It’s easy to forget, given the current glut of robot-uprising doom flicks, that Hollywood has been doing the artificial intelligence thing for decades – long before anything resembling true AI existed in the real world. And now we live in an era in which a chatbot can write a passable sonnet, it is perhaps surprising that there hasn’t been a huge shift in how film-makers approach this particular corner of sci-fi.
Gareth Edwards’ The Creator (2023) is essentially the same story about AIs being the newly persecuted underclass as 1962’s The Creation of the Humanoids, except that the former has an $80m VFX budget and robot monks while the latter has community-theatre production values. Moon (2009) and 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey are both about the anxiety of being trapped with a soft-voiced machine that knows more than you. Her (2013) is basically Electric Dreams (1984) with fewer synth-pop arpeggios.
