According to the $150m Netflix thriller Heart Of Stone, what the world needs is an all-powerful AI supercomputer to keep it safe from crime.
NB: The following contains mild spoilers for 2023’s Heart Of Stone.
For reasons best known to Skydance, the multi-million dollar production company released two remarkably similar films in the summer of 2023. You’re probably familiar with the first, released last July – action thriller sequel Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, the latest high-wire spectacle for Tom Cruise.
Roughly a month later, though, along came another thriller: Heart Of Stone, an action vehicle for Wonder Woman star Gal Gadot. Despite costing Skydance and its other backers, Pilot Wave and Mockingbird Pictures, somewhere in the region of $150m to make, you may not have heard much chatter about Heart Of Stone – possibly because it appeared on Netflix with a surprising lack of fanfare.
Both Dead Reckoning and Heart Of Stone are globe-spanning spy films full of car chases, stunts, fights and dramatic shifts in allegiance. What’s more noteworthy is that both of them are about artificially intelligent computers in one way or another. In Dead Reckoning, we were introduced to The Entity – a former cyber weapon turned sentient, human-hating AI. Although barely seen, its presence drives the plot, and co-writers Christopher McQuarrie (who also directs) and Erik Jendersen leave us in no doubt that The Entity is the villain of the piece.
In Heart Of Stone, on the other hand, the AI computer at the plot’s centre is presented as something more benign – despite multiple characters talking about just how terrifyingly powerful it is.
Gadot plays Rachel Stone, a seemingly bookish and incapable MI6 field agent who’s secretly a battle-hardened member of the Charter – an anti-terrorist organisation so clandestine that even Stone’s MI6 colleagues assume it’s a myth. Although it’s seemingly been around for decades, the Charter’s latest secret weapon is the awkwardly-named Heart – a “quantum computer sophisticated enough to hack into anything, anywhere.”
As we learn through various chunks of exposition, the Heart has access to computers and devices all over the globe, and can use those data points to essentially predict events before they happen. One character tells us, “It’s determinism… its modelling is so accurate, it can predict the future;” another suggests it could be used to deliberately crash planes or set off nuclear warheads.
In one distinctly James Bond-like scene, we’re shown how Stone can use the Heart’s predictive powers like a more sophisticated Google Maps – it plots the fastest route down the side of a snowy mounting and provides her with positions of targets and possible outcomes. Later, back at the Charter’s curiously baroque secret lair, an operative tells Stone that the organisation was already dealing with three potential terrorist plots that morning, and that it had prevented a “potential sarin gas attack in Paris” thanks to the Heart, which had “predicted the time and location of the attack with 87 percent certainty.”
The concept of preventing crimes before they happen is straight out of 2002’s Minority Report – Steven Spielberg’s heavily (often wonderfully) embellished adaptation of a Philip K Dick short story. Although the methods are different – the future world of Minority Report uses psychic human brains to predict possible futures rather than a quantum machine – the results are essentially the same. Even the Heart’s interface – all wavey hand gestures and holographic projections – is straight out of the tech Spielberg and his team of futurists imagined for Minority Report.
The difference between Heart Of Stone and Minority Report, however, is that the latter actively questions whether the use of surveillance technology to prevent crime is justifiable, and the entire movie becomes (among all the action) a debate about free will versus fate and privacy versus surveillance.
In Heart Of Stone, rather unusually, the members of the Charter are unquestionably the heroes. Although they have all the hallmarks of a shadowy outfit raved about by conspiracy theorists on Reddit, including four global leaders called ‘Kings’, it’s stated early on that the Charter exists to save lives. The Heart itself is described admiringly by its operator, Jack (Matthias Schweighöfer, something of a Netflix regular), as “the closest mankind has to perfect intelligence.”
Stone’s boss, Nomad (Sophie Okonedo), says, “The Charter exists for one reason – to maximise lives saved. That’s the only moral metric there is. A pure and objective calculation.”
For Heart Of Stone’s makers (director Tom Harper and writers Greg Rucka and Allison Schroeder), the more disturbing implications of an all-seeing, all-knowing computer are barely dwelt on. When Stone briefly pushes back against the idea of taking orders from a machine, Nomad quickly bats it down, arguing that ignoring the Heart’s predictions resulted in several deaths.
Nor is there ever the question of whether four unaccountable people, all named after playing cards and secretly using technology to spy on the globe’s citizens, might sound at least a tiny bit sinister. It’s a marked contrast to The Dark Knight, in which Morgan Freeman’s tech genius Lucius Fox, acting as the film’s moral conscience, decries the use of surveillance technology and demands that Batman destroy it.
The villain in Heart Of Stone, meanwhile, is a vengeful former British intelligence operative who wants to steal the Heart and use it to track down and kill the Charter’s bosses – a motivation that recalls 1995’s GoldenEye. Stone, with an assist from hacker Keya (Alia Bhatt), eventually thwarts the plot, restores the Heart to its rightful owners, and the ending implies that the Charter carries on as normal. The implication being it’s not a case of whether this sort of power should exist, but rather that it’s perfectly fine as long as it’s controlled by the ‘right’ people.
Perhaps it’s inevitable that a film with such a tech-utopian theme would emerge on a Silicon Valley platform like Netflix. The company has long used machine learning to decide what to show its users, and has a team dedicated to researching neural networks and generative AI. Nor does it baulk at the moral implications of using AI to fake photographs of murderers or conjure up bogus footage of long-dead pop moguls in order to dramatise its documentaries.
For Heart Of Stone, its supercomputer, floating in a zeppelin 85,000 feet up like an all-seeing eye, is simply a plot detail – as much a device as those pore-perfect masks Cruise wears in the Mission: Impossible franchise. But by glossing over the sci-fi possibilities suggested by its technology, Heart Of Stone inadvertently becomes something more disturbing than its makers perhaps intended: a breezy action thriller where the world will be kept safe from harm by an unelected organisation and its omniscient computer. No more crime, no more privacy, no free will; to paraphrase a famous poem, we’re all watched over by machines of loving grace.
