A24’s “Eddington” is the prequel to the AI movie “Her,” and a real-world warning
Ari Aster’s latest film channels social media chaos, political unrest, and looming AI disruption into a darkly prescient vision of America’s near future.
“I think social media is a tool, and it's been harnessed in a lot of ways. We’ve been distracted by these like ideological battles, while big power operates above us and is changing us and is changing the world,” says Ari Aster in a recent interview about his new A24 film Eddington.
If you haven’t heard of it, you’re not alone. The film had a domestic opening of just $4.4 million and has only pulled in $9 million since its release on July 16. These numbers are much lower than Aster’s previous A24 cult hits Hereditary (A24’s fourth-biggest success) and Midsommar, which had opening weekends of $13.5 million and $6.5 million, respectively. Ultimately, Hereditary raked in $88 million, and Midsommar earned $48 million. So, on balance, the studio is accustomed to the cultural impact of its films sometimes outstripping its box office performance.
Still, the relative silence around Eddington, which stars Joaquin Phoenix, Emma Stone, Pedro Pascal, and Austin Butler, is unusual and quite unfortunate. Eddington is a film that perfectly encapsulates the last five tumultuous years in the U.S., as well as the tension-filled uncertainty framing 2025 as AI threatens to transform everything from where we work to how we speak to our closest friends.
Aster somehow manages to pack the realities of social media mania, the struggle between Right and Left politics, all within a black comedic return to the classic Western. He does this while simultaneously evoking the social anxiety of Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker and the kind of transgressive violence seen in Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs.
You’d think that would be enough, but amid all of this character and plot development, Aster masterfully injects the specter of AI and its rapidly emerging impacts on real-world cities and communities due to the industry’s voracious appetite for the energy needed to train Large Language Models (LLMs) via high-powered GPUs housed in massive data centers operating 24/7.
In the case of Eddington (a fictional town in New Mexico abutting Native land), the AI company is called Solidgoldmagikarp. This name is no accident, and is the perfect metaphor for the chaos that unfolds in the film. As AI pioneer Andrej Karpathy, an OpenAI co-founder and student of Geoffrey “Godfather of AI” Hinton, recently explained, Solidgoldmagikarp is a real phenomenon that describes a glitchy or “anomalous token” that can confuse an AI model and produce unpredictable outputs.
It has often been said that the best science fiction doesn’t necessarily lean on technology to tell the story, but instead seamlessly weaves it into human drama. That’s precisely what Aster has done here, except that AI is no longer a sci-fi vision of the future. It’s as real and disruptive a force as nuclear power in the 1970s or the Internet in the early 2000s. Seeing Solidgoldmagikarp fully envisioned as a massive tech company, complete with its own logo and enormous facility, will no doubt give AI insiders a good laugh.
In the film (mild spoiler), Phoenix’s character ends up inadvertently becoming the reason why Solidgoldmagikarp achieves its goal of taking over the area to advance its AI data center agenda. And while many consequential events happen between the humans in the film leading up to that point, we’re left with a rather ominous sense of what Solidgoldmagikarp’s triumph may mean for the future.
And that’s when it hit me: Eddington plays like a thematic prequel to Her, forming an unexpected narrative loop that feels both eerie and intentional. The connective tissue? Joaquin Phoenix (playing Theodore in Her and Joe Cross in Eddington).
In both films, Phoenix portrays a character who moves through the story as an insecure, hapless, yet purposeful human, tipping over dominoes and setting things in motion that are larger than himself. Much like in the real world, where we’re building AI with a myriad of warning lights flashing in front of us, we continue to press the accelerator pedal, ignoring the dull hum of stressed metal and threadbare tires warning us that, maybe, we’re going a bit too fast.
If you haven’t seen Her, directed by Spike Jonze, I highly recommend giving it a watch. In the meantime, it can be summed up as a story of AI agents first becoming the ultimate tool for human interaction, and then, quite suddenly, achieving superintelligence, subsequently leaving humanity behind, rather than destroying it. Such a passive-aggressive outcome might be the best-case scenario, compared to the dark warnings of Nobel Prize winner Hinton.
Wherever reality takes us, what Aster has accomplished with Eddington is a film about AI cleverly cloaked in the fuzzy hysteria of a species still coming to grips with a maelstrom of wildly protean data streams washing over them in real time.
Like much of A24’s best work, Eddington’s true power lies in the cultural and philosophical shadows it casts. Ignore the tepid box office numbers, that might just be the emergent algorithm obscuring the future hurtling toward us.