Neill Blomkamp, a director made famous for his 2009 sci-fi film District 9, has (despite that movie's success) been a peripheral figure around Hollywood, TV and video games for the past 15 years. Mostly because his movies, despite their fantastic art direction, are bad.
There's stuff to like in them! I enjoyed District 9, and if you simply cut the last 30 minutes off Elysium I thought it was fun too, but mostly for the same reasons I run a regular art feature: I can sit through a lot of shit if there are interesting combat exoskeletons and weird prawn aliens to look at, and I can admire and appreciate those things while still realising the movies they were part of sucked.
Which, whatever, Blomkamp is terrible at telling stories because he doesn't want to tell stories. He's not in this to make you feel something. Neill Blomkamp knows what a cool mech or space gun looks like, and putting those in his movies is all he's ever been good at, which is why most of his major motion pictures--which all employed the same cobbled-together, mildly-dystopian visual signatures--have their fans, but have also seen diminishing returns. And those diminishing returns might be why the last major motion picture he directed was...Gran Turismo.
Considering he's a guy who, like George Lucas, seems more obsessed with film-making technology than in making films, and is also a guy who worked on one of video gaming's biggest grifts, it should surprise absolutely nobody that Blomkamp is now also very into AI.
His new short, Nightborne, was made using AI. It's not augmenting actual footage, it's not providing effects work in the background, the entire thing, from the soulless actors to the soulless action sequences, has been spat out by a machine. The fine print of the YouTube description tries to soften this by saying the faces and voices present were used "under likeness agreements", and that "concept art by human artists" somehow features, but he also leads off boasting that "every frame was generated in Seedance 2.0", so fuck that.
It's awful in ways I don't need or want to describe to you; simply knowing that Neill Blomkamp spent an afternoon typing prompts into a computer will conjure in your mind a sequence of images that will come very close to what it actually looks like, and that's close enough to save you the 13 minutes it would take to watch it.
As bad as it is, and inevitable as it is, it's still a huge bummer, because while I've never really enjoyed a Neill Blomkamp movie, I've been a huge fan of the art that went into them. Every combat arm or flying car or talking robot that went into District 9, Elysium (which I did a whole showcase on at Kotaku that, sadly, has had its images wiped) or Chappie was designed and modelled and animated and painted and shot by real people, and it was work that I really respected. It sucks that the guy responsible for those movies doesn't have the same respect.
