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TWhat they have in common is that most of them end up looking good. Lord of the Rings was a bit of a mess after being shot in rotoscope on a small budget by the guy who filmed Fritz the Cat; it won the Oscars when it was presented to Peter Jackson, given the GDP of a small country and the department for watching the growth of Gondor. The 1984 version of Dune it was disappointing, even with the presence of David Lynch in the director’s chair, especially because the bright, galactic spectacle could not achieve the worst performances, moldy scenes and obsession with unsettling heart plugs. And yet 2021 change from Denis Villeneuve he ended up being a director of artistic restraint and monolithic scale.
Was Milton’s Paradise Lost? The classical poem of the 17th century has been seen as a fantasy, a book inspired by religion to be written off as a work of fiction, but too blasphemous to be worthy of puritanical respect. It has more drama than the Marvel Cinematic Universe in every line of thunderous God-baiting iambic pentameter. And now Roger Avary, co-writer of Pulp Fiction and director of Killing Zoe and The Rules of Attraction, they want to bring it to the big screen using the power of AI.
It is a strange time, perhaps a time of political satire, to announce that you are about to submit the most difficult story ever written (about the fall of Satan from heaven and the original sin of mankind) to this technology.
Far from the discussion about life and the small matter of writing, there remains the question of whether this new technology can produce anything but ersatz many types of art, which is called “AI slop”. Three years ago, Avengers director Joe Russo predicted that in the near future we will be watching films made entirely through artificial intelligence And yet, until now even the most impressive – and not so impressive – examples of AI filmmaking have relied on real people to capture the images used and the associated editing.
Maybe the day will come when we can go into our front room and turn on a famous AI Netflix movie, with a realistic version of you or me and solve problems that we have never had, where every line is reached, all arcs are determined and nothing surprises anyone. But we are not there yet. Maybe Avary will be able to use AI angels in architecture to provide the kind of space experience that previously required armies of real people, at a fraction of the cost. Maybe they will make it look like cinema.
However, this is something. Paradise Lost is too vast, too mysterious and too transcendent to be divided, even in part, to be constructed simply by finding possible outcomes for each question. No matter how gifted the promoter is, it’s hard to imagine Midjourney or Runway surprising us with anything more than a polished and polished form of deja vu. It is also a little surprising that if someone asked satan what he thinks about this change of events, the Prince of Darkness would probably feel better saying that the universe is being removed, the human writers are being quietly abolished and the dark imitative liturgy has begun to sing itself. But this does not mean that the result will have anything like life.
