The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
The term Artificial Intelligence (often abbreviated to A.I.) is used to refer to machines that have developed the ability to think independently, human-like personalities and/or emotions. A.I.’s can range from Robots and Androids to Super-Computers.
The 1960s and 70s were filled with assorted plots involving evil super-computers turning against humanity. From Star Wars (1977) onwards, the A.I., became something cuddly and user-friendly. The Terminator (1984) brought a return to the evil A.I. and lethal killer robot.
By the time of the rise of Cyberpunk, the A.I. had faded into the background and become an accepted part of the scenery. As debates about such heat up in the real world, the latter half of the 2010s have brought a renewed interest in the possibility of artificial intelligence and what it would look like.
A.I.’s and other machines that turn against humanity are discussed under Films About Machines Amok.
One of the most influential films on this site, producing a host of sequels and making the careers of all involved. At heart, a simple monster on a spaceship film, it is made into a classic through Ridley Scott’s relentless suspense and H.R. Giger’s design work
A film that was as groundbreaking when it came out as Star Wars was in its day. The Wachowskis create a defining work on Virtual Reality themes and do so with a sublime cool and a series of breathtaking action moves that blew everybody away
Spike Jonze addresses virtual relationships in this story of a romance between a man and an A.I. A film that is astonishing in its freshness, naturalness and avoidance of any of the cliches that have dogged other treatments.
Ridley Scott’s film was not a success at the time but has since been regarded as a SF masterpiece, one of the defining screen treatments of android themes while the incredibly dense Cyberpunk vision of the future was copied by many subsequent films
The greatest science-fiction film ever made? Stanley Kubrick goes against all convention – the film is slow, has no clear story and reaches an enigmatic ending and yet it is a work of brilliance, both visually and in terms of effects technology
Blade Runner is a landmark classic but this is well worthwhile sequel from Denis Villeneuve that recreates the fascinating Cyberpunk world in more detail and expands out on the themes laid down in the original. Made with impeccably beautiful detail
Steven Spielberg directs an unfinished Stanley Kubrick project about an android boy’s quest. The result is a beautiful and intelligent SF film where the sensibilities of either director merge with magnificent results
A near-dialogueless story of a lonely robot clearing up junk in the aftermath of civilisation. This is surely Pixar’s most endearing film to date where they are operating at the peak of their creativity
Gareth Edwards, the director of Monsters and Godzilla, makes a genre-defining work about robotics and artificial intelligence set in a stunningly detailed future world. This site’s Top Film for 2023
Extraordinary anime where the members of an after school club secretly harbour great powers. From there, this expands out with reality-bending scope
Epic and beautifully animated anime set largely underwater about the struggle to save a dying Earth from an evil super-computer that wants eradicate humanity
Produced not long after 2001: A Space Odyssey, this is one of the smartest and best of the super-computer takes over the world films, directed with a tight economy and written with a snappy wit
A smart and extremely clever variant on Androids/A.I. themes with Sophie Thatcher as a sex android who gains self-awareness and independence. A great script filled with hilarious whiplash twists.
John Carpenter’s first film, made as a student project in collaboration with an also unknown Dan O’Bannon. A send-up of the boldly going space exploration of Star Trek, this features a ship where the crew are going stir crazy. The results are hilarious
2001: A Space Odyssey did not need a sequel but this fits the bill surprisingly well. A warmer and much more human film than Stanley Kubrick made, this has some of the very best effects of its era.
