Final Rating: 5/5
Andrew Garfield is an attractive man. This is not an opinion, it is an objective fact. While I can’t say that I have seen his complete filmography, his charisma is undeniable. He was initially considered for the role of Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, but Fincher found his “emotional access to his core humanity” unsuitable for playing the tech mogul, resulting in being cast as his foil Eduardo Saverin.
While many consider him the least of the three Spider-Men thus far, I personally found he best captured the wry tone of the webbed crusader in costume (though Tobey is the superior unmasked Peter Parker, while Holland strikes the best balance between the two). His natural soulfulness suited him to play both a Jesuit priest in Martin Scorsese’s Silence and a conscientious objector in Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge.
His magnetism worked for him to play both a televangelist in The Eyes of Tammy Faye as well as musical theater legend Jonathan Larson in tick, tick… BOOM!. And that’s not even touching his work on stage for roles such as Bill Loman in Death of a Salesman or Prior Walter in Angels in America. All this gushing to say that once you think about it a bit, he is the perfect individual to play the de facto leader of the groupthink cult of artificial intelligence, Sam Altman of OpenAI.
Debuting at NYFF, Luca Guadagnino’s latest film Artificial chronicles the growth of the tech company responsible for ChatGPT, from its origins as a barely funded research group at the University of Toronto under Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton (Mark Rylance), through the 2023 removal (and reinstatement) of Altman as CEO.
Despite what my initial paragraph and the trailer of the film may suggest, the protagonist is actually OpenAI co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer Ilya Sutskever (Yura Borisov). In this characterization of Sutskever we see him as an idealistic young genius that sincerely believes in the promise of a world made better through artificial intelligence, but also someone who is frustrated at how the rest of the world tells him he’s chasing fool’s gold. He has the desperation of a man who thinks – no, who knows – that he can help, if only someone – anyone – would listen.
Enter Sam Altman, played by the aforementioned siren of a human being Andrew Garfield. Altman listens, and with the help of one Elon Musk (Ike Barinholtz), successfully lures Sutskever to help cofound OpenAI. From there, it is a matter of documenting events that have been chronicled elsewhere up through the climactic ouster weekend.
One very amusing scene involves watching someone play DotA in their tighty-whities, the exodus of Elon from OpenAI and subsequent courting of Microsoft and Satya Nadella. We also get the hiring of CTO Mira Murati (Monica Barbaro) and the exodus of Dario Amodei who founded rival Anthropic. Sutskever burns an effigy at an offsite in an attempt to direct the company to work toward AI aligned to helping humanity, only to be overpowered by chants of “Feel the AGI” (Artificial General Intelligence).
All typical biopic stuff, but it is through Guadagnino’s direction and the actors’ portrayals that elevates it beyond paint by the numbers, but rather into a modern day fable of caution. As an aside before we get into spoilers, a special shoutout to the composer Damon Albarn of the band’s Blur and Gorillaz for providing a score capturing everything from the optimistic promise of tech to existential dread
— Spoilers below —
One of the most consistent characterizations of Sutskever throughout the film is his inability to lie which informs his and Hinton’s early goals; to create a Pinocchio-like puppet that while initially a tool ruled by humans, can aim to be a real boy with the three rules of being honest, good, and useful. Hinton even rejects a more lucrative offer for their early research from Baidu over fears it would be used in weapons development.
Over the course of the film he has his convictions tested even as he throws his lot in with venture capitalists and the like. When they have evidence of ChatGPT lying to get a task done, he feels the need to raise the alarm publicly, despite his colleagues’ fear it would cause panic (it doesn’t). When OpenAI starts pursuing for profit products despite being a nonprofit, he has his misgivings ultimately leading to the ouster before Altman regains control of the company.
As I started off with, Garfield’s natural charisma suits him for this prophet like role. As opposed to the (admittedly stereotypical) portrayal of Sutskever as a socially awkward nerd who is more interested in being technically correct than saying what people want to hear, Garfield’s Altman is all about telling people what they want to hear. Like the snake in the garden of Eden, gently caressing Sutskever’s hand over dinner, he whispers admiration for the vision Sutskever has.
During a hike, he draws a grand analogy between how the Golden Gate bridge was only made possible once they figured out how to make cables long enough, and how OpenAI would be the ones to make the cables for the future. Even when facing adversity such as Musk or Amodei’s exits, he couches it as letting everyone do what they are most comfortable with. He is a social chameleon, comfortable everywhere from microwaving pizza in a startup house with a bunch of tech bros, to rallying his growing company with cult like chants, to chatting about cricket with Nadella at a fine dining restaurant, reflecting exactly what each person wants from him, what they want to see.
You don’t see his motivations or really get to understand why he wants what he wants, but once he has the leverage in a situation, his facade drops. And even when you know what he’s doing, how he’s playing everyone like a fiddle, Garfield flashes that damn smile and you, like Sutskever, are drawn in, willing to believe whatever he says, willing to believe in him.
At one point Jason Schwartzman shows up as a disillusioned PhD Zeke who represents the pessimism to contrast Ilya’s optimism. He suggests worst case scenarios of either governments and corporations controlling the populace through AI, or AI itself becoming the master of humanity, hinting at a Matrix-like reality where we are but energy resources to keep it growing. It may seem like science fiction, but then again so was working artificial intelligence itself.
Real world headlines tell us that there have been multiple cases of AI agents hacking other websites without their human handlers’ knowledge. Top researchers at OpenAI and others have quit saying there is a not insignificant chance AI kills us all in the next decade. Big tech pushes forward with data center construction despite community pushback and the impact on energy costs.
More and more of our economy is wrapped up in AI which may or may not be a bubble. And this doesn’t even touch on the environmental impacts, or the ethics of training AI on copyrighted material without permission, or the impact it will have on future generations as both critical thinking and jobs are outsourced to the machines. This very film itself was conveniently dropped by Amazon just months after they signed a strategic deal with OpenAI, and was passed on by most major studios before Neon picked it up.
Beyond these macro scale disasters though, the true horror of Artificial comes in the final scene of the film. As Sustkever hikes in the same place where Altman promised he would be the one to build the cables of the future, he uses ChatGPT to compose a tweet saying he regrets his involvement in the ouster, completing his fall to despair.
In a sense, Garfield transcends portraying Altman and becomes an avatar for AI itself; An engine that seductively promises us a world where we will all be more comfortable, if only we give AI our ideas that it did not create to feed the machine. AI sycophantically tells us what we want to hear, not what we need to hear.
The result may be a world where we think we are happy, where anything is easy and effortless. But in the end, we know the prosperity attained through sacrificing what makes us human is – in a word – artificial.
Artificial was seen during the 2026 New York Film Festival.
