Neill Blomkamp’s new zombie AI movie just got a little heated

On Monday, Section 9 and Grand Tourism Director Neill Blomkamp has revealed his latest project: a 13-minute sci-fi film titled At night This is from Peter Watts’ 2014 book Echopraxia. The short comes from Blomkamp’s new AI company, Barley Studios, and features characters whose voices and faces are modeled after the actors. But each of them At nightImages were created by ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0-to-video generator.

In and X post for shortsBlomkamp described it as an “experimental beginning” that is meant to show what reproductive AI is capable of, and said that he wants to “deal with all aspects of this type” at some point in the future. Blomkamp seems to think so At night It is a powerful testimony that will make people interested in seeing what they are promoting. But as polished as “film” can be compared to many of the AI-generated videos floating around the internet today, it still has many of the hallmarks we associate with slop. And although a group of real people were involved in the project, At night it’s such a bad watch that one can hardly call it the future of filmmaking.

Fighting the military conflict between the US and Syria, At night tells the story of an American pilot who was seriously injured when his helicopter was shot down. Although the whole body of the pilot was seriously injured, he is still alive and his head is normal. These qualities make him a perfect fit for Project Nightborne – a government program that turns brain-dead soldiers into remote-controlled, weaponized zombies. And because the military has a lot of weapons, the pilot is one of the people who are trained to fight in secret.

Like every other AI-generated movie that came before, At night It is actually a series of very short video clips that have been edited together to tell a simple story. At night he often cuts from shots of his titular main character to interviews with people involved in Project Nightborne. These cuts give the film – which was edited by Austyn Daines – a way to argue against the fact that Seedance 2.0 can produce several seconds of video at a time. And how the dialogue of the film is mixed approximately (but not really) it makes it seem like you’re listening to real people talking.

If you look closely At night‘s visuals and listening closely to its audio, it’s easy to tell how much gen AI is in the mix. The characters in the background are often written without meaning, and the characters deliver their lines with strange emphasis that makes them look like people who don’t really know what they’re talking about. According to Blomkamp, ​​”real artists” contributed to the project, and 32 actors agreed to have their likenesses used on screen. But human input doesn’t seem like it’s close enough to save At night from feeling more machine-made than art.

After all, it’s from the same director who dreamed it up I live in Joburg – exercise using VFX to explore the concept of apartheid during the apartheid era – nothing surprising At night. Blomkamp’s creative voice seems non-existent as this short story unfolds, and if Seedance 2.0 wasn’t part of the equation, people probably wouldn’t be talking about it.

Although Seedance 2.0 can produce videos of affected individuals, At night it shows how the model still doesn’t understand the detailed realities that make human behavior feel alive and alive. Everything interesting that you can see in this overview is just a picture of the videos that Seedance 2.0 was taught, not what it can boast of.

Except for zombies, At night it doesn’t really match the source material. But it is similar to Jia Zhangke Jia Zhangke’s dance AI short film by Ruairí Robinson featuring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt fighting – all created by Seedance 2.0. Each of these projects has shown that traditional filmmakers tend to know how to push the boundaries of gen AI technology, but their creativity can do more to overcome the technical limitations of the technology.

While text-to-video models may be very advanced, they are not advanced enough to produce finished works that audiences are excited to see. At nightannouncement was almost immediately he encountered a back wave from people who saw the film as a sign of Blomkamp’s purge. And while Blomkamp probably thought so At night would do well for himself, it seems like he’s lost in the same unfortunate situation that Darren Aronofsky did. his evil AI series about Judgment War.

A very interesting thing At night and how his story can be interpreted as a commentary on the technology that was used to create it. Project Nightborne is about people who are responsible for repurchasing the bodies of dead people without their consent in order to find cheap people. Generative AI is not like (at the same time or apparently) as destructive as the zombie-killing army, but those pushing for the technology are driven by the same desire that inspires it. At nightthe villains.