Darren Aronofsky, who directed The Whale and Mother!, teamed up with Google DeepMind and production house Primordial Soup to produce a series of shorts that dramatize the founding of the United States. It feels like a test of whether the guiding hand of one of Hollywood’s biggest auteurs can bend an ugly and fiddly plagiarism machine to his own creative ends and produce something that doesn’t make you want to hurl. I don’t think it will be controversial to say it fails spectacularly.
On This Day… 1776 is an episodic series of YouTube videos that each focuses on a different point leading up to the American revolution. The fact-based vignettes are made with SAG voice actors and AI visuals, including a “combination of traditional filmmaking tools and emerging AI capabilities.” The stated goal is “reframing the Revolution not as a foregone conclusion but as a fragile experiment shaped by those who fought for it.”
Each new episode will drop on the 250th anniversary of the actual events depicted in it. The first one is dated January 1 and has George Washington raising a Continental Union Flag in Somerville, Massachusetts. The second is dated January 10 and has Benjamin Franklin urging Thomas Paine to write what would become his Common Sense pamphlet. There’s also a trailer previewing the series if you want to get the gist without having to imbibe the full eight minutes of horror.
What Aronofsky and company have achieved with their AI tools is a series of brief human interactions and heavily edited transitions which convey a linear narrative without any major glitches. On This Day… 1776 establishes the vibe of a History Channel promo and gestures at the quality of an educational reenactment series a middle school teacher might pull out when they’ve given up, but little else. And all the familiar artifacts of slop are still present and accounted for.
People’s faces look like they’re melting even when they’re not moving. Background scenery often includes the kinds of nonsensical details (why so many buttons?) you only get from genAI hallucinations. And the voices don’t even match up with the lips most of the time. But most of the slop sensibility emanates from more subtle places. The voices don’t modulate in ways that feel lively or engaging. The camera pans and zooms like its being controlled by a drunken sloth. And the edits are are still so manic it feels like the entire visual experience is anxiously trying to get to the end before it all visually implodes.
“No one can look at this and think it’s better than putting two real actors in chairs,” wrote one person on Bluesky. “This is the most unnatural thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” wrote someone on YouTube. “It would be more watchable if the cast were amusement park animatronics.” Another commenter went full Doomer Mode: “AI slop about the forming of the country that is about to crumble….how fitting.” Happy birthday America, sorry your party is so lame.