Artificial, the new comedy-drama about OpenAI and the artificial intelligence arms race, is a movie of weird walks.
As OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever, Russian actor Yuri Borisov clomps around, like a geeky Frankensteinian monster. As the controversial OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Andrew Garfield bounces and skips boyishly—a gait that Altman himself recently commended for its accuracy. And as Elon Musk, Ike Barinholtz puts on a loping swagger, commanding rooms of computer nerds like some sort of alpha gorilla (a semblance matched by his long, pouting faces, which call to mind those old Bored Ape NFTs).
During the movie’s post-premiere Q&A earlier this week at the New York Film Festival, Barinholtz wryly described his character as “a person who walks normally.” Such are the awkward saunters of the march of history in the making.
Artificial, directed by Luca Guadagnino, waltzed into NYFF with some controversy clinging to it. The film was originally set to be released by AmazonMGM, which conspicuously dropped it this summer after Amazon struck a $50 billion deal with OpenAI. (Indie house Neon swooped in to pick it up.) NYFF artistic director Dennis Lim referenced “the circumstances” around the film in his onstage introduction.
That OpenAI may have brooked issues with Artificial makes sense. The film is almost completely unflattering, depicting Altman and other OpenAI stakeholders—as well as all the major drivers of the AI boom—as vain, reckless, and insufferably boring. Where 2010’s The Social Network succeeded in making Silicon Valley computer savants look like robust titans of industry and architects of the future, Artificial works to opposing ends. It depicts its tech titans as self-regarding dweebs.
Comparisons to David Fincher’s Facebook drama are inevitable. There’s the subject matter, of course. And the fact that both films feature Garfield in a lead role. (It should be said that Artificial is really more of a biopic of Sutskever, here depicted as both the prime mover of the current AI wave and its nagging moral conscience, than it is of Altman.) But Guadagnino and writer-producer Simon Rich’s approach to the material feels diametrically opposed to Fincher’s. The Social Network was a steely, polished, wordy drama. Artificial is pitched as a black comedy that verges on the surreal.
Guadagnino, best known in Hollywood for the coming-of-age drama Call Me by Your Name and the three-way tennis romance Challengers, has mastered a strain of tense eroticism. There are shades of that in Artificial, in Altman’s seductive wooing of Sutskever’s character. But the film is, for the most part, literally and figuratively sexless.
The images are plain, and even a little ugly. You can almost feel Guadagnino’s more rococo style begging to break out. A slo-mo sequence of a room of gawky programmers dousing each other in bottles of Jarritos, celebrating their AI’s latest self-learning benchmark, is stickily unsexy. A climactic scene of Altman and his OpenAI lackeys confronting Sutskever on a sloping San Francisco street recalls the green-screen backdrops of Tommy Wiseau’s cult classic The Room. After the screening, Guadagnino claimed the story captured a different strain of desire—what he described as “the desire to prevail.”