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.
No one is suggesting Hollywood should start making films about what AI actually does. It seems unlikely that film-goers would flood to multiplexes to catch a three-act tech farce in which a nefarious algorithm admits it can’t answer the hero’s question because it “doesn’t have access to data yet”. But we should at least be getting something that feels like it’s been inspired by recent developments, rather than expensively produced and lavishly recycled takes on stories we’ve all seen before.
From the look of its debut 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 is at least gesturing towards something new. This time, the AI in question doesn’t seem hugely interested in saving or destroying mankind; instead it’s acting like a chaotic, reality-bending dungeon master, running humans through a cosmic escape room for reasons that make sense only to itself. Could machines of the future have taken a note from modern day YouTubers who spend all day and night livestreaming their own digital reality? Is this all just a great big laugh at the expense of humanity by a god-like deity?
Perhaps this is more about 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 frightening, wise or soulful, and has decided to make it an endlessly glitched-out nonsense engine instead. A jittery man from the future (Sam Rockwell) bursts into a diner to inform a random assortment of strangers that they must help him prevent the AI apocalypse. Suddenly we’re pinballing between spider-legged dollbots, neon-lit dystopian alleyways and what looks like a giant ungulate striding through suburbia, all intercut with quippy one-liners from people who seem to want to narrate their own AI apocalypse in real time. Mystical triangular glyphs are everywhere and set-pieces arrive with the panicked rhythm of a timeline that’s clearly being reloaded every 30 seconds.
There’s a definite hint of Everything Everywhere All At Once in the over-caffeinated speed-cutting chaos too, but at least we’re not being handed yet another ponderous parable about robot souls, digital enlightenment or the hubris of man. Verbinski’s film also stars Juno Temple and Haley Lu Richardson and is out in February, when we’ll presumably find out what unholy combination of prompts caused the timeline to glitch this badly in the first place.
