The Artificial Teaser Is Like The Social Network Meets Ex Machina

3 min readIf I had a quarter every time Andrew Garfield starred in a biographical thriller about a real-life tech mogul, I’d have two quarters. That’s not a lot, but isn’t it weird that it’s happened twice?More than sixteen years after Garfield played Eduardo Saverin, former best friend and money guy for Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, in The Social Network, Garfield is now in the shoes of billionaire Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, for the upcoming movie Artificial, directed by Luca Guadagnino. The movie will premiere at the New York Film Festival on October 5, followed by a wide release by Neon on Christmas Day.The movie’s teaser was released on Tuesday, which you can watch further below.You might have heard about Artificial. Back in July, the movie made headlines as it was dropped by Amazon MGM Studios, which was poised to release it later this year until it decided otherwise. While the officially stated, if also maddeningly vague reason given by Amazon was that it simply felt the movie “will be better served if it were released by a different studio,” it’s not hard to suspect that Amazon’s $50 billion investment into OpenAI might have something to do with it.As for the trailer itself, it’s still not a full trailer but a teaser that primes audiences on the atmosphere and tone for Artificial. And kind of like The Social Network, it’s going to be a dark one. Though it doesn’t have any choir covers of Radiohead, we still get a glimpse of Garfield playing Altman as he walks around his tastefully decorated, if sparse home straight out of Ex Machina, complete with underground tunnels and terrariums. And a gun locker that would make The Punisher a fan himself.Then there’s a rush of strange scenes removed from context: company dinners, private jets, beach parties, sunny days in an office, drives around San Francisco, and, of course, more people writing code on clear surfaces. There are a few close-ups of the movie’s other principal actors, like Monica Barbaro (playing Mira Murati, during her time as chief technology officer at OpenAI) and Yura Borisov, who stars as Ilya Sutskever, the man who co-founded OpenAI and fired Altman in November 2023.In case you didn’t know about it by now, Artificial is set to tell the story of Sam Altman during his roller-coaster five days in November 2023 when he was fired from, and then reinstated to, his position at OpenAI. But being a Guadagnino movie, one can wager that the movie is less about the beef between a few tech industry titans and more about what their fight means for the rest of us. Film journalist and podcaster Matthew Belloni said in a July episode of his podcast The Town that he’s read the script, and that the movie serves as a vehicle to explore the disruptive nature of generative artificial intelligence. It is also not a hagiography of Altman.Said Belloni: “Because it does touch so many third rails right now about what’s going on with big tech. I’ve read the script, and I looked at it and was like, This is not a flattering portrait of Sam Altman. This is Social Network kind of on steroids, because you add in not only these guys warping the culture, they could potentially end the world. And that’s the message of this movie.”It’s a packed year for movies. The awards race is already shaping up with buzzy features like The Invite, The Debut, Primetime, You Can See Everything, and even a sequel to The Social Network. And who knows what else might show up at one of the many festivals still left in the calendar year. Now you can throw in Artificial into the mix. I’d ask ChatGPT how much of a chance Artificial has of being nominated for Best Picture, but I’m not sure we can trust it’ll have the most objective answer.