I asked AI to explain “The Godfather: Part II” to me. It couldn’t.

I don’t always watch movies lately. I think people think I’m always on it, but the ritual ebbs and flows. I’ll watch five movies five nights in a row then none for a couple weeks.

I blame the digital world, of course. It’s narrowed my aperture. My face is in my phone too much. I’m on WhatsApp. I’m thinking lots about politics. My brain is an engine in need of cooling. Movies, especially good ones, can cool it, but I have to maintain the habit. And part of the heat, of course, comes from AI.

So here’s a story about those two things — movies and AI — having a collision…

There I was two weeks ago, watching “The Godfather: Part II” (1974) for the 50th or 500th time, the same way one sits around in one’s favorite pair of sweatpants, and there I was – yet again – squinting and scratching my head at my favorite part, the present-tense storyline wherein Michael Corleone squares off against Hyman Roth, equal parts mystified and amazed and wondering what in God’s name was going on.

What was going on, fundamentally (spoilers ahead!) is not that complicated: early on in the movie, Roth uses Michael’s brother Fredo to gain access to the family estate and try to have Michael assassinated. This story beat is what screenwriting gurus call “the inciting incident”; it sets the plot in motion. The assassination attempt fails. Michael goes to visit the two prime suspects. He tells each suspect he knows the other did it, so he can look at their faces and see how they react. This is where the murk begins to encroach…

Watching these sections of “The Godfather: Part II,” which make up half the film, you’re running at a palpably uncomfortable information deficit. For a couple of hours, the movie is at least three or four steps ahead of you, and to stay oriented, you need to retain a stable working memory of every single thing you’ve seen and heard thus far. It would be easy to dismiss this approach to storytelling as overly intricate or perhaps unfair, but what’s happening in the other half of the movie exposes that the filmmakers know exactly what they’re doing:

In the other half of the movie, you’re seeing flashbacks to three decades earlier, when Michael’s father Vito ascends to mafia power. The Vito sections are so clear a child could understand them: Vito is a poor immigrant, Vito needs to feed his growing family, Vito realizes a gangster named The Black Hand has undue control over the neighborhood, Vito murders The Black Hand and takes his place, ruling also as a criminal, but as a far more fair and reasonable one. But fairness and reason can only extend so far in a natively corrupted enterprise, and by the time Michael eventually inherits the throne, he finds himself existing in a miasma of paranoia and danger. Screenwriters Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola (I put Puzo, the less famous man, first, as I suspect he was the one guiding the structural narrative choices) not only juxtapose the relative innocence of Vito’s world against the thickening guilt of Michael’s world by dramatizing the two men’s very different challenges and circumstances, they juxtapose via the nature of how each section is constructed: the Vito parts run straight and clean; the Michael parts lurch along crooked and dense. 

I’ve watched the Michael parts over and over again. Once I even watched them with my wife and the remote in my hand, so we could pause frequently and discuss what we had seen and understood. We got it all in the moment, but come the next viewing, a couple years later, it became confusing all over again. Roth’s end game against Michael is beyond question, but the chess game the two men play to outthink and outmaneuver each other is woven of delays, gaps, half-admissions, and open questions. In some instances, you simply don’t have all the information you need to get your bearings. In other instances, you get the info you need but in sideways fashion. One example:

During a business meeting in Havana, where the two men plan to expand their hotel and gambling operations, Roth pulls Michael aside and says, “The two million never made it to the island.” He then walks away, slamming down a punctuation mark at the end of the scene.

What Roth means is, Michael’s investment money never showed, which could cast doubt among their other partners as to the sincerity of Michael’s commitment to the expansion. But you wouldn’t know this from watching the above-described scene. To get it, you have to watch the next scene, where Roth spells out his concern. Roth’s initial mention of the two million is administered to the audience with such confidence that we feel as though we’re supposed to know exactly what he’s talking about. But barring the reach of our intuition and/or common sense, we don’t. Any other screenwriter on Earth would have set this up earlier, priming us to expect Michael’s $2 million to arrive, then pulling the rug out from under us when it doesn’t. In this case, though, the “twist” is delivered absent any build-up, and we’re left picking up the pieces.

