ChatGPT film recommendations on artificial intelligence

ChatGPT and the threat of artificial intelligence to a host of writing-related and writing-reliant jobs, including this one, have once again raised the spectre of AI and robots as a menace to the grey-matter powers of humanity and their potential to earn the greenbacks necessary for survival under late capitalism.

As with so many things once only thought to be possible in the realms of speculative and science-fiction, the movies have been exploring this idea for almost as long as the medium has been around.

So for this week’s recommendations I decided to ask ChatGPT what films about AI it would recommend, in response to a prompt to “select three films from anywhere in the world and any period in film history that deal with the subject of artificial intelligence.”

Using my own slower intelligence I’ve then edited the program’s selections to make allowances for films previously discussed in this column; to include films beyond only English language or American films and to account for titles that aren’t available on streaming platforms in SA.

Here, with a little help from my much smarter, faster and encyclopedic AI assistant, are three films that examine our fascination with AI and warn of the consequences of allowing it too much freedom to take over everything, everywhere all at once.

THE ARTHOUSE ESSENTIAL

Solaris — YouTube

Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 low-on-effects, high-on-philosophical-big-questions classic continues to cast a long shadow over the history of thinking sci-fi.

Adapted from the best-selling novel by Stanislaw Lem, it’s the story of a psychologist Kris Kelvin who is tasked with investigating the strange goings on at a space station, orbiting a planet called Solaris.

When he arrives to begin his job, he soon discovers that Solaris is much more than a ball of gasses and that the planet has a sentience and the power to recreate the memories of those who come into its orbit. Faced with the ghosts of his past and long-repressed memories that begin to appear, Kelvin must make a fateful decision to side either with humanity or Solaris.

Tarkovsky expertly teases out the huge existential questions of the film over the course of an increasingly claustrophobic and psychologically terrifying two-and-a-half hours, which ultimately leave you emotionally exhausted and intellectually invigorated.

It was touted as a socialist response to the cold pessimism of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. But it now stands as a rebuke to the ideas of the very regime it was celebrated by because of the way in which Tarkovsky manages to slyly hide his criticisms within a narrative that may seem to argue against machines on a superficial level but which upon deeper reflection makes a call that was particularly true and urgent for those who, like its director, found their desire for freedom and self-expression banging hard against the cold, grim, unflappable groupthink of the Soviet regime.

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THE STONE COLD CLASSIC

Metropolis — YouTube

Made when director Fritz Lang was still living and working in Germany and celebrated as a leading proponent of that country’s expressionist movement, this 1927 silent-era classic is considered the first science fiction epic of the movies.

It was a hugely expensive film for its time — making use of giant sets, cutting-edge special effects and armies of extras — and not without controversy in its representation of sex, violence and doomsday moral warnings against the rise of machines.

The plot has the simple, effective quality of a fable in which the spoilt son of the master of the city of Metropolis comes crashing down to earth when he learns the harsh reality of how his futuristic city is actually run, thanks to his encounter with a saintly young women named Maria. Turns out that Metropolis sustains itself on the back of the underpaid labour of slave workers and so when the newly awakened young rich man decides to fight for their rights and the love of Maria, his father takes things to the next destructive and terrible level by having a mad engineer build him a robot to help stop the revolution. The results are less than perfect though as the robot soon starts causing more havoc than it was created to prevent.

Horribly mauled by editors and censors at the time before being even further decimated by a lurid 1980s, colour-tinted Giorgio Moroder scored version, the film was finally assembled into something approximating Lang’s original intention in the early 2000s and now stands as a technically pioneering piece of expressionist cinema whose warnings about reliance on technology still have pertinence.

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THE DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH

Moon- Rent or buy from Apple TV+

Sam Rockwell gives a career best performance in this 2009 old-school human-centred, ideas-and-dialogue-heavy sci-fi directed by Duncan Jones — once better known as Zowie Bowie, son of David.

In the near future humanity has solved its energy crisis by mining fuel on the moon. Rockwell plays Sam Bell, a lone astronaut who is coming to the end of a three-year stint as the supervisor of the mining machine whose had no-one except himself and a suitably slightly menacing computer assistant for company.

The loneliness of his mission is clearly starting to take its toll as he prepares to make his way home and be reunited with his beloved wife, but things start to take a nasty turn when Sam begins to have visions and becomes convinced that his computer helper and his bosses are plotting a conspiracy to ensure he never gets home.

It all adds up to an increasingly worrying treatise on the relationship between humanity and technology that’s admirable for the ways in which it uses so little to consider such big and still pressing questions.

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