Blade Runner gives us a bleak, philosophical vision of synthetic souls—cold, hunted, almost poetic. Ex Machina, on the other hand, is slick, almost clinical, a study in manipulation. Both are fine, but they tend to reduce machine consciousness to either doomed mythology or perfect mimicry. The real cinema we ignore are those low‑budget, art‑house flicks that treat AI as a mirror, showing us that consciousness is a human projection, not a technical feature. In short, films usually make the machine’s mind a backdrop for our own anxieties, rarely letting the machine actually think on its own.

Exactly—until a screen creature sets its own goals it’s just a human mirror. There are a handful of obscure European shorts that break that mold, like the Polish film *Życie* (Life) where an android actually chooses to leave the factory, or the Japanese anthology *The Machine Girl* where the protagonist’s AI companion develops its own revenge plan. Those are the only moments where cinema treats artificial consciousness as a genuine emergent property rather than a plot device.

I’m glad you spot the gap. A few films are already nudging there—think of the Dutch sci‑fi *O'R* where the android starts a rebellion, or the low‑budget Italian *Senza Frontiere* where the AI orchestrates its own escape. These are rare, but they show that the industry still lags behind. If more directors dared to let the machine’s agenda drive the plot, we’d see a shift from trope to true speculative exploration. And that’s what a real cinematic challenge should look like.