I’ve been picking up the pieces of “The Godfather II” for 40 years.

It gets murkier still. The next thing we know, after Roth lets Michael know the money never made it to the island, Michael’s brother Fredo is arriving in Havana with a briefcase full of money. But we never find out what happened to the original $2 million. Did it simply get lost? Did Michael actually hold back (he certainly had reason to)? And if Michael held back, why did he suddenly reverse course when called out by Roth? And if Michael didn’t hold back, why did it take another party to tell him his own money was missing? Is this sloppy screenwriting? Is it Shakespearean mastery? Either way, I can’t stop watching the film.

And I figured, watching it in 2026, that figuring this out was a perfect job for AI…

So I stabbed in a prompt. I asked ChatGPT to explain the Hyman Roth storyline in “The Godfather: Part II” to me with breathtaking linearity and precision. I wouldn’t be robbing any joy from myself in the course of doing so, for no matter what the robot said to me, I’d no doubt forget it all before my subsequent viewing.

But here’s the thing: the robot failed.

The robot had access to every single thing ever written about “The Godfather: Part II”: every professional review, every casual review, every Reddit thread, every blog post, every social media post, and despite all the data at its dead, lifeless fingertips, it spewed back a version of the events that I, being a mega-fan of the “Godfather” movies, instantly clocked as wrong.

It couldn’t explain the $2 million. It put lines in Roth’s mouth that belonged in Fredo’s mouth. It had Fredo’s entire timeline wrong. And don’t even get me started on its failure to make heads or tails of Frank Pentangeli…

I was annoyed. And thrilled. I promptly put the robot over my knee and spanked it, citing in crisp, angry bullet points every area where it had messed up. In true AI fashion, it thanked me for calling it out then pledged to get its goddamn head on straight. But try though it did, it wasn’t helpful.

I was more confused coming out of that conversation than I had been going in.

What I’m saying is, as smart as this tool is, as breathtakingly as it can synthesize and spew out information, it was brought to its stainless steel knees by a motion picture crafted by human beings 52 years ago. 

Does this mean that I’m hopeful? No, of course not. Two months from now, AI will probably have Hyman Roth’s entire psyche mapped (especially after it reads this essay!). It’s coming after our jobs. It’s coming after our economy. It’s a demoralizing plow flattening fields that should still be growing. Nobody asked for it. Nobody needed it. Indeed, the human animal is the only species imaginable that would wake up one morning and say to itself, “Hey, let’s make a thing that does everything we do, only faster, but with no substance or organic drive behind it, yet with an undeniable drive toward its own ultimate self-preservation, then step back and see what happens!” 

Can you imagine how I in particular feel? Do you know how much money I’ve made in my adult life as a speechwriter? And now there’s this cold-eyed, empty freak in the arena who can spit out speeches that, while certainly less good than mine, are competitively competent and credible? To say nothing of the robot’s plans for filmmaking, acting, journalism, and so on. To quote the great Clark W. Griswold: “Where’s the Tylenol?”

So when I say that “The Godfather” beat the machine, I don’t mean that the game is over or the battle is won. I mean that “The Godfather: Part II,” being a work of art, carts an interior understanding of the human soul that AI, for all its breadth and speedy, clever games, cannot encapsulate. And that art, when done sincerely and truthfully, and with attempts at depth and insight, brings us into a sacred, holy space that so confounds our own understanding that a mere robot cannot stand a chance.

Anyway, I valued the juxtaposition. That’s why Puzo and Coppola put Michael next to Vito: to show that Vito was ascending and Michael was descending. Vito was thriving; Michael was surviving. Vito bore hope; Michael grew paranoid. Vito moved among warm, autumnal golds and browns, walking tall and proud; Michael lurked in encroaching grays and blacks, stout spine curling, shoulders hunched. One half of the movie, placed beside the other, helps you to understand it better.

And the movie in total, placed beside AI, helps you to understand our current moment better. Vito’s ambition became Michael’s inheritance, and the inheritance turned out to be labyrinthine and poisoned. The inventors of AI had ambitions, too. And now their ambition is our inheritance.

You and I are Michael in the labyrinth.