A White Lotus Star's 2020 Sci-Fi Movie About AI Should Be Your Next Netflix Watch

Netflix is full of overlooked and underseen films that are more than deserving of your attention. Take "Archive," for example, a 2020 sci-fi film that stars Theo James of "The White Lotus" fame. The film's debut was somewhat undermined by the COVID-19 pandemic, but it's just waiting to be discovered on Netflix and seems even more pertinent to our cultural discourse now than it did upon its initial release.

After playing Tobias "Four" Eaton in the "Divergent" film series, James appeared in multiple films, including a regrettable role in what is arguably Billy Bob Thornton's worst ever movie, "London Fields." Thankfully, that didn't slow him down too much. In 2022, James gained widespread attention for his role as Cameron Sullivan in season 2 of "The White Lotus," a bigger, bolder, and stranger installment of the HBO series that proved hugely successful.

Since then, he's played the lead role in Guy Ritchie's Netflix series "The Gentlemen" and starred in Osgood Perkins' 2025 Stephen King adaptation "The Monkey." But there is one particular overlooked gem in James' filmography in which the British star delivered one of his best performances: "Archive." The sci-fi movie with a crazy twist has great reviews and a solid premise, so now's the time to check it out if you missed it back in 2020 — which you almost certainly did, given its unfortunate debut amid the pandemic.

"Archive" — not to be confused with Netflix's uneven supernatural series "Archive 81" — is a 2020 British film written and directed by Gavin Rothery. It marks the designer's directorial debut following his two decades of creative work on both films and video games. While "Archive" was a strong first feature for Rothery, it was mostly overshadowed by, well, the state of the world at the time.

The film is set in 2038 and stars Theo James as engineer George Almore, who loses his wife, Jules (Stacy Martin), in a car accident. George then becomes obsessed with restoring Jules by building a robot imbued with his wife's consciousness, which was conveniently backed up on a device from the company's Archive. After two attempts to build an AI android analogue of his wife, George's final version (known as J3) nears completion. Meanwhile, his previous version (J2) becomes jealous of his latest creation, and Archive becomes increasingly suspicious of George's work, forcing him into a race against time to finish his latest project, which sees him transgress several ethical boundaries. All of which leads to a twist ending that has both critics and audiences reeling.

A film about an intelligent machine that begins to evolve its own will seems particularly relevant at a time when, as the New York Times reports, AI models literally have their own social media website. But the wider issue of the so-called alignment problem — i.e., ensuring the goals of a sentient machine align with those of humanity — looms large over the rise of AI chatbots that often seem to be a little too good at passing the Turing test. As such, "Archive" isn't just a taut sci-fi thriller but an alarmingly relevant one.

"Archive" was originally set to premiere at the 2020 South by Southwest Festival, but the pandemic scuppered those plans, and it was sent straight to digital with a handful of limited theatrical screenings. As such, you likely didn't hear much about it when it first came out, which is a shame because it's good!

The film is a much better story about love and loss than Theo James' 2022 effort "The Time Traveler's Wife," which was unfortunately too shallow to thrive. "Archive," meanwhile, has a 78% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes based on 37 reviews. Sight & Sound's Anton Bitel thought it worked well "as a paranoid thriller, a yearning romance, and an introspective tragedy," while Robbie Collin of the Daily Telegraph found it to be "good, bleak, shivery fun," that "thrums with an intelligence that's anything but artificial." Even Monica Castillo of RogerEbert.com, who wasn't too impressed with the film overall, wrote that she was left "genuinely stunned" by the twist ending.

Users on Letterboxd felt the same as Castillo, with one reporting that the ending "blew my mind," and another commenting, "It's something else. I didn't even see it coming." If you want to test your own powers of prescience, then "Archive" is available to stream right now and is arguably one of the best sci-fi movies on Netflix.