Neill Blomkamp’s new AI zombie movie is getting quite warm

on monday, Zone 9 and Big tourism Director Neill Blomkamp has revealed his latest project: a 13-minute sci-fi short film titled Nightburn This is loosely based on Peter Watts’ 2014 novel Echopraxia. The short film comes from Blomkamp’s new AI startup/production company Barley Studios, and features characters whose voices and faces are modeled after human actors. But every one of NightburnThe footage was captured using ByteDance Seedance 2.0 text to video generator.

in Share X about shortBlomkamp described it as a “test debut” intended to show what generative AI can do, and said he wanted to “address a full feature in this format” at some point in the future. Blomkamp seems to think so Nightburn It’s a solid proof of concept that might make people curious to know what it claims next. But while this “movie” is polished compared to most AI-generated videos spreading online today, it still bears many of the hallmarks we associate with failure. Although a team of real people was involved in the production of the project, Nightburn It’s such a terrible watch that one would hardly call it the future of filmmaking.

Against the backdrop of the military conflict between the United States and Syria, Nightburn It tells the story of an American pilot who was seriously injured when her helicopter was shot down. Although most of the pilot’s body was badly injured, she was still technically alive with her head intact. These things make her the perfect candidate for Project Nightborne – a government program that turns brain-dead soldiers into armed, remote-controlled zombies. Because the army has an endless supply of corpses at its disposal, the pilot is one of many uniformed ghouls being secretly trained for war.

Like all the other AI-generated films before it, Nightburn It’s actually a collection of very short video clips edited together to tell a simple story. Nightburn Footage of his zombie main character frequently cuts to documentary interviews with people involved in Project Nightborne. These cuts give the film — edited by Austin Daines — a way to obscure the fact that Seedance 2.0 is only capable of producing a few seconds of video footage at a time. The film’s dialogue style is mixed barely (But not quite) It makes it sound like you’re listening to real people talking.

When we take a really close look NightburnVisuals and listening closely to the audio, it’s easy to recognize how much AI is in the mix. The tags in the background are often written quite cryptically, and the characters deliver their lines with unusual emphases that make them sound like people who don’t really know what they’re saying. According to Blomkamp, ​​”real concept artists” contributed work to the project, and 32 human actors agreed to have their images used on screen. But this human input doesn’t seem close enough to hold Nightburn It feels more like machine-made content than a piece of art.

Regardless that it’s coming from the same director who dreamed it up Alive in Joburg – An imaginative exercise in the use of visual effects Exploring ideas about intolerance in the apartheid era -There’s nothing special about it Nightburn. Blomkamp’s creative voice seems almost non-existent as the 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 people clearly expressing their emotions, Nightburn It highlights how the model still doesn’t have any kind of real understanding of the subtleties that make a human performance feel truly organic and alive. Whatever emotional nuances you might see in the short film, it’s really just a reflection of the videos Seedance 2.0 was trained on, and not exactly something to take credit for.

Aside from zombies, Nightburn It has little in common with its source. But it is very similar to Jia Zhangke’s case Jia Zhangke dance A short, viral video produced by Ruairí Robinson depicts Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt fighting — Both were created using Seedance 2.0. Each of these projects has shown that traditional filmmakers tend to know how to play down the technical limitations of the AI ​​generation, but their skills can only do so much to make up for the technology’s innate weaknesses.

Although text-to-video models may become more sophisticated, they haven’t advanced enough to produce finished works that audiences will be excited to see. NightburnIt was an announcement It was almost immediately met with a wave of backlash From people who saw the film as a sign of Blomkamp’s washing. While Blomkamp thought so Nightburn would generate some positive buzz for itself, and seems to be wandering into an unfortunate situation similar to the one created by Darren Aronofsky His awesome series for Amnesty International about the Revolutionary War.

The most interesting thing about Nightburn is the way in which her story can be interpreted as a commentary on the technology that was used to make it. Project Nightborne is about individuals in positions of power who reuse dead bodies without their consent in order to generate labor on the cheap. Generative AI is not (Immediately or clearly) are as destructive as deadly zombie soldiers, but those who are driven to use technology are driven by a desire similar to that which motivates them. NightburnThe bad guys.