Let me first establish that I am far from a proponent of AI.
It’s of course true that such technology has the potential to send humanity into a whole new paradigm (if it hasn’t already), and the benefits that such progress could bring should never be entirely dismissed. But, Jurassic Park is also still fresh enough in my head for me to say that I’d gladly take that loss of progress if it means we’re deprived of such potential for self-destruction. Because let’s face it; if religion—which, at its core, is literally supposed to exist to help people honor and embrace their goodness—has enabled so many of our atrocities, it’s really not worth trusting the world with a tool such as AI, especially in the disinformation age.
And yet, if Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire represents the amount of creative effort we can expect from franchise glut going forward, we may as well just usher in AI to do that work specifically, and then the triple-digit budgets that those movies usually get could instead be spent on movies that are actually worth making and watching.
Now, I’m obviously not so foolish as to believe that such a thing would happen if AI were to be enlisted for full-scale filmmaking down the line; best guess is that $100 million would end up in the pockets of studio executives. The point remains, however, that allowing such things as Frozen Empire’s severely milquetoast, fan service-stuffed state of being to populate budgets and cinemas the way they have is about as dystopian as the thought of AI filmmaking. In fact, knowing that Frozen Empire wasn’t made by AI is uniquely depressing in its own right.
Frozen Empire is far from the only culprit here, but this is the straw that broke the camel’s back, as it were—a straw that took every opportunity it had to insult the audience. Don’t have Phoebe tell a throwaway science joke just to have Gary immediately say how funny the joke is; there are a million wrong ways to do meta humor, and that’s among the worst. And before you say it works because of the whole dubious step-dad thing going on with Gary and Phoebe, there’s far better ways to supplement that emotional arc without sabotaging your creative integrity, and don’t even think about pretending that Frozen Empire had any interest whatsoever in earning even a shadow of the emotional beats it did try to shoehorn into itself, anyway.
It also, of course, continues the trend of not having the first clue about what made previous Ghostbusters films (and that includes the original, the sequel, and Answer The Call) work as well as they did, a sin the franchise’s reboot direction first committed with Afterlife. The endorphins that come with seeing Slimer, Stay Puft, Bill Murray, and all the rest of the nostalgia bait are every bit as insincere as the entire production of Frozen Empire, but they are still, at the end of the day, endorphins, the presence of which the film uses to excuse itself from trying to put its own spin on the very specific, dark-but-not-too-cynical approach to comedy that made the Ghostbusters of yore work, and stuff in its place the exact sort of uninvolved, phone-it-in, toothless attitude that Frozen Empire‘s actors were all but forced to adopt by the overpowering mediocrity baked into the script.
At the end of the day, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is such an incoherent, soulless mess of a movie, with no identity outside of its connection to previous iterations of the material, that I am truly tempted to support the utilization of AI for making these types of movies specifically: IP-laden franchise fare that no one has any interest in bringing a good idea to, but that studios will forge ahead with anyway because it’s probably going to make money. (Not to say that this is true of all IP-driven franchise films; I’m fully expecting Wes Ball to confidently carry the Planet of the Apes torch forward).
Any machine can spit out recognizable characters for us to latch onto as we try to escape the real world, but it takes a human mind to craft a story worth telling, and if we’re going to insult that capacity of ours by settling for Frozen Empire’s attempts at creativity, then that, again, is far, far worse than surrendering to our new robot overlords.
(featured image: Sony Pictures)