The first sequel to The Terminator where James Cameron returns with the biggest budget for a film at the time. Cameron harnesses then top-drawer CGI technology to create one of the most original nemeses in any SF film
Brit Marling is one of the most intelligent creative faces of the 2010s/20s. Here she co-writes, co-directs and stars in a fascinating murder mystery set in the tech world at a futuristic retreat
At age 81, David Cronenberg is still on great form with this perversely fascinating work about the development of a technology that places cameras inside graves to observe corpses as they decay
Unexpectedly delightful film about a man and a robot. With Tom Hanks alone with a robot for company in the aftermath of civilisation, it becomes in effect Cast Away meets Wall-E
Ryan Reynolds discovers he is a character inside a videogame. This has a conceptual ingenuity and originality and is the most fun and outrightly enjoyable mainstream film seen of recent
A flop in its day, nobody at the time saw how revolutionary this was in that it predicted the idea of cyberspace and the internet. The design of the world inside the computer all in candy apple colours and geometric shapes is extraordinary
Classic anime from Mamoru Oshii, a Cyberpunk work with a heroine who is a cyborg special forces officer, a work that delves deeply into the philosophical questions of what is human and what is machine
Phantasm series director Don Coscarelli makes a mind-expanding effort that seems a conceptual collision between Donnie Darko, Limitless, a slacker version of Supernatural and Dr Strange
Another of the unsold Gene Roddenberry tv pilots, the story of an android searching for its purpose. This is excellent science-fiction, one of the most credible portraits of an android intelligence on screen up to this point, while Questor later became the model for Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation
The seventh of Mission: Impossible films with Tom Cruise still on great form at age 61. He and the team raise the bar for the series to a new high
The field has been open for one work to come and set the benchmark for A.I. films. Alex Garland’s Ex Machina arrives at that work. Rather than flashy effects, this resides in a series of beautifully cool debates and sharply intelligent twists
Strong and intelligent Cyberpunk film with Christopher Lambert dealing with a videogame character that has come to life
One of the best of the recent spate of artificial intelligence films. A programmer creates an A.I. for the purpose of trapping sexual predators on the internet only to be faced with ethical questions about what he has created
From the extraordinary and underrated Scooter McCrae, a dark and very disturbing film about the development of a sex robot for men who like to beat and abuse women
This Blade Runner-influenced work about robots that develop artificial intelligence is exceptional, featuring a particularly captivating last half with Antonio Banderas journeying with strangely alive robots
Beautifully made Mamoru Hosoda film about a rogue A.I. taking over a social media network. A film that is also a heartwarming work about family togetherness
Imprisonment thriller where Melanie Laurent wakes up trapped inside a cryogenic capsule, this expands out to become an excellent SF film
Katsuhiro Otomo written anime that functions as a parody of the school of Transformer robots as the artificially intelligent hospital bed of a geriatric becomes a giant ramshackle colossus rampaging through the city
To accompany their two Matrix sequels, The Wackowskis hired seven anime directors to each make a short film set in The Matrix universe. The results are often quite remarkable
This where the MCU began after a spate of high-profile Marvel Comics adaptations in the early 2000s. Jon Favreau conducts a highly enjoyable adaptation of the comic-book with Robert Downey Jr shining as Tony Stark
A surprise delight, an animated film that overspills with madcap creative energy concerning a misfit family on a road trip who come up against the machine revolution
This was the first film to ever depict the internet with Matthew Broderick as a teen innocent hacker who accidentally hacks in and triggers a nuclear alert thinking he is playing a computer game
Long-awaited revival of the tv series on the big screen. While this has a mixed fan reception, it is well worth re-evaluation. It is the only one of the Trek films that reaches for epic, mind-expanding places to find something of a 2001: A Space Odyssey
At contrast to all the serious films being made about A.I, and androids, this is a wonderfully charming and really quite eccentric comedy where a man builds a robot out of junk
A fascinating and well told work about artificial intelligence and mind upload. If the third act falls into disappointingly cliched patterns, this is nearly three-quarters of a strong and intelligent science-fiction film
Modest and quite effective Dean R. Koontz adaptation in which Jay Mohr is trapped in a small town run by an A.I. that does everything it can to prevent him from leaving
This was the first anime film made in CGI, an ambitious SF film involving a time travel plot and a struggle against a machine-dominated future
Interesting and well-made low-budget film about a scientist who builds an android duplicate of himself that starts to gain its own independence
A reboot of the classic Japanese tv series about a superhero who goes into action on a motorcycle using a suit to transform into a grasshopper being
There have been a host of works about artificial intelligence in recent years. This is a worthwhile entry in the field about the relationship between a man and an android on a space mission
A rare Bollywood venture into science-fiction – a completely madcap android intelligence/amok film that features some wildly imaginative action scenes, all set amid typical Bollywood song and dance/romance numbers
A very different take on the Superman story that asks What if Superman had grown up in the Soviet Union rather than in the US and become a paragon of Communist virtue
Rather entertaining film from The Asylum about the machine revolution that overspills with madcap technological invention
The second of the anime Godzilla films and much more successful than its predecessor. The reconceptions of some of the classic monsters has a dazzling ambitiousness while Godzilla has all the ferocity it should have had in the first film
Film that imagines what might have happened if the Y2K Bug had occurred and resulted in a machine revolution
A completely mad and all over the place film with Sam Rockwell as a time traveller (or madman) arrived at a diner to recruit six people on a mission to save the world from an evil A.I.
