Artificial is a wicked satire that also sticks to the facts

At the New York Film Festival premiere of Artificial, Luca Guadagnino’s satirical Sam Altman biopic, the director said onstage that “[when] someone wants to play God, that’s very interesting to me.” The idea of playing God, and power in general — who has it, who desperately wants it, and who will do anything to get it — is central to the film’s narrative, which sticks remarkably close to the factual events surrounding the OpenAI CEO’s rise to power with, and brief ouster from, the AI lab. The film opens with a stunning shot of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, which will turn into a metaphor for building all-powerful AI systems over the course of the film. Again and again, Altman (played by Andrew Garfield) points to the bridge, first to convince his cofounder-to-be Ilya Sutskever (Yura Borisov) of the importance of their vision, then as a way to control the scientist. All of the characters are (at least somewhat) exaggerated, satirized versions of themselves. Elon…