ARTIFICIAL (12A)
Rating:
Rating: Four stars
Earlier this year, a New Yorker investigation asked whether OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman could be trusted.
Among the 100 people interviewed, a former board member described one of the most powerful men on the planet as 'unconstrained by truth'.
Artificial creates an even more scathing portrait of a liar with the aura of a visionary.
And despite Andrew Garfield's glitteringly brilliant portrayal – stick a bet on him now for a Best Supporting Oscar – it isn't likely to have Altman clicking the 'Like' button.
This timely comedy drama is shaped around the secret 2023 memos circulated by OpenAI's chief scientist and co-founder Ilya Sutskever (Anora's Yura Borisov).
We first meet Ilya as an awkward 17-year-old prodigy obsessed with creating AGI (Artificial General Intelligence).
Artificial creates an even more scathing portrait of a liar, and despite Andrew Garfield's glitteringly brilliant portrayal it isn't likely to have Altman clicking the 'Like' button
Together with his genius mentor, Geoffrey Hinton (Mark Rylance) aka the 'Godfather of AI', the pair get snapped up by Google.
There Chris O'Dowd's short-sighted boss fails to spot their project's game-changing potential.
Enter friendly, Puckish young venture capitalist Sam Altman and his pal Elon Musk (The Studio's Ike Barinholtz, hilariously bullish behind dazzlingly white teeth).
Where co-founder Ilya is lumpen and pathologically incapable of lying, Sam is easy, lethally charming and emotionally manipulative.
A man who, as one character puts it, could wash up on an island of hungry cannibals and somehow have them hailing him as king.
As the AI arms race hots up, however, the guard rails start coming off and Ilya and colleague Mira Murati (Monica Barbaro) grow increasingly alarmed by what they are creating.
But how can they put the genie back in the bottle?
Back in the real world, that question could hardly feel more urgent.
Last month former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon warned that AI could easily spin out of control and 'kill us all by the end of the decade'. Which makes Artificial a potentially bleak and terrifying watch.
There's a lithe, sinuous quality to his performance, as if Sam is perpetually wriggling out of an imaginary noose
Thankfully, it is also unexpectedly camp and very entertaining. The script comes from Saturday Night Live writer Simon Rich and is often laugh-out-loud funny.
There's a bippy electronic score by Blur's Damon Albarn, while sensual Italian auteur Luca Guadagnino bathes his dark comedy drama in bright San Francisco sunshine.
At first glance, OpenAI might seem an unlikely subject for the acclaimed director of Call Me By Your Name, Challengers and Queer, aside from the fact that Altman is gay.
But Guadagnino's familiar preoccupations are all there: desire, seduction and shifting power plays. And although Artificial nods more than once to Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, AI itself is not the villain.
The real danger lies in the human behaviour that's shaping it: ambition, vanity, greed and tribal loyalty. The film may be called Artificial, but its true subject is human nature.
As Spider-Man, Andrew Garfield lived by the maxim that 'with great power comes great responsibility', but responsibility is absolutely not on Altman's agenda.
There's a lithe, sinuous quality to his performance, as if Sam is perpetually wriggling out of an imaginary noose.
He moves like a snake in bright blue contact lenses, hypnotising everyone around him, endlessly blessing his employees, mainly a ghastly, baying tribe of tech bros, with 'I love you guys', like a cult leader handing out communion. Lucifer, after all, was the light-bringer.
Like The Social Network, Steve Jobs and BlackBerry, this movie gives us the human dimension to the building of a tech empire.
But Artificial feels like an evolutionary next step. Watching it is like being strapped into a rollercoaster ride to human extinction. It can all feel scarily out of our control. But the one thing we can all do is keep our eyes open.
Worth noting that Amazon MGM, which was set to distribute it, abruptly dropped it this year, shortly after announcing a major partnership with OpenAI.
You've got to think that if the tech giants don't want you to see it, it's got to be worth a look.
In cinemas January 22.