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?

Article

Culture

Film & TV

12 June 2025

5 min read

The death of Hollywood

Out of the ashes, new stories will rise

Theodore Brun

Theodore is author of the historical fiction series The Wanderer Chronicles.

Seth Rogan's The Studio, a Hollywood satire.

Apple TV.

There is no more obvious sign of the ailing of the Hollywood behemoth (if not to say, its actual death) than the utter failure of Disney’s latest live-action re-release of Snow White.

According to Forbes, Disney’s total investment in the movie, including production and marketing, likely exceeded $350mn. To break even, it would have needed to take around $500mn gross at the box office, after distribution and movie theatre cuts. To date it has made just under $200million.

If nothing else, that is a tremendous waste of money. But the essential problem seems to have been that the movie’s creators were trying to bend themselves (and the story) into pretzel-shaped contortions to satisfy the various demanding (and contradictory) ideological axioms of LalaLand. The result? Not only do they fail on their own terms: a movie about a young princess finding her inner girl power and leading an oppressed people to overthrow a tyrannical autocrat ends by setting up a new regime under one unchallengeable and all powerful ruler: a system of “Snow-White Supremacy”. It also fails on the archetypal axioms of story. There’s a reason why parents still read to their children the traditional version of Snow White, which scholars believe to be so long-living and so “true” that its roots seem traceable as far back as Ancient Greece. Modern storytellers mess with that long lineage of audience appeal at their peril; as no doubt several Disney executives have now found to their cost.

Last month the veteran Hollywood screenwriter and novelist Andrew Klavan concluded, after watching the last annual offering of glamour-slick virtue signalling that is the Oscars, that Hollywood is indeed a dying beast. He argued that the collective movie-making culture has become so captive to a certain ideological mindset that it has prioritised that over the more basic and primary objective of telling stories. When ideology overrides the essence of storytelling - delivering stories reflective of life as it actually is and as we find it - then the art suffers and audiences instinctively turn away.

Why? Because we all come to stories to find truth (even if it is dressed up in the “lie” of fiction). The problem with the ideological mindset approach to storytelling is not that it does not start with good intentions (let’s say a value like “compassion”); but that it drives towards and ends with outcomes very far from life as we know it to be. So, for example, compassion for allowing female-identifying men into women’s sport ends up with Olympic crowds applauding a man punching various women in the face to earn himself a gold medal. Or well-intentioned young people marching throughout the cities of Europe in support of terror groups who behead babies. There is a cognitive dissonance between the makers of movies imbibing and propagating this sort of mindset and their audience of millions.

No wonder those audiences are tuning out. Because the central thing that people want from art are good stories. Good stories make us nod and say: yep, life is like that - however far-fetched the premise or the setting may be. Bad stories make us feel like someone has tried to sell us a lie. They are “phoney” - and at a gut level, we know it.

So, if Hollywood’s time in the limelight (and the pay dirt) may be running out, where should we look for a new resurgence (dare we say, resurrection?) in the art of storytelling?

“Two are better than one because they have a good reward for their toil.” Collaboration seems to produce the goods.

It would be foolhardy to come down too hard on an answer to that question, since ultimately stories can and have come from anywhere. But if I had to lay down money on the kind of environment out of which any resurgence in the storytelling industry (whether of the moving image or the written word) will come, I would be betting on some sort of life-affirming, collaborative, creative network or community based around the foundational values of truth, goodness and beauty, and motivated by a shared desire to see the renewal and revitalisation of Western culture everywhere.

Such networks have been springing up with the ubiquity and rapidity of mushroom colonies all over the West, particularly in the US and across Europe.

Angel Studios has emerged as one of the more front-footed of these. This is a US-based media company that produces and distributes films and TV series with inspirational and faith-based themes: projects like The Chosen - the globe-conquering pay-it-forward re-telling of the Four Gospels - and Sound of Freedom, the latter grossing over $250million worldwide. (Disney take note.)

While Angel’s content may have arisen out of niche audience demand (it was founded as a successor to the VidAngel app that sourced child- and faith-friendly content), other collaborative networks exist with a broader mission for cultural renewal. The Everything Network is one such example. A UK-based Christian network of leaders across multiple fields of society, it operates from the principle that, for centuries, society has benefitted from the way Christianity has contributed to the whole of life: from the art we create, to the laws we make, and the way we care for those in need. If God cares about everything, then the invitation persists for us to work towards the renewal of all things.

This includes the stories we tell. Hence, under one aegis, authors, poets, or screenwriters are connected with financial backers, producers, directors, animators, marketeers and so on. Implicit within the network’s mission is a recognition that stories have the power not just to entertain, but to change the world. For good and for bad.

Just look at the Bible.

At a more modest level, creative networks are coming together all over the West: in churches, across the broader arts and entertainment landscape and so on, in part as support communities for people working in those industries, but also as incubators for collaborative output. Some are more ambitious than others. And many are proving the truth of the proverb: “Two are better than one because they have a good reward for their toil.” Collaboration seems to produce the goods.

So, if truth, beauty and goodness are the weapons on the battlefield of imagination, and the soul of the world is the prize, perhaps these emerging creative networks are the divisions, the battalions, the platoons deployed along the front line. Time will tell which are most effective.

What is certain is that, long after Hollywood’s spell over us all is broken, humans are still going to want to hear good stories. Stories that tell us something meaningful and true about life as it appears before us.

I’ll have my bucket of popcorn ready just in case.

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