Blomkamp’s AI zombie “film” recycles tired slop

On Monday, District 9 and Gran Turismo director Neill Blomkamp unveiled his latest project: a 13-minute sci-fi short titled Nightborne, loosely based on Peter Watts’ 2014 novel Echopraxia. The short emerges from Blomkamp’s new AI startup and production company, Barley Studios. Its characters feature voices and faces modeled after human actors, but every single shot was generated using ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 text-to-video generator.

In an X post about the project, Blomkamp called it a “test start” intended to showcase what generative AI can achieve. He also expressed interest in tackling a full feature in this format someday. Blomkamp seems to believe Nightborne serves as a strong proof of concept that could spark curiosity about his next AI-driven endeavor. Yet for all its polish relative to most AI-generated videos online, the short still carries many of the hallmarks we associate with slop. And while a team of real people contributed to its production, Nightborne is such a poor viewing experience that calling it the future of filmmaking would be a stretch.

Set amid a military conflict between the US and Syria, Nightborne follows an American pilot whose helicopter is shot down, leaving her with life-threatening injuries. Though most of her body is wrecked, she remains technically alive with her head intact. That makes her the perfect candidate for Project Nightborne, a government program that turns brain-dead soldiers into remote-controlled, weaponized zombies. Since the military has an endless supply of bodies, the pilot becomes one of many uniformed ghouls secretly trained for war.

Like nearly every AI-generated film before it, Nightborne is essentially a collection of very short video clips stitched together to tell a simple story. It frequently cuts from shots of its zombified protagonist to documentary-style interviews with people involved in Project Nightborne. These cuts, edited by Austyn Daines, help obscure the fact that Seedance 2.0 can only generate a few seconds of footage at a time. The film’s dialogue mixing almost, but not quite, makes it sound like real people are speaking.

Blomkamp’s creative voice feels almost nonexistent throughout Nightborne. When you really examine the visuals and listen closely to the audio, it’s easy to detect how much generative AI is in the mix. Background signs often display complete gibberish, and characters deliver lines with odd emphases, making them seem like they don’t actually understand 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. But that human input doesn’t seem nearly enough to keep Nightborne from feeling more like machine-made content than a piece of art.

Aside from coming from the same director who created Alive in Joburg, an imaginative VFX exploration of apartheid-era bigotry, there’s nothing remarkable about Nightborne. If Seedance 2.0 weren’t part of the equation, people probably wouldn’t be talking about it at all.

Though Seedance 2.0 can clearly churn out videos of people emoting, Nightborne highlights how the model still lacks any real understanding of the minute details that make human performances feel organic and truly alive. Whatever emotive nuance you see in the short is merely a reflection of the videos Seedance 2.0 was trained on, not something it can take credit for.

Aside from zombies, Nightborne shares little with its source material. But it closely resembles Jia Zhangke’s Dance short and Ruairí Robinson’s viral AI video of Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt fighting, both created with Seedance 2.0. Each of these projects demonstrates that traditional filmmakers know how to downplay gen AI’s technical limitations, but their skills can only do so much to offset the technology’s innate weaknesses.

Text-to-video models may be getting more sophisticated, but they haven’t advanced enough to produce finished works that audiences are excited to see. Nightborne’s announcement was almost immediately met with backlash from people who saw it as a sign of Blomkamp being washed. And while Blomkamp may have thought the short would generate positive buzz, it seems much more like he’s wandered into a situation similar to the one Darren Aronofsky created with his terrible AI series about the Revolutionary War.

The most interesting thing about Nightborne is how its story can be interpreted as commentary on the technology used to make it. Project Nightborne is about people in power repurposing dead bodies without consent to generate cheap labor. Generative AI isn’t as immediately or obviously destructive as killer zombie soldiers, but those pushing for its use are driven by a desire similar to the one motivating Nightborne’s villains.