5 Great Movies Where An Evil AI Successfully Destroys The World

If you look at the current state of artificial intelligence, there's really nothing to worry about. Alright, there might be instances of it going rogue on government websites, and that one time a chatbot almost started a war, but besides that, everything is going as smoothly as can be.

Psst, quick, while they're not looking. It's going horribly, guys. We might be able to make pictures of ourselves looking like we're in the 1980s and videos of Will Smith eating spaghetti like he's never eaten it before, but aren't we just on a path to our own destruction? It's not like we haven't been warned, either. For decades, science fiction movies have shown signs that artificial intelligence could be our end, often through blockbuster-level spectacle and often a major movie star leading the fight against the machines for a better tomorrow.

Naturally, being the glass-half-empty-because-the-rest-has-gone-to-data-farms sorts we are, we've compiled a list of movies that offer the best depictions of just such a thing happening. This pile of big pictures has shown, in exceptional fashion, just how well an evil AI could wreck the planet and leave us constantly wearing fingerless knitted gloves, duster jackets and trying to remember what sunlight looked like. To start things off, we're going with one about The One, while the rest of us stayed unconscious in big baths full of jelly. Heck, when we say it like that, does it really sound that bad?

When Mr. Thomas Anderson, aka Neo (Keanu Reeves), escapes the Matrix, the real world he wakes up to looks somewhere between the Labyrinth from "Hellraiser" and LV-426 from the "Alien" franchise. Here we learn the horror that humanity went to war with machines, and we didn't just lose but were transformed into living batteries for the enemy to feed on. The result is fields of humans incubated and wired up to the nines, fed a virtual reality they can't control, while those who escaped the Matrix reveal the truth and are forced to swallow a tough red pill to do so.

The scary thing about this dark future is its efficiency. The planet has been transformed into a burnt husk of what it once was. Those who remain are forced to keep the lights on, only to hasten their own demise. It takes three films before we learn there is still hope for a brighter world, when Neo finally breaks through the smog in "The Matrix Revolutions" and sees sunlight waiting on the other side. It's only in Neo's nemesis, Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving), that the villains of the future don't learn from the mistakes of the past. Just as we made the machines, they made the program Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving), a glitch in the Matrix that sets their own destruction in motion, proving that artificial intelligence might be a horrifying presence in this franchise, but one that's just as flawed as the heroes trying to find the off switch.

Even decades after he made them, director James Cameron has spoken at length about the science fiction movies he helmed that showed the horrors of artificial intelligence wrapped in a time loop. Both "The Terminator" and "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" open with a haunting depiction of a world-ending event, leaving those left in the rubble to fight the machines they made. Through Cameron's lens, we see silver-plated tanks and airships bombing the heck out of a human resistance that's hiding in piles of bones and leaving their kids to watch fire on television. Both openings set the tone perfectly about what's to come and, more importantly, what's at stake for humanity to make it into the future.

But while those visual aids do kick us into gear, it's perhaps the dulcet tones of Arnold Schwarzenegger's scary movie robot that do the best job of sending shivers down our spine and plugging horror into our hearts. Laying it all down for Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) during a drive on the highway, the T-800 explains how humanity shot itself in the foot. About how Skynet learned at a "geometric rate" before eventually becoming self-aware and sparking a nuclear war. The timeline might be a few decades out, but it's hard not to hear this rundown and not feel a little bit unsettled about what's on the horizon, and the only future coming is "what we make for ourselves."

It might not be the most popular chapter in the Cornetto Trilogy, but there's a lot to take from "The World's End," including what feels like the bleakest ending of the three movies. During Gary King's (Simon Pegg) pub crawl with his old pals, he uncovers that his town has been infiltrated by an otherworldly artificial intelligence dispersing an army of robots that are all posing as locals. With every stop they make, the gang begins to drop in numbers, with the hardwired horrors either replicating or incapacitating King's group until he finally faces the supreme being head-on.

The final showdown reveals that the organism known as The Network has driven humanity's immense leaps in technology over the last few decades. Even so, Gary's persistent arguing that we can handle things on our own leads The Network to abandon its plans of world domination. That's not before it takes off and sends a pulse across the globe, plunging us into a technological blackout. While it might not have been its original intention, The Network did as King asked and left the world to fend for itself — it just sent the globe back to the Dark Ages to really see how we'd handle things. We didn't see much beyond that, other than Gary and Blanks of his former friends wandering the land, but we don't think we did very well. 

This is perhaps the only entry on the list that asks the real question: what makes an artificial intelligence inherently evil? In Kubrick/Spielberg's futuristic version of "Pinocchio," David (Haley Joel Osment), the robot (otherwise known as a 'mecha') that wants to be a real boy, finds himself at the bottom of the ocean begging a statue of the Blue Fairy for his wish to come true. Instead, he slowly powers down and remains there; on the surface, 2,000 years pass, and humanity is outlived by the mechas they created. At this point, highly advanced models recover David, deem him the closest thing to a now-extinct species, and grant him the wish he always wanted.

Unlike Skynet in "The Terminator" or the Machines in "The Matrix," the mechas of "Artificial Intelligence" don't aim to destroy us; they simply outlive their makers. In this tale, time is our enemy, not the machines that aren't affected by it. With that being said, though, it does beg the question as to why mechas weren't built to help keep humanity ticking over. In this particular timeline, couldn't artificial intelligence have been used more prominently in science and medicine, thereby stopping us from getting wiped out? In the end, all that's left is David and robots that look more akin to something from another world than the one we made for ourselves. Then again, it's better than a metal skeleton that sounds like he's from Austria, right?

The end of the world is always a terrifying notion, but it's not that scary when it comes in the energetic, animated form of "The Mitchells vs. the Machines." The 2021 movie depicts a father-daughter relationship pushed to the breaking point when a virtual assistant made by a naive tech bro turns every smart device and newly built home robot against humanity. From there, a worldwide blackout takes place, with most of the human race getting rounded up as part of the AI's plan to send us into space. Thankfully, the Mitchells, on a road trip to take their daughter, Katie Mitchell, to film school, aren't connected (coincidentally, the original title of the movie) and set off on a mission to pull the plug on the technological tyrants once and for all.

A far more family-friendly Judgment Day than the one ingrained in sci-fi fans, "The Mitchells vs. the Machines" still does a good job of showing how dependent we are on technology. It also shows how dangerous things can get if we let an AI take charge of things that should still have some human input. That way, there's no risk of, say, a robotic revolution that sees the end of life on Earth as we know it. If the rest of the films on this list have put the fear of the future in you, then top them off with this and rest easy knowing the Mitchells will save the day eventually.