Witty and quite charming low-budget SF film with Don Opper as a gawky android on a space station trying to understand the human condition amid the arrival of escaped convicts
Film based on a full-length Swedish SF poem that concerns the despair, emptiness and strange societies that emerge among those aboard a spaceship that is thrown off course
This is considered the film that torpedoed Andy Kaufman’s film career – a dippy romance between two robots. This gets very silly but the film has undeniable charms
Pilot for the excellent Bruce Timm Superman animated tv series of the mid-1990s. This retells the Superman origin story, keeping great faith to the comics, while adding some fantastic action scenes
One of the better in the fad for Artificial Intelligence films we have had since the 2010s with Theo James trying to place his late wife’s consciousness into an android body
The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was a multi-media phenomenon that has developed a cult. The tv series with a less-than-stellar BBC budget was not the most effective incarnation of these but still hits the wittily absurd nerve of Douglas Adams’ humour
The first of the sequels to The Matrix inevitably disappointed on the massive build-up. The Wachowskis leave more questions than answers, while the new action scenes are often jaw-dropping they also feel boiler-plated on
Third of The Matrix sequels and the weakest of the series. This offers one showstopping effects sequence, on the other hand it also leaves a host of unanswered questions dangling
Spider-Man: Homecoming was Sony’s Spider-Man reboot where the elements came together with winning regard and Tom Holland’s politely eager nervousness made for a fantastic Spider-Man. This was the first sequel.
This falls short of being a great science-fiction film by a hairs breadth. Not the big space/action film it was sold as, more a Philip K. Dickian conceptual breakthrough film that seems to have borrowed large chunks of its set-up from Moon
TV mini-series adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s classic dystopian novel. Developed by Grant Morrison, this freely adapts the novel but does a strong and intelligent job of reimagining it in contemporary terms
Spinoff from the Transformers films. As though all it took was a change of director, this is a small sweet film that has more in common with E.T. as opposed to Michael Bay’s mass destruction spectaculars
French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet of The City of Lost Children and Amelie fame returns with an appealingly eccentric, beautifully designed comedic take on the machine revolution
Prequel to the Chinese spectacular about the construction of an engineering project to move the Earth, this comes with some epic-sized effects sequences
Quirky film shot as though a mockumentary from the 1970s about a conference where programmers compete against computer chess programs that starts to get into some puzzlingly weird SF territory
Robert Heinlein’s time travel novel gets a surprisingly faithful adaptation from Japan. This keeps the story’s double structure that tells one story and then with considerable conceptual dexterity reveals another hidden in the margins
Leigh Whannell, James Wan’s BFF and co-writer on the Saw and
SF film with Sam Rockwell as a lone man stationed on The Moon discovering the truth of his existence, this gained much word of mouth when it came out
A spinoff designed to feature Robbie the Robot, the scene-stealer from Forbidden Planet. Here Robbie has been sent back in time to the present where he is befriended by a young boy
An ambitious film yet a;; contained within a single house, set on the eve of a space mission where the commander realises that the A.I. has started going wildly off-book
Guy Ricthie makes a spy action film that doesn’t take itself too seriously and is far more absurdly entertaining than anything you expect it to be. Hugh Grant steals the day as the super-villain of the show
The idea of Jennifer Lopez in a transformer suit kicking robot ass has an outlandishness to it. The surprise is that this is a really good, well written SF film of planetary survival
Michael Bay takes on the 1980s toy phenomenon, turning it into a massive blockbuster filled with copious mass destruction and machines beating the metal crap out of each other
While the title sounds like a cheesy faux B movie, this a surprisingly serious work. Taking undeniable influence from tv’s The Tripods , it is a YA work about the fight to free Earth following a machine invasion that proves far more entertaining than anything one expects of it
South Korean anthology containing a trio of tales on the theme of the end of the world. The standout is the middle segment, a very Asimovian tale wherein a robot claims to have logically attained Buddhist enlightenment
