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ARTIFICIAL is basically THE SOCIAL NETWORK but for OpenAI: it's the origin story of the company that launched ChatGPT and so literally changed the world. What it is NOT is the story of Sam Altman. Because whatever Mark Zuckerberg's infinite failings, he at least wrote the code for Facebook. By contrats, Sam Altman is just an emotionally manipulative liar who excels at sales. The real story of OpenAI, as penned by screenwriter Simon Rich (INSIDE OUT), is the story of Ilya Sutskever (ANORA's Yura Borisov).
Ilya is the super smart mathmo who teams up with Nobel Prize-winning academic Geoff Hinton and basically invents AI, sells the idea to Google, only to part ways with Geoff and join OpenAI when Geoff keeps preaching patience. Of course Ilya thinks Sam Altman is his friend and believes in their mission of creating an open AI away from the control of any single corporation, only to have Sam sell that dream from under him for Microsoft's cash and compute. So Ilya famously pushes Sam off the board only to have Microsoft's CEO and half the OpenAI employees go against him and reinstall their messiah.
ARTIFICIAL worked for me as a film because it’s really about Ilya with Sam Altman as a side character. The actor playing Ilya is so good and his character arc is so compelling that I was captivated for the two hour plus running time.
As for Andrew Garfield he just reprises his role as Jonathan Larsen in TICK, TICK...BOOM! but with the camp turned up to a thousand and some weird de-ageing shit going on that makes him look like Spock
I think he mistook weird physical ticks for an actual performance. And he probably needs to stop playing gay characters like some kind of SNL skit camp kabuki that’s borderline homophobic. It's a totally weird choice but something that's not surprising given director Luca Guadagnino's fondness for excess. If Yura Borisov is in a serious biopic, Garfield is in COYOTE VS ACME. And Ike Barinholtz's portrayal of Elon Musk is straight out of SNL. It's just a super-weird choice.
By contrast, I really loved Simon Rich's screenplay. He tells a complicated story well and keeps a lot of the intricacies of the boardroom drama. I think he gets Altman's basic psychopathy right, but this goes against the broad performance from Garfield. Garfield got a lot of laughs from the Festival audience, but if Sam Altman were so laughable in real life, he wouldn't have been able to manipulate so may people. I also really loved Damon Albarn’s score.
ARTIFICIAL is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 2hrs 20m. It will be released in the USA on December 25th and in the UK on January 22nd 2027/
