AI could come up with Wes Anderson’s latest film

AI is coming for everyone’s jobs, but especially mine. There is absolutely no good reason for The Spectator to keep sending me to watch films with my wobbly biological eyes, not when they could just feed the latest releases into a computer, set the parameters to “contemptuous,” and watch a perfectly serviceable review assemble itself, for free, before their eyes. They’re losing money on every column. They may as well be paying a scriptorium full of monks to illuminate each copy of the magazine on vellum. I’m doomed, surplus to requirements, and the 21st century will replace me with a few lines of code. But it could be worse. At least I’m not Wes Anderson.

Wes Anderson is unlucky enough to have a strong, unique personal style, one that’s immediately recognizable, and also immediately replicated. There’s a series of books called Accidentally Wes Anderson, consisting entirely of photos of various pastel-colored objects, elegantly framed. Online, there are dozens of videos people have made with AI, showing Wes Anderson’s Harry Potter (“The Grand Hogwarts School”), Wes Anderson’s Star Wars (“The Galactic Menagerie”), and Wes Anderson’s Lord of the Rings (“The Whimsical Fellowship”). Apparently, Wes Anderson hates this stuff. “If somebody sends me something like that,” he told the Times, “I’ll immediately erase it and say, ‘Please, sorry, do not send me things of people doing me.’” And ordinarily I’d be sympathetic. There’s a real difference between creation and imitation, coming up with a genuinely distinctive style and getting a computer to vomit up something formally similar. The imitation will always be fundamentally empty and soulless. No unity of vision, just hollow form. The problem is that Wes Anderson keeps on making films like The Phoenician Scheme, which is essentially an extruded bolus of Anderson film-like product, and exactly as hollow as anything to come out of a machine.

Start with the title. I asked ChatGPT to generate a list of plausible-seeming Wes Anderson film titles and it gave me The Opal Observatory, The Bathysphere Affair, and The Phoenician Scheme. The story is about a heartless 1950s tycoon called Zsa-Zsa Korda (Benicio Del Toro), who has a grand scheme to build a railway, canal and dam in the fictional Middle Eastern country of Phoenicia, in return for five percent of the profits in perpetuity. Doing this requires slave labor, an artificial famine and various cameos from all your favorite character actors, who shuttle around on various pastel-colored sound stages. There’s Tom Hanks. There’s Bryan Cranston. Richard Ayoade shows up; so does Benedict Cumberbatch and Riz Ahmed. They’re all charming. Meanwhile his daughter, a novice nun played by Mia Threapleton, stands around looking severe. Really, the story hardly matters. It meanders along for a bit, and then it ends for no particular reason. In the end, it’s just a container for an all-star cast, whip pans, and lines such as “I delivered you myself. I cut the umbilical cord with a pair of garden shears of my own design.”

It’s all fine, if you like that sort of thing. You won’t be bored. Maybe there’s even some artistic value in the secret emptiness of the thing, its form without content. But it left me feeling empty, in exactly the same way that the thousandth AI-generated image of SpongeBob flying a plane into the Twin Towers leaves me feeling empty. Yes, you can make this thing. But why?

The Phoenician Scheme is an extruded bolus of Anderson film-like product

Wes Anderson is capable of making films that are actually about something. The Darjeeling Limited is about something. The Grand Budapest Hotel is about something. These are not just successions of pleasing images; they’re stylized representations of things that happen in the inner and outer lives of human beings.

Meanwhile, in The Phoenician Scheme, we see various beautifully framed signboards for the railway, canal and dam Korda is building in his fictional Middle Eastern country. The signs for the railway and canal are in English and Arabic. The sign for the dam is in English and Hebrew. There is the presence, mentioned but not explored, of a private utopian colony. The Israeli-Arab conflict, which you might have noticed in the news lately, ends up being recycled into some brief whimsy. Obviously, what’s currently happening in Gaza is difficult fodder for a Wes Anderson film. It’s hard to frame piles of rubble in his usual meticulous style. I think it’s something a computer would have a hard time generating. He should give it a try.