Neill Blomkamp, a director who rose to fame for his 2009 science fiction film District 9He has been a marginal figure in Hollywood, television and video games for the past 15 years (despite the success of this film). Mostly because his films are bad despite their fantastic art direction.
There are things to like! I enjoyed it District 9and if you just cut off the last 30 minutes Elysium I thought it was fun too, but mostly for the same reasons I regularly host an art feature: I can take a lot of shit when there are interesting combat exoskeletons and weird shrimp aliens to look at, and I can admire and appreciate those things while still realizing that the movies they were a part of sucked.
Anyway, Blomkamp is terrible at telling stories because he doesn’t want tell stories. He’s not here to make you feel anything. Neill Blomkamp knows what a cool mech or space gun looks like, and putting them in his films is the only thing he’s ever been able to do. That’s why most of his major feature films – all of which used the same jumbled-together, slightly dystopian visual signatures – have had their fans but also had diminishing returns. And these diminishing returns may be why the last major film he directed…Big tourism.
Considering he’s a guy who, like George Lucas, seems more obsessed with cinematic engineering than filmmaking, and also worked on one of the biggest scams in video games, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Blomkamp has also become very interested in AI.
This AI Ass screenshot from this AI Ass short film looks like an HD upscale of an FMV cutscene from a 1999 CD-ROM adventure
His new short film, Nightbornwas created using AI. It doesn’t expand on the actual footage or provide background effects work. the wholefrom the soulless actors to the soulless action sequences, was spat out by a machine. The fine print of the YouTube description tries to mitigate this by saying that the faces and voices present were used “under likeness agreements” and that somehow “conceptual art by human artists” appears, but it brags right at the start that “every frame was generated in Seedance 2.0,” so fuck that.
It’s terrible in a way that I don’t need or want to describe to you. Just knowing that Neill Blomkamp spent an afternoon typing prompts into a computer will bring to mind a sequence of images that is very close to what it actually looks like, and that’s close enough to save you the 13 minutes it would take you to look at it.
As bad as it is and as inevitable as it is, it’s still a huge disappointment because although I never really enjoyed a Neill Blomkamp filmI was a big fan of the art that went into them. Every combat arm, flying car, or talking robot that has gone in District 9, Elysium (which I did a whole presentation about at Kotaku, the images of which were unfortunately deleted) or Chappy was designed, modeled, animated, painted and shot by real people, and it was work that I truly respected. It’s a shame that the guy responsible for these films doesn’t have the same respect.
https://aftermath.site/neill-blomkamp-ai-movie/
