Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial, the true-story drama starring Andrew Garfield as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, recently premiered at the New York Film Festival (NYFF). The film was introduced at its premiere screening by NYFF programming chief Dennis Lim, who said the following before the screening:
We are already in a threshold period. We need to understand how we got here, and the film you’re about to see shows us that way.
This quote comes from a recent article by The Hollywood Reporter, which praised the film as the “movie of the moment – the origin story of our current AI quagmire at the literal, psychological, and pretty much every other level.” THR detailed the film’s intricate portrait of its topical subject matter. The article states,
The movie is notably faithful, at times dutifully chronological and nearly always horror-movie bracing on the subject of the rise of capitalist AI.
The article also later describes the film as offering “a rich and often entertaining primer on the becoming of OpenAI, how integrity and caution have time and again been sacrificed on the holy altar of finance.”finance.” As for Andrew Garfield’s much-anticipated performance as Sam Altman, THR’s article also praises his portrayal of the OpenAI CEO, saying the following about Garfield’s portrayal:
Garfield portrays him as a completely dishonest personality who will always tell everybody how much he likes them to their face while screwing them behind their back. A flamboyant cipher to a sometimes-cartoonish degree. Garfield’s Altman is going for a different kind of spiritual truth.
Artificial is notable for being originally scrapped by its original studio, Amazon, which decided to shop the film to other studios, not long after the studio put in a $50 billion investment in OpenAI. Neon is now distributing the film and will release it this Christmas.
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