Beware of the bug: Is Hollywood finally starting to get a handle on movies about artificial intelligence? | film

IIt’s easy to forget, given the current glut of doom movies about a robot uprising, that Hollywood has been doing the AI ​​thing for decades — long before anything resembling real AI existed in the real world. Now we live in an age where a chatbot can write a passable sonnet, it’s perhaps surprising that there hasn’t been a major shift in how filmmakers approach this particular corner of science fiction.

Gareth Edwards’ The Creator (2023) is essentially the same story about artificial intelligence being the newly oppressed underclass as 1962’s The Creation of the Humanoids, except that the former has an $80 million visual effects budget and robotic monks while the latter has the values ​​of a community theater production. Moon (2009) and 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey are both about the anxiety of being trapped by a smooth-voiced machine that knows more than you do. Her (2013) is essentially Electric Dreams (1984) with fewer pop arpeggios.

No one is suggesting that Hollywood should start making movies about what artificial intelligence actually does. It seems unlikely that moviegoers will flock to theaters to see a three-act technological farce in which an outrageous algorithm admits that it can’t answer the hero’s question because it “doesn’t have access to the data yet.” But we should at least get something that feels like it was inspired by recent developments, rather than expensively produced and lavishly recycled based on stories we’ve all seen before.

From the looks of the film’s first trailer, Gore Verbinski’s Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die may not be the bold reinvention of AI cinema we might want, but it at least suggests something new. This time, the AI ​​in question doesn’t seem terribly interested in saving or destroying humanity; Instead, he acts like a chaotic, reality-bending dungeon master, running humans through a cosmic escape room for reasons that only make sense in themselves. Could the machines of the future take note from modern YouTubers who spend all day and night live-streaming their digital reality? Is all this just a big laugh at humanity’s expense by a god-like god?

Maybe it has more to do with the Deadpoolisation of modern blockbuster cinema, but the sense I get from this trailer is that Hollywood has finally run out of ways to make AI scary or wise or full of emotion, and has decided instead to make it an endless bullshit engine. A nervous man from the future (Sam Rockwell) breaks into a restaurant to inform a random group of strangers that they must help him prevent an AI apocalypse. Suddenly, we’re moving between spider-legged dolls, seedy neon-lit alleyways, and what look like giant ungulates wandering through the suburbs, all interspersed with quips from people who seem to want a real-time AI apocalypse narrative. Mysterious triangular glyphs are everywhere and set pieces arrive with the panicked rhythm of a timeline that is clearly reloading every 30 seconds.

There’s a definite hint of “everything everywhere at once” in the over-caffeinated speed-cutting mayhem, too, but at least we’re not handed another heavy-handed tale of robot souls, digital enlightenment, or human arrogance. Verbinski’s film also stars Juno Temple and Haley Lu Richardson and will be released in February, where we’re supposed to find out what unholy set of prompts caused the timeline to go so badly in the first place.