but not all of life. I also hope she stops hating what can be a beautiful, enchanting, community-fostering game, with many a helpful story to tell.

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