One of the earliest works from Katsuhiro Otomo, the cult director of Akira, although he only contributes one episode to an anthology of anime tales with the common theme of robots. The collection contains some impressive and visually striking episodes
Iron Man was very enjoyable. True to typical superhero sequel form, this complicates the original by introducing so many new villains and characters that it becomes an overcrowded narrative juggling act
Amiable comedy about an annoyingly intrusive artificially intelligent mobile assistant that wreaks havoc on its owner’s life
The Resident Evil films are designed for people who were introduced to drama via the Xbox, action sequences that can be assembled in random order and where it doesn’t matter what happens. I watched this, the sixth and final entry, with next-to-no enthusiasm but then quite unexpectedly it starts to work
Sequel to the killer doll film M3gan that is a much better work than its predecessor. If the original was Child’s Play by way of The Terminator then this is the series’ equivalent of Terminator 2: Judgement Day
Modest and conceptually packed B-budget action film in which a motley team are sent to break into a bunker that has been hijacked by a scientist who is threatening to fire nuclear missiles
An SF film with minimal resources – just two characters in a desert – that deliver a modest variant on the Enemy Mine scenario about an alien and human enemy stranded on a planet
A compilation of shorts from anime directors set in the Halo videogame universe. The first two episodes have a breathtaking scale but the others are bitsy stories but nothing standout
One of The Wachowskis returns to the world of The Matrix and rather wittily turns it into an anti-blockbuster about her reluctance to do so
The eighth of the Mission: Impossible films. The previous entry Dead Reckoning was a high point in the series and this is left wrapping up the storyline in what would appear to be Tom Cruise’s final outing for the series
The first Avengers film came with a massive anticipation in seeing the characters come together and the snappiness of their interplay; here this seems more flat, while the rest is overrun by wall-to-wall action
SF neo-noir that suffers from a painfully low budget (particularly when it comes to its CGI) but transcends this with a consistently intelligent story and a world created with a reasonable sense of verisimilitude
An animated film adaptation of Crisis on Infinite Earths, one of the classic DC Comics titles of all time. With superhero films now obsessed with multiverses, this seems the perfect time to bring it to the screen
Another horror anthology with each episode from a different directors, united around the wraparound theme of stories being told by patients in a strange psychiatric facility
A Bollywood take on the android/A.I. themes, where a roboticist falls for an android girl and tries to have her accepted by his family
SF film that plays out like it should be an episode of Black Mirror where Emilia Clarke and Chiwetel Ejiofor play a couple who sign up for a process where a baby can be gestated and born externally inside an egg
This travels into very similar places to Roman Polanski’s The Tenant – a paranoid tale about a man surrounded by very strange apartment neighbours. Apart from adding some reality blurring SF twists to the mix, this does little more than churn cliches
Very strange French SF film about a futuristic truck race
This comes with an intriguing central premise – a woman is imprisoned in the house of a mad tech genius where her only hope of escape is befriending his home security A.I. that is hungry for input about the world. An interesting idea alas doesn’t carry it past an ill-informed idea of how an A.I. would behave
Another in the spate of recent A.I. films of the 2010s/20s. Here one can buy android replacements for one’s late spouse but someone is hacking and causing them to go rogue
Action film about an artificially intelligent fighter plane that goes amok. Rob Cohen directs in all the cliches of the genre and the seeming need to have something spectacular happening every few minutes
Sequel to Starship Rising, a space opera that does some amazing things with effects on a next-to-no budget
For reasons not clear to me, Space Jam is considered a classic. Now we get a sequel that updates it to the present featuring a different NBA star LeBron James
The one and only solo outing from Lou Costello of Abbott and Costello fame made after the duo’s split-up and just before Lou’s death. The film is essentially a comedy remake of the previous year’s Attack of the 50 Foot Woman in which Lou’s newlywed wife abruptly becomes a giant