Neill Blomkamp’s new zombie AI ‘film’ is just slop warmed over
On Monday, District 9 and Gran Turismo director Neill Blomkamp unveiled his latest project: a 13-minute sci-fi short titled Nightborne that's loosely based on Peter Watts' 2014 novel Echopraxia. The short 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 single one of Nightborne's shots was made with ByteDance's Seedance 2.0 text-to-video generator. In an X post abo
Director Neill Blomkamp released a 13-minute science fiction short called Nightborne created entirely using a text-to-video AI generator, which he framed as a demonstration of generative AI capabilities. The short, produced by Blomkamp's new AI production company, was created by having AI generate every shot, though human concept artists, editors, and actors contributed to the project. The film's story follows an American pilot who becomes part of a military program that turns injured soldiers into remote-controlled weaponized zombies. According to the reviewer, despite skilled editing and human involvement, the final product exhibits common flaws of AI-generated content including gibberish text in backgrounds and actors delivering lines with unnatural emphasis, leading to widespread backlash and criticism that the project demonstrated limitations rather than promising potential for AI filmmaking.
Explainer: Video AI Is Splitting in Two: The Seedance vs. Kling Control Divide
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