Famed sci-fi director Neill Blomkamp is facing backlash after unleashing his first full test film made with AI.
Blomkamp, best known for works like District 9, Chappie, and Elysium, published the thirteen-minute-long short film to YouTube on July 19, and responses have been brutal.
The proof-of-concept follows a U.S. Army pilot who gets grievously injured after her aircraft is shot down during a field mission in Syria. As part of the shadowy ‘Nightborne’ program, a ‘control implant’ is inserted in her brainstem that essentially turns her into a mindless zombie acting on orders of the U.S. government.
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
This marks the inaugural release of Barley Studios, an AI-focused film studio founded by Blomkamp, who says the short was fully generated in Seedance 2.0 and directed by him through prompts. As per the video’s description, 32 real people provided the voices and faces for the characters therein under likeness agreements. Concept art for the project, however, was provided by human artists.
Nightborn is set in the world of Peter Watts' 2014 novel Echopraxia, which features all manner of science-fiction fare like alien life, vampires, and of course, zombies. While Watts has yet to offer a public comment on Blomkamp’s latest adaptation of his work, the internet has spoken — and made its stance extremely clear.
Comments across social media are blasting the test film, poking fun at the dialogue (we couldn’t help but laugh at "Oh s**t, well, I think she’s going to make it, so that’s good"), various visual inaccuracies, and jarring camerawork.
“No thank you. What a crazy fall from grace for such a beloved filmmaker,” one wrote on YouTube.
“Wow Neill, thank you for showing us that even in the hands of an established director, AI slop looks indistinguishable from everyone else's AI slop!” another said on X/Twitter.
“Bro, we just wanted District 10,” another said.
Blomkamp has yet to respond to the outrage surrounding his latest project, but offered more insight into Nightborne on his personal Instagram account.
“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,” he explained. “Barley Studios will be my new AI studio for creating my own films, the way Oats Studios was for traditional film and VFX.”
It's worth noting that, while Watts hasn't spoken out following the release of Nightborne, he did mention working with Blomkamp back in 2025, telling Forbes that he and Blomkamp had a "long and tortured history" with adapting his book Blindisight (a prequel to Echopraxia). And with this latest proof-of-concept, it's looking even more tortured than ever.
Unfortunately for hopeful fans, Blomkamp isn’t sure if District 10 will actually happen, despite confirming that he was writing a script for the sequel film in 2021. In August 2023, the director admitted that the future of the movie is uncertain, saying, “I don’t know if I even want to make that right now, but at some point down the line, it’ll probably get made.”
This is the latest AI movie making waves online after Odysseus: The Fall, an AI-generated film retelling the Odyssey, sparked similar reactions from audiences, especially in comparisons to Nolan’s lauded movie adaptation of the same source material that blew the top off the box office on opening weekend.
Virginia (she/her) is IGN’s News Editor. With ten years of experience reporting on games and entertainment, she’s got a storied background in the fighting game community, influencer news, and viral online trends. Find her on Twitter at @TheeMissGlaze.
