Darren Aronofsky has always been a divisive filmmaker. But the director of hits like “Black Swan,” “The Wrestler,” and “Requiem for a Dream” has now almost certainly blown up his credibility even with his die-hard fans, after cranking out an almost completely AI-generated historical video series.
Called “On This Day … 1776,” the show, which consists of several-minute “episodes,” is meant to cover notable events that took place in the American Revolutionary War, but has instead mostly drawn attention to how awful its AI visuals look, on top of its persistent anachronisms. Colonists living in houses with modern vinyl siding? Sure, why not.
The reviews, predictably, are brutal. In one titled “Requiem for a film-maker,” The Guardian’s Stuart Heritage blasted its faux-photorealism aesthetic as “ugly as sin,” and called out its overreliance on center-framed, back-of-the-head shots. “This is, after all, because the back of an AI-generated head is far less likely to send people into screaming fits of trauma than an AI-generated face,” Heritage wrote.
“‘On This Day … 1776’ is genuinely very horrible to watch,” he concluded, “and everybody involved should be ashamed. It is by far the most disturbing thing Aronofsky has made, and I’ve seen the last eight minutes of ‘Requiem for a Dream.’”
It’s hard not to agree. The entire show operates in the mode of meaningless montage, because stitching together a collection of barely-related, aesthetically generic shots is the only mode of “filmmaking” that AI is suited for. The effect is like watching an extended advert. But whereas a commercial usually has the good manners to wrap up in less than a minute, Aronofsky’s monstrosity slogs on with its cavalcade of quick-cutting but slowly-moving close-ups, as if to demonstrate to maximum effect how utterly inane this all looks.
Big names are attached to the series. The show is a collaboration between Aronofsky’s AI studio Primordial Soup, Google’s DeepMind lab, Salesforce, and TIME Studios. This isn’t being sold to us as the work of Aronofsky sitting in his bedroom somewhere and typing in AI prompts. This is supposed to be the high watermark of what AI can bring to the table.
“But keep watching for more than a few seconds, and it quickly becomes apparent that slop is slop, no matter how it’s gussied up,” wrote Angie Han for The Hollywood Reporter. “‘On This Day’ positions itself as a well-funded, high-profile, apparently good-faith effort to demonstrate how AI might be deployed as a tool to enhance rather than replace human artistry. Instead, it only goes to show that the problem with AI in filmmaking runs deeper than its technical limitations.”
“How depressing is it” it continues, “that with the guidance of a visionary filmmaker like Aronofsky, with the lavish financial backing of companies like Google and Salesforce, this thing — a pair of shoddy, TikTok-length clips that would barely pass muster as animated illustrations for a high-school history lesson, let alone coherent pieces of storytelling in their own right — was the best anyone could make of the supposedly boundless limitations of AI?”
Aronofsky, by the way, was at one point slated to direct a biopic about Elon Musk. Now, it seems like he’s drunk the same AI Kool-Aid that Musk has been pounding.
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