Neill Blomkamp and ByteDance: An AI Short Film That Disappoints

Neill Blomkamp and ByteDance: An AI Short Film That Disappoints

Charles Pulliam-Moore is a journalist specializing in film, television, and pop culture. Before joining The Verge, he wrote about comics, labor, race, and more on io9 and Gizmodo for nearly five years.

On Monday, the director of District 9 and Gran Turismo, Neill Blomkamp, unveiled his latest project: a 13-minute science fiction short film titled Nightborne, which is loosely based on the novel Echopraxia by Peter Watts published in 2014. This short film comes from Blomkamp's new AI startup, Barley Studios, and features characters whose voices and faces are modeled after human actors. However, every shot of Nightborne was created using ByteDance's text-to-video generator Seedance 2.0.

In a post on X regarding the short film, Blomkamp described it as a “starting test” intended to demonstrate what generative AI is capable of, and he expressed his desire to “make a full-length feature in this format” in the future. Blomkamp seems to believe that Nightborne is a solid proof of concept that could spark public interest in his future creations. Yet, while the “film” is more polished than most AI-generated videos circulating on the internet today, it still exhibits many traits we associate with subpar productions. Even with a team of real people involved in its production, Nightborne is so difficult to watch that it’s hard to consider it the future of cinema.

Synopsis of Nightborne

Set against the backdrop of a military conflict between the United States and Syria, Nightborne tells the story of an American pilot who suffers fatal injuries when her helicopter is shot down. Although most of her body is severely injured, she is still technically alive, and her head remains intact. These elements make her the ideal candidate for the Nightborne Project — a government program that transforms brain-dead soldiers into armed, remotely controlled zombies. And since the army has an unlimited supply of bodies, the pilot is one of many uniformed ghouls secretly trained for war.

Like almost every other AI-generated film that has come before it, Nightborne is essentially a collection of very short video clips stitched together to tell a simple story. The short film frequently shifts from shots of its zombified main character to documentary-style interviews with people involved in the Nightborne Project. These transitions give the film — edited by Austyn Daines — a way to obscure the fact that Seedance 2.0 can only generate a few seconds of video footage at a time. The way the film's dialogue is mixed almost (but not quite) gives the impression that you are listening to real people speak.

A Missing Creative Voice

When closely examining the visuals of Nightborne and listening attentively to its audio, it’s easy to perceive how present generative AI is. The background panels are often written in complete gibberish, 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 to the project, and 32 human actors agreed to have their likenesses used on screen. However, this human contribution doesn’t seem sufficient to prevent Nightborne from feeling more like machine-generated content than a work of art.

Aside from coming from the same director who conceived Alive in Joburg — an imaginative exercise using visual effects to explore ideas about apartheid racism — there is nothing remarkable about Nightborne. Blomkamp's creative voice seems almost nonexistent as the short film's story unfolds, and if Seedance 2.0 weren’t involved, it’s likely that people wouldn’t be talking about it.

While Seedance 2.0 can clearly produce videos of people expressing emotions, Nightborne highlights how the model still lacks a true understanding of the nuanced details that make human performances organic and truly alive. Any emotional nuance that might be seen in the short film is actually a reflection of the videos on which Seedance 2.0 was trained, rather than something it can claim credit for.

Apart from the zombies, Nightborne has little in common with its source material. But it bears a strong resemblance to the short film Dance by Jia Zhangke and the viral video by Ruairí Robinson featuring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt fighting — both created with Seedance 2.0. Each of these projects has demonstrated that traditional filmmakers generally know how to minimize the technical limitations of generative AI, but their skills can only do so much to compensate for the inherent weaknesses of the technology.

Although text-to-video models are becoming increasingly sophisticated, they have not yet progressed to the point of producing finished works that excite audiences. The announcement of Nightborne was almost immediately met with a wave of criticism from those who saw the film as a sign that Blomkamp was losing his touch. And while Blomkamp may have thought that Nightborne would generate some positive buzz for himself, it seems rather that he has stumbled into an unfortunate situation similar to that created by Darren Aronofsky with his terrible AI series on revolutionary war.

A Reflection on Technology

The most interesting thing about Nightborne is how its story can be interpreted as a commentary on the technology used to create it. The Nightborne Project concerns individuals in positions of power who repurpose the bodies of deceased individuals without their consent to generate low-cost labor. Generative AI is not as (immediately or obviously) destructive as killer zombie soldiers, but those pushing for the use of this technology are motivated by a desire similar to that which drives the villains of Nightborne.