No one has been more patient with director Neill Blomkamp than me. Not only do I love District 9. I love Chappie, and will defend it to the bitter end (Admit you haven’t seen it, and you only know the famous tweet). I thought Elysium was a flawed success. I showed kindness to Gran Turismo by, um, not watching it. That way I can pretend forever that it might be good.
But this? This is unforgivable:
Blomkamp generated this… whatever it is, and posted a link to it on X on July 19. He calls it his first “full test AI film,” and says it was made with Seedance 2.0. He also says he would like to “tackle a full feature in this format,” apparently through a new enterprise called Barley Studios.
In the clip, a member of the U.S. military is rendered comatose after her helicopter is shot down, and she is turned into a zombie soldier via some kind of black op called Project Nightborne.
For better or worse, people do sometimes figure out how to make arresting and shocking AI video. I’m not sure there’s any redeeming artistic value to any of it yet, but I remain open to the possibility.
But Blomkamp’s clip barely deserves to be dissected. The only thing that sets it apart creatively from other generic AI videos online is that it’s long. But apparently Blomkamp got so lost in the fact that his outputs were looking more or less like real footage from an 8K movie camera at first glance, and that they perform the basic beats of storytelling, that he got to the end, and didn’t notice, or care, how antiseptic it all feels.
The viewer feels absolutely nothing watching this, other than the occasional annoyance at the typically relentless, ratatat-tat dialogue delivery. It’s a reminder that the quality of the “acting” in these clips hasn’t advanced in almost a year.
It’s an absolute disgrace on every level.
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