NEED TO KNOW

• The AI Doc opens in theaters March 27 — directed by Oscar winner Daniel Roher and produced by the teams behind Everything Everywhere All at Once and Navalny
• The trailer features Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Demis Hassabis — three of the five men most responsible for the AI race — alongside the researchers warning it could end badly
• Elon Musk agreed to participate and didn’t show. Mark Zuckerberg declined entirely.

WASHINGTON, D.C. (TDR) — I’ve watched a lot of trailers. This one stopped me cold.

The big picture: The AI Doc isn’t another tech explainer dressed up as a documentary. It’s an Oscar-caliber filmmaker — a man who got inside Alexei Navalny’s circle while Russian intelligence was trying to kill him — turning that same instinct for proximity to power onto the most consequential question of our era: what happens if we get artificial intelligence wrong?

• Director Daniel Roher frames the film through the most personal lens available — his wife is pregnant, and he needs to know what world his child is inheriting
• The trailer opens with that anxiety fully intact and never lets it go
• The subtitle — Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist — tells you where he lands, and it’s not where you expect

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Why it matters: The people who built this technology are in this film. On camera. Answering questions they clearly don’t enjoy.

• Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Demis Hassabis — the CEOs of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind — all sat for interviews
• When Roher asks Altman to promise that AI is going to go well, Altman’s answer is two words: “That’s impossible.”
• Amodei tells Roher directly — “This train isn’t going to stop. You can’t step in front of it. You are just going to get squished.”
• Those are not quotes from critics. Those are quotes from the architects.

Driving the news: The trailer drops two days before the film’s theatrical release — and it lands in the middle of the most consequential week in AI policy history, with the Anthropic Pentagon blacklist case in federal court and the Iran war reshaping which AI companies the U.S. military trusts.

• The film premiered at Sundance in January to an 8.2 IMDb rating and 85% on Rotten Tomatoes from early critics
• It features not just the CEOs but the “doomers” — Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin of the Center for Humane Technology, and Dan Hendrycks of the Center for AI Safety
• Harris tells Roher on camera: “I know people who work on AI risk who don’t expect their children to make it to high school”
• That line, in a trailer, is not a marketing stunt — it’s the film showing you exactly what it’s willing to say

What they’re saying: The early reviews don’t agree on everything — but they agree this film earns its access.

• RogerEbert.com — the film “asks why we’re not talking about it more if there’s even a chance that we might” get AI catastrophically wrong
• The Hollywood Reporter described the visual style as “a kaleidoscope” — stop-motion animation, hand-drawn sketches, archival footage — a film that refuses to be boring about an existential topic
• One critic noted Altman “pauses bizarrely after every question, as if he were a language model considering how to respond to a prompt” — and that observation alone is worth the price of admission
• The AP called it a documentary about a technology “depicted as a ravenous parasite devouring humanity’s knowledge, creativity and empathy”

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Yes, but: The trailer — and early reviews — hint at a limitation the film itself seems aware of.

• Several critics noted the documentary can’t fully conclude because the technology hasn’t revealed itself yet — one called it the “mid-’60s cigarette problem”: something feels deeply wrong, but the data isn’t complete enough to say what
• The access to Altman, Amodei, and Hassabis is extraordinary — but all three are practiced communicators who know how to be candid without being accountable
• Musk agreed to participate and bailed. Zuckerberg never responded. Two of the five most powerful men in AI are not in this film — and their absence is its own story

Between the lines: The trailer is doing something the AI industry has spent billions trying to prevent — it’s making the stakes visceral for a general audience in a way that white papers and Senate hearings never have.

• The personal framing — a father scared for his unborn child — bypasses the usual defenses people build against abstract technological risk
• Roher got these CEOs to sit down because they presumably believed they could control the narrative; the trailer suggests they underestimated what a great documentary filmmaker does with an honest answer
• The film opens the same week the Pentagon is in court arguing Anthropic is a national security risk for refusing to remove AI safety guardrails — the timing is not ironic, it’s clarifying

What’s next:

• The AI Doc opens in select theaters March 27, distributed by Focus Features
• A full TDR review will follow opening weekend
• A companion documentary, Deepfaking Sam Altman, releases simultaneously — taking a sharply different and far more confrontational approach to the same subject

If the men building the most powerful technology in human history can’t promise it goes well — what does it say about us that we haven’t made them stop and explain why?

Sources

This report was compiled using information from Focus Features, RogerEbert.com, The Hollywood Reporter, AP, InSession Film, IMDb, and Rotten Tomatoes.

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