By Ben Child
Publication Date: 2025-11-18 10:56:00
IWith the current spate of robot Doom movies, it’s easy to forget that Hollywood has been dabbling in artificial intelligence for decades – long before there was anything resembling true AI in the real world. And since we now live in a time where a chatbot can write a passable sonnet, it’s perhaps surprising that filmmakers’ approach to this particular area of science fiction hasn’t fundamentally changed.
Gareth Edwards’ The Creator (2023) is essentially the same story about AIs as a newly persecuted underclass as 1962’s The Creation of Humanoids, except that the former has an $80 million VFX budget and robot monks while the latter has community theatrical production value. Moon (2009) and 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey are both about the fear of being trapped with a soft-spoken machine that knows more than you. Theirs (2013) is basically Electric Dreams (1984) with less synth-pop arpeggios.
Nobody is suggesting that Hollywood should start making movies about what AI is…