Luca Guadagnino has made a film that knows exactly what it thinks and never stops telling you. Artificial opens in 2003 with a young Ilya Sutskever seeking out Geoffrey Hinton, and the film's central dramatic engine — the tension between a true believer and a motivated opportunist — is established immediately. Yura Borisov carries the film's conscience as Sutskever; Andrew Garfield carries its commercial instincts as Altman. The structure is sound. The execution is where the arguments start. The film's best material is Garfield's Altman: a figure who evolves from what the script calls 'demon twink' to full-spectrum narcissist, complete with a victim complex that peaks when he's fired from OpenAI and reinstated five days later. 'They're being very mean to me,' he pouts. This is the movie working. The boardroom dynamics, the ethics debates with Mira Murati (Monica Barbaro), the climactic Pandora's Box monologue — these scenes have the controlled menace that Guadagnino can deliver when he trusts his material. The problem is the material doesn't trust itself. Simon Rich's script — and Rich is a genuinely funny writer — keeps reaching for the SNL sketch when the film needs the long knife. Ike Barinholtz's Musk lands as an impersonation of an impersonation, Mike Myers doing a character who was already a character. A scene that should puncture the mythology of the tech-bro dinner becomes a broad comedy set piece. The humor is frustratingly uneven: occasionally savage (Altman snapping 'I didn't invent teen suicide, Mira' is genuinely chilling), more often broad. The visual language compounds the problem. Guadagnino reaches for metaphor — a homeless person in VR goggles, a car accelerating over the Golden Gate Bridge into fog — and the film announces its meaning rather than dramatizing it. Damon Albarn's score is a mismatch: one original composition with lyrics so on-the-nose that the film itself seems to notice the problem. When the satire works, it works because it's specific. When it reaches for the universal, it goes slack. What Artificial doesn't attempt is the more interesting film underneath it: a serious account of how Altman, specifically, navigated the gap between stated mission (beneficial AI for humanity) and operational reality (a $157bn valuation and a $50bn bet from Amazon). The film tells us Altman is amoral. It doesn't show us the system — the investors, the media, the Vanity Fair covers — that not only tolerated this but celebrated it. The Amazon MGM distribution withdrawal, reportedly triggered by Bezos's $50bn OpenAI investment, demonstrates that the film touched something real. It's a shame the film didn't push further into that territory rather than settling for a portrait of individual villainy. This is tech oligarch season at the movies — Musk, Holmes, Zuckerberg all incoming — and Artificial arrives first with the highest-profile subject. Guadagnino is a serious filmmaker operating in a mode that doesn't fully suit him: the polemical biopic requires a different kind of ruthlessness than the sensory cinema he excels at. The result is a film with genuine chilling moments and a tonal jumble that blunts them. There's a leaner, meaner version of this film that exists somewhere. This isn't it.
