From the vantage point of 2026, the story sounds unsettling, even dystopian. But The Imitation Game was actually a celebration of its protagonist, Alan Turing, and his pivotal role in helping the Allies decrypt German intelligence messages en route to victory in World War II. The movie was a box-office smash, won an Oscar, and exemplified a slew of Obama-era, techno-optimist movies that celebrated rugged individuals relentlessly building futuristic tech that could lead to a better society.
In some cases, the films seem to spill from depiction into outright activism. In The Social Reckoning, for example, the protagonists trying to hold Zuckerberg accountable contend that the only way to get powerful people to change is to “cause pain.” And pain Hollywood can certainly cause: tech companies have invested hundreds of billions of dollars to make AI a pillar of society, and face a financial bloodbath should the public reject their tools.
Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Reckoning —Sony Pictures
These films are remarkably different in their storytelling approach. Gibney’s documentary Musk is a methodical four-hour march through the Tesla founder’s corporate foibles; Aaron Sorkin’s drama The Social Reckoning traces the growing personal disillusionment of eventual Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison). You Can See Everything unfolds as something of a psychological chess match between Theranos’ Elizabeth Holmes, who is trying to rehabilitate her image right before she heads to prison, and filmmakers Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, who hope to interrogate her contradictions.
This new crop of films, however, largely comes to the opposite conclusion: that these tech overlords have charted a wayward course for humanity precisely because of how differently—and callously—they think. In the aughts, Peter Thiel and other members of the so-called PayPal Mafia came to the conclusion that the path to Silicon Valley success required chasing relentless speed and scale at any cost. This new playbook dictated that founders bet everything on a company vision; sell the public on the myth, even if parts were untrue; scheme and scrap toward invention and then monopoly; then rinse and repeat on an even bigger scale.
These new movies grapple with this psychological shift. As the screenwriter of The Social Network in 2010, Aaron Sorkin painted Zuckerberg as petulant, to be sure, but still soulful, and hellbent on sticking it to the man. A quarter-century later, the Zuckerberg he wrote and directed Jeremy Strong to play in Reckoning is the man: robotic and cruel, making decisions via cold cost analysis. In Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial, Andrew Garfield plays Sam Altman as a serial liar who will say anything if it helps further his mission. These guys aren’t depicted as antiheroes, but as villains, with self-serving worldviews that may be incompatible with democracy.
AI Anxiety
Musk and Artificial carry even more apocalyptic overtones. The former ends with a visualization of Musk flying off into space on a rocket ship as the earth explodes behind him. Gibney told TIME in September that his dread levels these days are “really high.” “Elon Musk is betting on whether or not AI will lead us to a moment of extraordinary abundance or basically the end of life on earth,” he said. “Who makes that kind of a bet?”
This Time, It's Personal
Andrew Garfield (left) as Sam Altman in Artificial, with Yura Borisov as Ilya Sutskever —Courtesy of NeonWhat will the overwhelming negativity of these movies achieve? Gibney hopes to offer a holistic and rigorous examination of the character of tech leaders, who are constantly pivoting out of crises and toward the Next Big Thing. Musk has moved from cars to rockets to the government to AI and back. Zuckerberg changed Facebook’s name to Meta amid the backlash brought on by Haugen’s whistleblowing—and then when the metaverse fell flat, he dumped all of his company’s money into AI.
That hostility coursing through these movies matters, because AI ambitions depend on mass adoption. To train ever more powerful AI, companies like OpenAI and Meta have borrowed hundreds of billions of dollars, which they will eventually need to repay by earning consistent and massive revenue. The public is already immensely distrustful of AI, even as they adopt it in huge numbers. If Artificial persuades many people to stop using ChatGPT—as Andrew Garfield has done—that could put further pressure on the industry’s wager.
The tech titans themselves seem to care, though, and are responding in kind. They are increasingly withholding access from journalists or TV interviews, opting instead for friendlier settings like The Joe Rogan Experience. They are shaping how these films are perceived on social media: multiple platforms initially declined to run Musk’s trailer because of its “political content.” They own the film studios, and could cut off funding for similarly critical products, relegating them to the less widely seen indie margins. And finally, they are building AI tools which could make many of the human elements of the filmmaking process obsolete—virtual actors, animation, set design, storyboarding.
Given all of these threats, perhaps it’s not a surprise that these tech movies thrum with urgency and apocalyptic rhetoric. As the famous tagline for Jaws: The Revenge read, “This time, it’s personal.” So Hollywood is snapping back, casting itself as an embattled underdog in a fight for its life. The problem is that it’s already sitting inside Big Tech’s gaping mouth.
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