{"id":798377,"date":"2026-10-10T19:18:09","date_gmt":"2026-10-10T19:18:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/798377\/"},"modified":"2026-10-10T19:18:09","modified_gmt":"2026-10-10T19:18:09","slug":"artificial-review-guadagnino-makes-sam-altman-a-bond-villain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/798377\/","title":{"rendered":"Artificial review: Guadagnino makes Sam Altman a Bond villain"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sam Altman<\/a> may be a relatively new figure to most of the public, but in tech circles, his story starts much earlier than when he opened Pandora\u2019s Box and launched OpenAI to the world. In an industry that prizes speed and ingenuity, Altman seemed like he would fit in with the tech scions he partnered or competed with in the past. As audiences have come to learn through biopics like The Social Network or Steve Jobs, these stories are often much more complicated than the one man who becomes the face of a company. Luca Guadagnino\u2019s film Artificial seeks to correct the record about one of tech\u2019s newly minted stars and examine how the cult of personality that follows figures like Altman leads to both innovation and unintended consequences.<\/p>\n

The heart of Artificial belongs to a solemn-faced Ilya Sutskever (Yura Borisov), a young genius in a field filled with very smart people and very fast talkers. His imagination is focused on computers that can think for themselves, and under the watchful gaze of his professor and later boss at Google, Geoffrey Hinton (Mark Rylance), his ambition is mostly kept in check out of concern that the power that Ilya dreams about needs to be deemed safe first. Feeling underappreciated at Google, he\u2019s courted by enthusiastic hiker and hypeman Sam Altman (Andrew Garfield) and a skeptical Elon Musk (Ike Barinholtz) to work on a new startup that would become OpenAI. Altman soon pushes the company, originally built on a set of ethical ideals, to grow at the expense of its intentions, leaving Ilya in the uncomfortable position of standing up to his loudest supporter and risking the company\u2019s future.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Despite the title of Artificial, the science behind the tech plays second fiddle to the human drama. Simon Rich\u2019s script follows Ilya\u2019s awkward journey into this space, first as an outsider whose theories and work seems a hundred years off, then as a guy who\u2019s so painfully earnest, he can\u2019t lie, even when his company\u2019s future hangs in the balance. Guadagnino builds on these tensions with his actors\u2019 performances, closing in on Garfield\u2019s hand as Sam embraces Borisov\u2019s misfit Ilya, welcoming him into the fold. Although Damon Albarn\u2019s moody Nick Cave-lite score sounds more like a funeral dirge, it highlights the sense of foreboding running throughout the film, as if all the characters were sitting on top of a bomb that could explode at any moment.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Visually, Artificial is sleek and sometimes experimental, playing with subjects moving at different speeds or editing with sharp cuts to add even more electricity to the rapidly escalating chain of events, not unlike the quick edits in Guadagnino\u2019s Challengers or his adaptation of Queer. There\u2019s a running visual motif of the California sun streaming brightly into frame, forcing some of the characters, mostly Sam, to squint or shield their eyes. It\u2019s as if Guadagnino and cinematographer Malik Hassan Sayeed are trying to throw a light on the backroom deals and emotional coaxing it took to manipulate people in the tech world.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Earlier this summer, Artificial was unceremoniously dumped<\/a> by its distributor, Amazon Studios. Now that Neon has picked up the tab and is beaming the film to U.S. theaters for Christmas, it\u2019s easy to see why Guadagnino\u2019s unflinching look at Altman\u2019s rise to power may have ruffled some feathers at a company with a strategic partnership with OpenAI. Guadagnino and Rich do not take a kind view of the man who\u2019s bet the farm on maximizing speed over safety, emphasizing how skeptical voices like Hinton\u2019s have a point. As Ilya, the man who could not wait for tomorrow\u2019s progress, Borisov retains a kind of innocence throughout the film, giving the performance much more depth than his stoic face first suggests. He also gives his performance a jolt of impatient energy that could strike at any inopportune moment, explaining his lack of social graces and business savvy.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ilya\u2019s awkward savant makes for an entertaining odd-couple pairing with Sam, who is portrayed as a social gadfly who specializes in the kinds of communication that really make Silicon Valley go \u2018round. He befriends all, retaining a ring of protection around him through social cache. Garfield plays Altman about a notch below \u201cgay Bond villain,\u201d initially befriending Ilya before revealing himself to be in the market for his own gains\u2014although the real Sam Altman may be gracing the cover of Vanity Fair<\/a> in October, Guadagnino shares no such reverence. To emphasize Sam\u2019s two-faced nature, Guadagnino follows the dejected CEO as he reunites with his boyfriend at their Napa estate: Sam walks past other shirtless men enjoying the California sun before trotting down to a gun-filled bunker. He is more than worried about what will come out of the Pandora\u2019s Box he\u2019s opened, he\u2019s anticipating it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Most of the jokes in this movie are handled by the film\u2019s supporting cast, including Barinholtz\u2019s imagining of Musk as a walking, talking meme with an air of Austin Powers\u2019 Dr. Evil. Jason Schwartzman pops up as a scraggly soothsayer who tries to warn Ilya about the implications of his product, and like an alarm bell, his warnings get louder and louder as unfettered AI access gets closer to the internet. As fellow OpenAI engineer Mira Murati, Monica Barbaro represents another tricky figure in this story. She\u2019s a rare woman in her line of work, and has learned to survive such hostile environments by cozying up to power, wherever that is. Other familiar faces like Cooper Hoffman and Chris O\u2019Dowd fill in the crowded ranks of Silicon Valley as rising upstarts and established department heads try to stay ahead of the game in an AI-arms race.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Artificial is a cautionary tale of Shakespearean proportions, where innocence is betrayed, power is seized, and ethics fly out the window as soon as the right deep-pocketed investor comes calling. It\u2019s a far darker story than its sunny cinematography suggests, closer in line with the behind-the-scenes drama of The Social Network than a laudatory biopic of a company that has already negatively affected people\u2019s literacy and critical thinking skills. The AI genie might be out of the bottle, but Artificial doesn\u2019t give Altman credit for the creation, it simply blames him for releasing it on an unsuspecting public.<\/p>\n

Director: Luca Guadagnino\u00a0
Writer: Simon Rich
Starring: Yura Borisov, Andrew Garfield, Monica Barbaro, Cooper Hoffman, Jason Schwartzman, Chris O\u2019Dowd, Ike Barinholtz, Mark Rylance
Release Date: December 25, 2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sam Altman may be a relatively new figure to most of the public, but in tech circles, his…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":798378,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2839,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-798377","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/798377","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=798377"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/798377\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/798378"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=798377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=798377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=798377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}