Review

AI - Artificial Intelligence

Culture

1 November 2023

5 min read

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?

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5 August 2025

5 min read

I disobeyed Disney’s command to 'celebrate happy’

You don’t have to live your best life

Natalie Garrett

Natalie produces and narrates The Seen & Unseen Aloud podcast. She's an Anglican minister and a trained actor.

Disneyland.

I’ve just got back from a wonderful family holiday in California. And, of course, we couldn’t take our teenage daughters to California and not go to Disneyland.

This year marks the seventieth anniversary of Disneyland, the Californian theme park conceived and built by Walt Disney, which opened in 1955. We forget now that this was a revolutionary concept in its time and wonderfully founded on the wholesome notion of creating a place where families could immerse themselves in an imaginative world; where parents and children could play and have fun together. In our screen-obsessed, individualist, loneliness-epidemic age, that continues to be a very good idea.

We spent two days at Disneyland which proved enough time for me to have a chat and selfie with Iron Man; become a Space Ranger firing lasers alongside Buzz Lightyear; go on a turbulent adventure through a dangerous lost temple with Indiana Jones; and even join the Rise of the Resistance to be chased by some mean-looking Storm Troopers. Good times.

However, a point of friction for me, ironically, was the theme for Disneyland's 70th anniversary celebration: "Celebrate Happy". 

I think Disneyland is great. A place designed for families and friends to have fun together absolutely gets my jaunty thumbs up. But I got increasingly annoyed by being told I should be happy all the time. Apart from anything else, the motto was clearly coined by someone who has never experienced the greatest irony of all: Disney Leg.

Disney Leg (grown-up name Cutaneous Vasculitis, also experienced when playing golf) is a form of small blood vessel inflammation resulting swelling, a purplish rash, burning sensation and itching caused by walking or standing for hours at a time in high temperatures. It occurs most commonly in women in their late 40s or early 50s. I was one such woman. And I can tell you for nothing that Disney Leg is no celebrator of happy.

Disney leg may have made me more Eeyore than Tigger, but my Disney experience was also framed by reading Kate Bowler’s wonderful book, Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I've Loved. I love Kate Bowler. I want her to be my best friend, forever. I want to be her when I grow up.

I first met her when I listened in to the Seen & Unseen Live that featured her in conversation with Graham Tomlin. She introduces herself saying, “I’m Kate. I’m a Duke professor, podcaster and author with a single mission: giving you a little more permission to admit that you’re not always ‘living your best life’. After years of being told I was incurable, I was declared cancer-free. But there’s no going back. I am forever changed by what I discovered: life is so beautiful and life is so hard.”

For everyone.” Kate is leading her own Rise of Resistance as she resists the tyranny of the wide and pervasive culture of extreme positivity that could also be summed up as “celebrate happy”.

If my life is a failure because I’m not happy all the time, then how do I find the courage and hope that I need when faced with suffering or challenge?

If Kate had been there, she wouldn’t have insisted that I celebrate happy, she would have found some shade and a bucket of iced water for me to immerse my Disney ankles in. She would have listened to me describe my discomfort with compassion and empathy such that I would then also feel able to tell her about how much I was enjoying myself.

You see, I believe that the way towards “happy” isn’t through denial of suffering. It can’t be. We all know that life can be unbearably hard as well as achingly funny. To deny one is to negate the reality of the other. And to make “happy” our life goal is to exclude so much else that is beautiful in its complexity. If my life is a failure because I’m not happy all the time, then how do I find the courage and hope that I need when faced with suffering or challenge? And suffering and challenge are an everyday part of life that we simply cannot choose to ignore. The unpaid bills, the cancer diagnosis, the broken relationship - these things don’t go away or hurt less when I insist that I’m living my best life.

Some of the best times of my life have occurred at exactly the moment when life has been hardest. Because that’s when I’ve had to acknowledge that I’m not in control of everything; that there is something, Someone, bigger and more powerful and more glorious than anything this world can offer me. If I insist on making happiness my god, I might easily miss out on the God who loved me so much he was prepared to suffer and die for me. My best life is found not in “happiness” but in the truth of God’s sacrificial love for me.

I don’t mean to denigrate Disney at all. I think the Disney DNA of fun and a warm welcome give the rest of us much to learn from. Did you know that the people who walk around Disneyland dressed up as the famous Disney characters are highly trained, including the golden rule: when a child hugs you, you don’t let go until they do. Isn’t that beautiful? (I wonder how that would play out if I insisted on that in my church?) But I do want to take the focus off the demand to “celebrate happy” and be free to celebrate the wider experience of life as well.

What I took from my Disney/Kate Bowler sandwich is that the best of life comes from embracing the highs and lows; being honest about and unafraid of mixed feelings.

Life is, as Ronan Keating once said, a rollercoster, just got to ride it. But also, I would add, life is getting fed up in the queue to get on the ride. Life is also feeling too hot or tired and needing to sit down. Life is also looking at your photos afterwards and realising that Tinkerbell has photobombed you. And I believe that all of that is to be celebrated, along with the happy.

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