Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
The ancient Chinese game of Go has long been considered a grand challenge for artificial intelligence. Yet in 2016, Google's DeepMind team announced that they would be taking on Lee Sedol, the world's most elite Go champion. AlphaGo chronicles the team as it prepares to test the limits of its rapidly-evolving AI technology. The film pits man against machine, and reveals as much about the workings of the human mind as it does the future of AI.
AlphaGo captures a genuinely historic moment in AI history with strong emotional resonance, particularly in Lee Sedol's dignified response to defeat and his remarkable Game 4 victory. The documentary's novelty is its strongest asset — it sits at a unique cultural crossroads of ancient human tradition and cutting-edge machine learning, capturing a singular unrepeatable event. The cinematography is competent but conventional for the documentary form. The narrative structure follows a fairly standard sports-documentary arc, and the ending, while emotionally satisfying, is somewhat bittersweet and abrupt. Acting, as such, is replaced by authentic human performances from real subjects, which are compelling but uneven.