Neill Blomkamp, the director of District 9, Elysium, and Gran Turismo, has just released a new short film. And for reasons which completely baffle me, he has chosen to make this film entirely with generative AI.
NIGHTBORNE is the first full test AI film I have made. It was made using Seedance 2.0.
I've been experimenting with AI for a couple of years, and it's now at the point where I want to tackle a full feature in this format. This is a 13-minute test start.
It was made with real… pic.twitter.com/mtnGt12qfP
— Neill Blomkamp (@NeillBlomkamp) July 20, 2026
The film is 13 minutes long, and allegedly used “real concept artists” and the “faces and voices of 32 real people.” It is not related in any way to District 9, despite the fact that all anyone wishes this guy would do is make a District 10. I have begrudgingly watched the entirety of the film and am here to explain to you what it contains, so that you don’t have to bother. You can if you want, but I promise there is absolutely no reason to watch Nightborne by Neill Blomkamp. It is a waste of your time, both because it is creatively bankrupt due to being generated by robots, and also because it is boring.
I’m not kidding. By not watching this, you are not missing any excellent jokes, fantastic acting performances, dramatic plot reveals, or critical cultural moments. In fact, you have certainly seen a version of this film somewhere before. Its plot feels AI-generated, like someone had the most rough, broad idea of what the most average sci-fi/military-themed mystery might look like, and never had any creative or interesting ideas afterward.
The story is framed in a rough documentary style for reasons I cannot figure out. There’s a woman on a U.S. military operation of some sort in Syria; her helicopter goes down but she seems likely to survive, until a bunch of people in hospital gowns put an implant in her head that turns her into a killer zombie. They then force her to fight other killer zombies in order to test and train them to be used in war. We’re supposed to feel emotions about this because the woman still has some latent memories of her husband and child, and her husband is furiously screaming at army officers demanding to know what happened to her. I am sure if allowed to go on, it would pretend to grapple with questions of whether or not she is still human. As it is, Nightborne manages to say nothing of interest or value whatsoever about humanity, and I severely doubt it would get there if given more time.
I’m mocking the plot here, which is allegedly inspired by a book called Echopraxia by Peter Watts. I would like to apologize if I have inadvertently insulted his book without having read it. Maybe that book is good, I have no idea. But reading a synopsis of Echopraxia, I cannot for the life of me figure out what this short film has to do with the book, so I feel comfortable saying that either Blomkamp’s idea was lame, or the AI he used lame-ified it, or both.
The AI-generated actors are similarly unremarkable except for how unremarkable they, and the script they are following, are. Lines are delivered flatly, missing the expressiveness you’d expect from, you know, real humans talking. Sometimes their expressions barely shift. There’s an incredible moment after the helicopter crash where you can hear someone in the background yell, “Aw, man, this co-pilot is dead!” with all the energy of someone who just spilled a bunch of fruit juice on the rug. Another standout line follows shortly after, as they evacuate the woman with a blood stain on her face that has changed locations about three or four times already:
“Hey, what’s wrong?”
“She’s my buddy’s wife.”
“Oh shit! Well, I think she’s gonna make it so that’s good.”
There are exceptions to this flatness in a few key moments that are very aggressively trying to make the audience feel something, such as when the husband yells at the military men. This scene goes from 0 to 11 very quickly for no reason. It’s also entirely pointless, because we never see the husband again except in a flashback.
The music, too, is occasionally goofy. Ominous organ music plays at multiple spots, maybe because the AI or whoever thinks organs are synonymous with zombies even if those zombies are weird army-designed cyborgs. I don’t believe for a second that this is some high-minded artistic choice. If it is, it fails to land.
It’s hard to tell how much of the above is because the film is AI and how much is just because it was a bad idea, but there is one element that’s definitely AI, and that’s the visual inconsistencies. If you kind of squint a bit, this looks like a perfectly normal movie. But as with most AI-created things, looking remotely closely at anything in the background or any detail for longer than a second or two reveals all sorts of weirdness. Cars driving in inconsistent, weird patterns. Funky-looking windows. Blood splotches moving around or disappearing entirely…you get it. There’s a version of this article where I walk you through as many visual or audio blips as I can possibly find within this 13-minute “film,” but we’d be here all day if I tried that. Herea re some pens in a pocket that make no sense, just to provide a single example among many:
Again, it’s all close enough that if you just shut your brain off and mindlessly consume this, it’s probably good enough to register as a regular short film. But it’s just so utterly nothing. I don’t find it an impressive display of what generative AI can do. It’s one thing if a director or producer makes a deeply mediocre, or even bad, film using real people and real sets and real cameras. At least then you can say that a person had an artistic vision and attempted to execute on it with the talents of other people, even if that vision was lame. But what’s the point of using an environment-destroying plagiarism machine to make boring movies? Why even bother?
You could argue that AI will get better, and eventually be able to produce make movies that are totally indistinguishable from actually directed, written, and filmed ones. Maybe even movies that some will argue are interesting or funny or even good! But even if we somehow make it to that point, I am of the opinion that we ought to be throwing the entire notion of AI-generated art like this into the trash. It’s lazy, it’s harmful, and it’s literally inhuman. I have a finite amount of time on this green earth. During that time, I want to watch and listen to all kinds of stories made by people: good, bad, exciting, and yes, boring. I’m already wishing I had spent my time doing literally anything other than watching the zombified corpse of a story that is Blomkamp’s Nightborne. Don’t trouble yourself; you’re not missing anything real.
