There’s no doubt that genAI movies are improving in their fidelity. With each new stunt pulled, the tech edges ever further through the uncanny valley, becoming more easily able to trick the eye at first glance. And that shit sucks, even if it’s still nowhere near being able to successfully replicate anything beyond a rapidly cutting trailer. However, Ash Koosha, the AI-brained creator behind last year’s Tribeca Film Festival entrant Dreams of Violets, hasn’t let that stop him from co-creating a 135-minute Odyssey knock-off that he’s planning to sell directly to viewers later this year.
Dreams of Violets was, by the few accounts coming out of Tribeca, not a good film. It was, however, rather clever in the way it got around the enormous limitations of genAI-created video and the software’s lack of object permanence. As demonstrated in January’s farcical “live-action” Zelda movie trailer created by techbro P.J. Ace, genAI currently cannot remember…well, it cannot remember at all, and as such it doesn’t “know” what faces it created in any previous scene. As such, the token requirements to create anything even close to object permanence becomes so spectacularly expensive that right now, at least, it’s not really feasible. Hence production company Fountain 0’s Dreams of Violets, a film ostensibly about the suffering of people under the regime in Iran, was created as a series of vignettes, dream-like drifts between different characters and moments, presumably in order to evade this massive limitation. And that was only 74 minutes long.
As The Hollywood Reporter reveals, Koosha now returns with Odysseus: The Fall, an epic 135-minute movie, seemingly as some sort of attempt to piggyback off the buzz around Nolan’s forthcoming The Odyssey. This film, its creator is quick to announce, only cost him a mid-five-figure sum, rather than the $250 million said to have been spent by Nolan. Oooooh, we’re required to say, $50,000 instead of $250 million! Hollywood is doomed! 5,000 times cheaper sure seems like a lot. Then you watch the trailer:
I’m not here to pretend that this isn’t, on some level, incredibly impressive-looking. But it’s incredibly impressive-looking for something made by AI. Just take a second glance and you notice how Odysseus doesn’t look the same from moment to moment. There are some truly sloppy moments, like when characters are running, or moments where two characters attempt to interact. Plus those rock-throwing dudes are the worst, and dramatically change shape and color between cuts. It doesn’t bode well for the full-length film, though to find out what that’s like when it eventually releases later this summer, it seems you’re going to need to fork out $9.99 via the Fountain 0 website, and that’s just to rent it.
As usual, and as is almost always the case with any genAI project, this is far less about the product than the tech making it. Odysseus: The Fall doesn’t exist out of an auteur’s passionate drive to tell a story, but rather as a tech demo for software that Fountain 0 is hoping to sell to others. And I cannot put this better than Dylan Beattie who, speaking at a recent conference, pointed out the following regarding AI creators: “The people who are going all-in on it are still selling AI. Let’s imagine you had built a machine that can build houses…you push a button and instead of taking six weeks to put a house up you put it up in six hours. If you had that machine, would you be going around trying to get people to invest in your machine, or would you just be building a shitload of houses and selling them?”
That’s the rub.