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

Culture

Sport

Trauma

17 July 2025

5 min read

Scottie Scheffler has a lesson for this summer's fading sports teams

The Open Champion's musings speak to the demise of Welsh Rugby and West Indian cricket

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A cricket batsman surrounded by opposition players leaves the crease.

A West Indies Batsman leaves the crease.

xcom/windiescricket.

This past week, while England were beating India at Lords in a nail-biting, high-quality Test match which was in the balance until the very last ball, on the other side of the world in Jamaica, something tragic was unfolding. The West Indies were bowled out for the paltry sum of 27 runs against the fearsome Australian bowling attack, the second lowest total of any team in around 150 years of Test cricket.

Why tragic? People of my age remember the 1970s and 80s West Indies as one of the best cricket teams in the world. Superb bowlers such as Malcolm Marshall, Curtly Ambrose, Michael Holding and Joel Garner terrorised batsmen from Adelaide to Antigua, from Cape Town to Christchurch. They hurled down cricket balls at a frightening speed, whizzing past the heads of batsman who didn't even have the security of a helmet. At the other end, a succession of brilliant batsman like Viv Richards, Gordon Greenidge, Clive Lloyd and Alvin Kallicharan scored hundred after hundred, as together they made-up one of the greatest teams in the history of Test cricket.

Since then, a sorry mess of dried-up funding, poor governance, neglect of grassroots cricket, and the competition of other sports such as athletics or basketball, has seen the standard of West Indian cricket decline dramatically, especially at the most complex form of the game - international 5-day Tests. So, the 27 was not a huge surprise. Something catastrophic like that was bound to happen one day.

In those same 1970s, Wales boasted one of the best rugby teams in the world. Gareth Edwards, Barry John, JPR Williams and Phil Bennett were at the heart of a dazzling and brilliant team. Rugby is Wales's national sport, yet in recent years a similar story of incompetent governance, lack of funding, and an inefficient regional structure has led to its dramatic decline, and a harrowing 18-match losing streak, which finally came to an end with a narrow victory over Japan, hardly one of the world's greatest teams. Last year's Six Nations ended with an embarrassing 68-14 home defeat against the team they hate to lose to - England. The current Lions team contains no Welshmen at all - the first time since 1896.

Then there is the demise of Manchester United. “We’ve seen it all. We’ve won the lot. We’re Man United and we’re never going to stop” sing United fans at most games. All very grand, but these days they don't win anything. The great triumphs were back in the 1960s, and then the 90s and 2000s under the great Sir Alex Ferguson. After a takeover by the incompetent Glazer family, who have increased sponsorship revenue but leeched billions out of the club, and seem incapable of running a global football institution, United have declined dramatically, ending up 15th in the league last season, and with a failure to recruit new players this summer, look destined to do even worse next season.

The fall of such sporting giants often elicits a strong dose of Schadenfreude in opposition fans. I was moaning about the fortunes of Man United to a Chelsea-supporting friend recently. He had zero sympathy.

And yet there is something tragic about lost sporting glory. Watching the current West Indies, Wales and Man United teams getting beaten by mediocre opposition brings a heavy sense of sadness - even if you're not Welsh or West Indian. Like King Lear, reduced to wandering around a ‘blasted heath’ like a madman, Icarus falling to the sea after over-reaching, or Sisyphus, once a king, yet incurring the wrath of the gods and now condemned to eternally rolling a stone up a hill only for it to fall down the other side (sounds just like Man United’s recent seasons), these teams’ current manifestations can’t escape the glory that was once theirs but is no longer.

Fading sports teams are our contemporary memento mori.

“How the mighty are fallen.” The phrase comes from the Old Testament - when the young warrior David mourned for the slain King Saul. Reflecting on lost human glory was in the past thought to be a valuable thing. Churches up and down the country have effigies of dead local grandees, lying in stone with hands clasped in prayer, as a reminder that human glory fades, death comes to us all, that our wealth will be handed on to others, and the things we are most proud of most likely forgotten.

Scottie Scheffler, the world' No 1 golfer and who just won the British Open recently spoke about winning a gold tournament, having a brief sense of euphoria, which then vanishes within a few minutes as life returns to normal. He wondered aloud whether it was all worth it: “There are a lot of people that make it to what they thought was going to fulfil them in life, and you get there, you get to number one in the world, and they're like, 'what's the point?'”

Scheffler has made no secret of his Christian faith. It presumably lies behind his comments that golf can’t give what he called “fulfilment in the deepest places of your heart". And maybe that is the ultimate lesson of these teams that were once great and are no more - a reminder that sport can be a source of great joy and achievement, but ultimately is unable to satisfy our deepest longings, because its glory is fleeting.

Fading sports teams are our contemporary memento mori. As humans we somehow yearn for something permanent, unshakeable, eternal, what our forebears found in God, but we moderns struggle to find anywhere. Wordsworth’s classic questions: “Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory and the dream?” are echoed in the demise of sporting greatness, and the existential musings of Scottie Scheffler.

One day, every sportsman or woman, every team - in fact, every one of us - will experience what the West Indies, Wales and Man United experience right now. The flower fades and the grass withers. And perhaps in that moment of lost fame, we will find the wisdom to seek more lasting things than sporting glory.

Support Seen & Unseen

Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,500 articles. All for free.
This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief

Pledge now