Artificial: The Sam Altman Movie Opens Christmas Day, and the Reviews Are Better Than Altman Hoped

Photo: Colleen Sturtevant, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Artificial premiered at the New York Film Festival in early October and the reaction has settled into something close to a consensus. Andrew Garfield is very good as Sam Altman. The film around him is sharp, entertaining and slightly slippery about what it actually thinks. Rotten Tomatoes is sitting in the mid-nineties, Metacritic in the mid-seventies, and Variety went as far as calling it Luca Guadagnino's best film in a decade. Screen Daily was the main dissenter and called it toothless.

It dramatises the OpenAI boardroom chaos of a few years ago, which means a lot of people in hoodies talking very fast in glass rooms. Yura Borisov is in it too, and from what I have read he gets the best scenes. The bit I enjoyed most was Altman's own reaction. He reportedly said the trailer looked like an awful movie, then admitted Garfield had nailed his walk. That is about as honest a review as the subject of a biopic is ever going to give.

It opens on December 25, a week after the Avengers and Dune pile-up, which is a smart bit of counterprogramming. If you want something grown-up to see over the holidays, this is the one I would pencil in. Do you want to watch a film about tech executives, or have you had enough of them in real life?