This award-winning movie starring Joaquin Phoenix centres around how an AI operating system (OS) blurs the line between what is real and what is virtual. The movie follows Theodore, who sets up an AI OS named Samantha in his home, which interacts with him via headphones. Over time, Theodore finds himself filling the lonely gaps in his life with conversations with Samantha and, eventually, he falls in love with her, err … it?

The reviews for this movie are mixed — some found the concept sick while others (like me) were impressed with the tremendous capability of the technology. There are some scenes that challenge the human-AI relationship boundaries, bringing about ethical questions such as is it healthy to have a “relationship” with a non-physical technological being that lives inside your head?

Technologists are now trying to humanise technology — meaning the more lifelike a chatbot is, for example, the better the user experience — and this movie shows the extreme of what can be achieved in that direction. — By Vanessa Gomes

Starring Ethan Hawk, Uma Thurman and Jude Law, this sci-fi thriller is set in a dystopian future, where humanity has fully embraced the science of eugenics.

This has effectively created an elite upper class with access to all the trappings of genetic superiority, while natural-born people — referred to as “in-valids” — are stuck at the bottom rung of society.

Vincent (Ethan Hawk) is one such in-valid who refuses to accept his fate. A janitor at an aerospace conglomerate, Gattaca Inc, he has always dreamt of seeing the stars. In a desperate attempt to escape his miserable, natural-born existence, Vincent strikes an illegal bargain with Jerome (Jude Law), a one-time genetic superhuman turned depressive paraplegic.

Vincent attempts to scam his way into a place on a spaceship to outer space by passing off Jerome’s superior genetic material as his own. The movie details Vincent’s obsession with looking, thinking and talking like Jerome to better sell the ruse, because detection would mean disaster. But an unexplained murder throws a spanner in Vincent’s plans, and threatens to derail his years of work and meticulous planning.

Gattaca is a brilliantly written movie that explores the extent to which people are willing to push past even the most iron-clad societal norms. It is dark and at times difficult to watch, but eventually opens up to reveal a surprisingly idealistic outlook.

The highly stylised sci-fi aesthetic of the Nineties is cranked up to 11 but, make no mistake, Gattaca truly shines in the quiet moments of dialogue, drama and introspection. The action sequences never feel too over the top, nor do they overshadow the movie as a whole.

In an era where sci-fi blockbusters deliver expensively assembled CGI characters with empty personalities and forgettable plots, the now 20-year-old Gattaca more than holds up against its more modern and much flashier counterparts.  — By Oliver Christopher Gomez

While this South Korean drama has two popular stars — Hyun Bin and Park Shin-hye — as its leads, the series is not your typical romantic comedy. The storyline revolves around an augmented reality (AR) game that has gone haywire and blurred the lines between reality and fantasy.

To play the game, you just have to put on a pair of contact lenses. You can walk around your city and find objects hidden in real places, visit locations in the game that are set in the real world, interact with other players and fight villains with your physical body (imagine children hitting the air with an imaginary hammer by the side of the road).

Things go bad when two players in the game duel and one of them actually dies. Soon, the main character finds himself launched into the game and having to fight for his life even when he is not wearing the contact lenses. Losers in duels actually die and the main character has to avoid this fate.

Watching this series was eerie. I can see how fun this AR game would be and imagine its commercial potential. But it would be so easy to lose sense of what is real and what is not. What is to stop someone from grabbing a knife or gun in real life — thinking they are still in the game — and killing another player? And what is going to happen in a world where everyone is walking around seemingly normal, but are really living in their own world, restricted to whatever they are watching through their contact lenses? — By Tan Zhai Yun

Ridley Scott’s visionary dystopian noir is a vision of future bereft of human emotion. Critically acclaimed for its mind-blowingly futuristic scenes, the film’s complex plot deals with cyborgs known as replicants, who are bio-engineered by the powerful Tyrell Corporation.

The replicants, which look and act like humans, are supposed to assist humans. But matters go awry when a group of superhuman replicants, known as Nexus-6 — engineered for perilous off-Earth missions — turn rebellious.

Replicants are then outlawed and law enforcement units, called “blade runners”, are tasked with taking out any replicant on Earth. Anyone convicted of aiding or assisting a replicant is sentenced to death. Retired blade runner Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is called out of retirement to hunt the rebels and eventually finds himself falling for a replicant, who has no idea that she is not human.

When I watched this movie for the first time in 1999, I was fascinated by how much of the exploration of the moral and philosophical dilemmas associated with AI and advanced technology were still relevant 17 years after it was made.

Seeing that we were on the cusp of the millennium and the anxiety that followed the threat of Y2K, the perpetually dark, rainy and neon-illuminated future — or November 2019, to be precise — was downright alarming. — By Pathma Subramaniam