Sunspring

How can anyone give this more than the forced minimum of one star? It's just actors reading lines that seem to have no connection to each other, and sometimes the individual pieces of dialogue don't even make any sense. Kind of like trying their best to "emote" while reading a phone book. As if the AI just took random bits of text from other works and scrambled some of the words around. It would have been better to have taken whatever little money was spent on this project, and donated it to a worthy charity, like the Home For Unemployed Screenwriters. Have I typed enough words yet? Okay.. it was really, really, really bad!

If you have heard of this short film then you almost certainly have done so due to the "written by artificial intelligence" element, which is not only an interesting idea, but of course is a good headline to get your film some attention (certainly this is what worked for me). It raises the question about whether or not a computer algorithm can write a sci-fi script if you feed it lots of other ones to work from. The obvious answer provided by the resulting script is "no; no it can't". However the much more interesting thing that the film shows about technology in filmmaking is that when it is only a tool in the hands of talented people then it can work.

Sunspring shows us this by taking a script which plays like a nonsense poem, and turns it into a surprisingly dramatic and amusing sci-fi love-triangle with dark secrets in a futuristic world. The team find the meaning in the words wherever they can; where they can't they turn to the camera and the cast to give it some sort of context to help it work. In short it is the delivery of the film, not the origins of it, that makes it work. The presence of Middlemarch got the headlines due to his role in Silicon Valley, but the other two actors are just as good – in particular Gray gives the final dialogue scene a lot more heart than it has on paper. There is humor in here, tension, pain, heart – and almost none of this comes from the computer generated script.

That is maybe a little harsh, because one should give some credit to Benjamin (the algorithm essentially) for its phrasing. At times the lines are garbage (lots of 'I don't know' in there) but here and there you get some wonderful lines which are either joyful in their randomness (I have to go to the skull), or have an unexpected poetry to them (he looks at me, and he throws me out of his eyes).

None of this yet mentions that this film was also one of the 48-hour challenges; a nice idea which usually produces films which are not so much good films as they are just achievements in working against a clock. For sure Sunspring is a very well-produced film even without this context; and it is encouraging to see that a film playing with technology succeeds in confirming that it is the creative and talented people that make the film work, not the technology they used to make it.

Wow, what an amazing pilot! The full series it is going to be simply awesome! It whispers addictive binge viewing from the very first few seconds (but I don't want to give too much away). Literally can't wait for the box set to be released! Only an early prediction here, but Sunspring could end up in the highest echelons of TV among greats like Breaking Bad, GoT, Mad Men and all that. The dialogue is scintillating and brought to life by a stellar cast mixing established stars with some new faces. I have always been a fan of Thomas Middlesitch for his portrayal of comic nerd or something in Silicon Valley which I have not seen.

It's a great idea. Get some computer program to write a screenplay.

The result? Weird, dull rubbish. It's hard to argue against because, technically, no one wrote it. Just a few weeks ago, some complete moron paid over $432k for an AI generated painting. If that's not a searing indictment against rich d#%kheads, I don't know what is.

This is kind of the same. It's got a certain novelty value, in that a computer was "trained" and then wrote this (it indicates that the "training" is pretty basic). It doesn't make any sense grammatically or narratively. Some reviews have described it as "hilarious and intense", which gives you an indication of the average level of intelligence out there. But we live in a work where the Kardashians are famous and popular, so it really should be no suprise.

It's worth watching because it's potentially the first of its kind. It's not worth a score of 5.7 (at time of writing).

As we start to get closer to algorithmic technology in our lives, we have to figure out how it's going to take place in the creative field. We might think of technology and robots as a separate entity but in the end they are based from us. We have finally began to teach technology to be creative and this short is the equivalent of a child's first semi- coherent drawing. It has it's dialogue flaws, of course, sometimes things don't make sense or feel a bit wonky but it doesn't really matter, those flaws actually have a certain degree of charm to them. This might be the beginning of a new short lived genre I would like to call "algorithmic surrealism cinema"; something similar to the short Italian white telephone cinema movement that emerged after WWII. I believe this will be one of the most influential pieces of cinema in the years to come. It's the start of a new renaissance.