In the past few weeks I’ve covered over a dozen examples of A.I. in film. They’ve ranged from simplistic, overly fantastical, stories of 8-bit computers achieving sentience and emotional beach-balls causing national disasters to serious, cerebral explorations of what the true meaning of intelligence, life and existence really is.
For each movie that I covered, there are a dozen more that I neglected. To close on a high-note, then, I’d like to touch on a handful of classic personal favorites that have helped to mold the genre.
A.I. has provided filmmakers with a wonderful tool to explore the human condition. We can guiltlessly examine the absolute best and worst aspects of ourselves in a safe and approachable way. The reflective interaction between man and machine has produced some of the most iconic moments ever set to film.
The 80’s was a great time for A.I. in film. We had reached a point, technologically, where the idea of smart machines seemed more inevitable than fantastical. Crucially, filmmakers could also assume their audiences were computer literate enough to understand more advanced concepts. Just as importantly, they knew that the audience wasn’t too savvy. A flurry of technobabble could make ridiculous claims sound reasonable and in the 80’s we got a lot of technobabble.
