Hollywood has had its own take on AI, both in front of the camera and behind it, for quite a while. Here are a few films to check out in that vein, including a very informative documentary.
Daniel Roher’s new documentary, The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist (PG), doesn’t tell me anything really new about AI, but it does clarify a lot of the issues that I had floating around in my head. His hand-drawn animation also helps make it quite entertaining. The Oscar-winning filmmaker (Navalny) interviews a lot of the big industry names in artificial intelligence — though Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are notable by their absence — and gives an even-handed look at both the potential benefits and dangers of the new technology while he himself discovers that his wife is pregnant and their son will have to navigate a world with AI in it. This is best viewed by neophytes who aren’t sure what AI is but are concerned about its effects, which I think is a lot of people. It’s available on Netflix or Peacock or rent and buy it through digital platforms Apple TV and Fandango at Home.
Courtesy Disney
Avatar: Fire and Ash (PG-13) opens with a filmed statement by James Cameron and his actors warning against the dangers of artificial intelligence taking over the movies and proudly stating that no part of their 2025 film was generated with AI. Nothing that Cameron says about AI is wrong, but he’s a strange person to be delivering this particular message, given the total lack of interest in the complexities of the human psyche he has shown in his previous efforts. However, after giving the last two movies in this series a good kicking, I was surprised to find that I actually have something nice to say about this third installment. It’s a ride. You can now stream it on Disney+ with a standard subscription.
The 2023 science-fiction epic The Creator (PG-13) dazzles with its looks, underwhelms with its brain. The advance word about this film was mostly adulatory, with people saying that it’s the next great step in big-budget science-fiction. Respectfully, I have to disagree. This movie’s thoughts about the future of artificial intelligence aren’t well-formed enough to make it a great science-fiction film, though it is remarkable in some other ways, mainly as a statement about the exercise of American power in a foreign territory. The bulk of the film takes place in 2070, 15 years after human-created
AI robots dropped a nuclear bomb on Los Angeles and five years after the humans dropped a retaliatory nuke in Southeast Asia. Sgt. Joshua Taylor (John David Washington) was near that site doing intel work for the U.S. Army, and the blast killed his pregnant wife, Maya (Gemma Chan), and turned him from an amputee into a double amputee. Understandably, he’s in no mood to help the Army win its war on the machines until his former bosses show him video footage of Maya somehow alive. If he helps steal the superweapon that the robots are creating, the Army will extract Maya and let Joshua be with her, which is all he really wants. It’s available to stream on Hulu and Disney+ with a standard subscription. You can also rent or purchase the film digitally across major video-on-demand platforms.
Courtesy Disney
