In celebration of America’s 250th birthday, Academy Award-nominated director Darren Aronofsky, in association with Google DeepMind and Salesforce, proudly serves up a heaping bowl of slop. The trailer for Time magazine’s new YouTube series On This Day… 1776, produced by Aronofsky’s AI animation company, Primordial Soup (it’s “soup not slop,” the Black Swan director says), is here, and the results are, charitably, one step above a Prager U video. Each episode dramatizes a different day of the American Revolution, offering a waxen, stoic, and soulless rebuttal to Ken Burns’ recently released documentary series, The American Revolution. See Benjamin Franklin as you’ve never wanted to see him before, looking like a character from Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, or, as one YouTube commenter eloquently put it, “like microwaved shite.”
Now, to be fair, the production is gesturing towards “ethical” AI use, as billionaires continue to search for a use case for this overhyped tech that’s propping up the American economy. SAG-AFTRA voice actors were used to voice character models that were obviously stolen from human actors, performers, and models. Benjamin Franklin, for instance, looks an awful lot like Anthony Hopkins; another Common Sense reader resembles Dominic West; and we detect a whiff of Jeffrey Jones (from Amadeus, specifically) in “grumpy” King George. Either way, it’s a hopeless and drab way to celebrate a tumultuous time in American history, one that certainly resonates today. Considering that AI can only generate two approximations of camera movements, and that the whole thing would’ve looked much better had they simply hired a couple of actors, this is a profoundly unengaging way to get people interested in history. But if they didn’t make it through the plagiarized magic of AI, then Salesforce, which invested nearly a billion dollars in AI start-ups last year, would have no reason to participate.
There are already two episodes of On This Day on YouTube. The first, “January 1: The Flag,” details—well, that’s a strong world. The episode yadda yaddas George Washington raising the flag of rebellion. The second, “January 10: Common Sense,” turns the day Benjamin Franklin commissioned Common Sense from Thomas Paine into a substanceless cutscene, or as Time describes it: the birth of “America’s first meme.” That, of course, makes Paine the first memer, and dank as he was, this depiction of the creation of Common Sense isn’t stirring anyone to Revolution.
