No one has been more patient than me with director Neill Blomkamp. I not only love District 9. I love my uncleand I will defend it to the end (Admit you haven’t seen it, and only know the famous tweet). I thought Elysium It was a flawed success. I showed kindness towards Grand Tourism for, um, not seeing it. That way I can pretend forever that I could be good.
But this? This is unforgivable:
Blomkamp generated this… whatever it is, and posted a link on X on July 19. He calls it his first “full AI test movie” and says it was made with Seedance 2.0. He also says he’d like to “tackle a full feature in this format,” apparently through a new company called Barley Studios.
In the clip, a member of the US military is left in a coma after his helicopter is shot down and becomes a zombie soldier through some sort of covert operation called Project Nightborne.
For better or worse, sometimes people figure out how to do Dazzling and shocking AI video. I’m not sure there’s any redeeming artistic value in any of this yet, but I remain open to the possibility.
But Blomkamp’s clip is hardly worth analyzing. The only thing that sets it apart creatively from other generic AI videos online is that it is long. But Blomkamp apparently missed so much in the fact that his results seemed more or less At first glance, they look like real footage from an 8K film camera, and performing the basic beats of the narrative, that you got to the end and didn’t realize, or care, how antiseptic it all feels.
The viewer feels absolutely nothing watching this, other than occasional annoyance by the typically relentless, tat-qualified dialogue delivery. It’s a reminder that the quality of the “acting” in these clips It hasn’t moved forward in almost a year..
It’s an absolute disgrace on every level.
