Andrew Garfield’s Sam Altman Walk Is Really Freaky

Something I realized watching the first teaser trailer for Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial, the OpenAI movie once dropped by Amazon MGM, then saved by NEON, is I didn’t know how Sam Altman looked when he walked. I knew what he looked like testifying in front of Congress or as a talking head on the news. But walking around a Silicon Valley campus? That Altman was a mystery to me, though whatever Andrew Garfield is doing — semi-hunched shoulders, jaunty speed walk, an almost musical cadence to his gait — feels right, so much so that it’s almost scary. That’s the main takeaway from the first teaser, at least: This is a guy who is, well, scary. Surrounded by guns, teary-eyed at the thought of artificial intelligence gaining power at the risk of destroying society — this is the Sam Altman Luca Guadagnino and Andrew Garfield want us to see.

“We opened Pandora’s box together,” Garfield’s Altman says in the trailer’s voice-over. “The future’s inevitable.” The one person who looks a bit skeptical about this is Yura Borisov (Ilya Sutskever), the OpenAI co-founder who led the charge to get Altman booted from the company. It’s a bit funny, 16 years after The Social Network, to have a fall awards season with both a spiritual sequel to Social Network and a different movie in which Garfield plays a tech founder who does stuff like write equations on a glass wall in dry-erase marker. The long tail of 2010 lives on, but this time Garfield gets to play the supervillain — or so it seems.

Artificial will premiere at New York Film Festival ahead of a theatrical release on Christmas Day.