Four Sided Triangle (1953)

Four Sided Triangle is an early Hammer film, before their success with Frankenstein, Dracula, Quatermass, and the rest. It is a straight science-fiction premise akin to Frankenstein, though, and it has surprising parallels to stories being told about AI today. It centers on the old moral question: what happens when human beings try to create, control, and possess something that should not be? Bill and Robin are both in love with Lena, while Lena loves Robin. Rather than accept the painful reality of unrequited love, Bill uses his scientific genius to create a machine that can duplicate Lena. His solution appears brilliant. If he cannot have Lena, he can create another Lena who will love him. But the experiment does not solve the problem. It only exposes the deeper foolishness of trying to make life, love, and reality conform to our desires.

The film's tragedy is that Bill treats a person as something that can be reproduced and a relationship as something that can be engineered. He assumes that if he can recreate Lena's appearance, personality, and memories, he can also recreate love. But love cannot simply be programmed into existence. The duplicate possesses Lena's identity, yet she remains an independent human being with her own desires and choices. Bill's attempt to overcome rejection therefore becomes an attempt to control another person, and the result is misery for everyone involved.

There is a distinctly Christian response here. Scripture presents human beings not as objects to be manipulated but as persons made in the image of God. Love is therefore not fundamentally about getting what we want. It is an act of self-giving. Paul describes love as patient and self-seeking, not possessive or controlling. Bill's fundamental error is that he wants love without surrender. He wants to eliminate the possibility of rejection rather than learn how to love faithfully in spite of it.

The film therefore exposes a temptation that goes far beyond romantic relationships. We are constantly tempted to use technology, wealth, influence, and even religion to construct the life we want. But Christian wisdom begins by recognizing that other people are not ours to manufacture or control, and that love cannot be forced. We may be able to create increasingly sophisticated substitutes for human experience, but we cannot manufacture the freedom, dignity, and genuine love that belong to persons created by God.