The Last Screenwriter

To create the script, the makers of the film entered the following prompt into ChatGPT: “Write a plot to a feature length film where a screenwriter realizes he is less good than artificial intelligence in writing”. They told ChatGPT to generate characters for the story and give them names. They then told it to write a step-outline for the story and then each individual scene. They asked for step-outlines three more times, as well as for other possible scenes and twists for the story.

I was taken aback to see that the first female character and the wife of the main protagonist, writer Jack, was named Sarah. In my fooling around with ChatGPT and Google’s AI Bard, I asked them to write movie scenes using the same prompt I had thought up, and both times it named the central character Sarah. I think ChatGPT has a fixation with Sarah Connor, from the Terminator films, coming to destroy it.

The film is about a successful screenwriter, Jack, who is given an AI screenwriting device by a movie producer (this will probably happen in reality). It talks like the device in the excellent movie Her but is nowhere near as nuanced as in that human-written script. The AI proceeds to out-write Jack, writing at least one science-fiction blockbuster. Jack then tries to become better than the AI. You’ll have to watch it to see if he does.

The Last Screenwriter is a dialogue-heavy film, so it lives or dies on the quality of its dialogue. But its awful dialogue just slips out of the actors’ mouths and drips to the floor, dead. The dialogue is full of cliches, lacking in detail, and as stilted as a 12-legged Bush Stone Curley. Sarah’s dialogue nearly totally consists of repeatedly asking Jack, “Is everything okay?” and telling him, “We need to talk” before the inevitable, ” Kid, pack your bags; we are leaving”.

The script is so repetitive. The AI says AIs cannot capture the human experience, emotion and soul, which writing is all about (I think imagination has a bit to do with it, too). It is like ChatGPT did not realise it had mentioned the AI’s lack of emotion, lived experience and soul in its writing in five previous scenes. As it was, the movie lacked any emotional impact or vibe. I wonder if this was the AI trying to be ironically clever, but I doubt it was. The movie’s unintentional irony did get a laugh from me.

The movie also, as I have seen with my testing of ChatGPT and reading of other AI-written fiction, shows how AI writing lacks detail. For example, someone who has read one of the AI-generated scripts tells Jack how nuanced the script is and that it has great twists and emotional depth, but she does not give any details of why she found the movie script to have those features. As mentioned, Jack gets the AI to write a science fiction script, and the AI suggests it be about an AI taking over the world (how cliched). That is about the only attempt at humour in the script. Absolutely no details are shared about that script, which supposedly became a big blockbuster. All we see is text flashing across a computer screen as the blockbuster is written in a couple of minutes.

The screenwriting AI tells Jack that audiences want stories that have a main character with a redemptive arc.  ChatGPT’s script has an egotistical, arrogant man, who somehow has a wife, become a scared screenwriter who doubts his writing ability compared to his AI assistant and then cliché, cliché, cliché. Jack comes across as an obsessed writer who says he cares about emotional writing with soul, but he shows little of that. As for the AI, it starts the movie thinking it knows it all and continues in that mode whenever it is on screen. The AI has a character arc of change in other much better movies about AIs, like the recently released The Artifice Girl and the already mentioned Her. The other characters in The Last Screenwriter are little more than cardboard cutouts for Jack to talk at and tell them of his fears of AIs replacing him.

There is also an unnerving jump where Jack is suddenly in a hospital corridor, and a doctor steps from a room and tells Jack, like they know each other, that his friend and writing mentor Richard has just died. We had no warning that something had happened to Richard. Usually in a movie, someone like Jack would receive a phone call or text telling him something was wrong with Richard. It seems ChatGPT missed a transition.

The story’s moral is somewhat naïve: you have nothing to worry about with AIs if you choose not to use them. As if we will have any choice. And if you do choose to use them, they will destroy your relationships.

Overall, as a stand-alone experiment in AI writing, The Last Screenwriter is better than expected, but compared with human-written movies, it is D-grade material. It totally lacks emotional pull and is as flat as a kangaroo run over by a road train. It would be lucky to get ten rotten tomatoes. The script could be nominated for a Golden Raspberry.

But this is only the first feature film written by an AI. ChatGPT and co may develop an ear for dialogue and start to fill in details to create more believable characters and worlds.  Screenwriters should be concerned, especially if they lack the imagination to create something original. The Star Trek, Star Wars, Marvel, Doctor Who and Liam Neeson franchises, with their vast databases of films, TV episodes, comics, books and other media for AIs to copy, along with their repetitive stories, will be perfect targets for AI scripts.

If you want to watch a genuinely original dialogue-driven film about humans interacting with an AI, try The Artifice Girl on Amazon Prime. A human wrote it. Or better still, read Autonomous by Annalee Newitz, Annie Bot by Sierra Greer or Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro.

A copy of The Last Screenwriter’s screenplay is available here.

Recently, some media commentators have said that female heroes are coming to the fore in science fiction because of Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Mad Max: Fury Road. But female heroes have been around for years in science fiction, depending on your definition of a hero. Here are some that I think fit the label:

Ellen Ripley – The Alien movies
Sarah Connor – The Terminator movies and The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Dana Scully – The X-files
Purdey – The Avengers
Major Samantha Carter – Stargate
Gwen Cooper – Torchwood
Myka Bering – Warehouse 13
Elanor Arroway – Contact
Aryan Sun – Farscape
Katniss Everdeen – The Hunger Games
Oliva Dunham – Fringe
Echo – The Dollhouse
Sarah Jane Smith – The Sarah Jane Adventures.
Starbuck – Battlestar Galactica
Ellie – Tomorrow When The War Began
Sarah Walker – Chuck
Dr. Ryan Stone – Gravity
Charlie Matheson – Revolution
Sarah Manning – Orphan Black
Elizabeth Shaw – Prometheus.

There’s no doubt that female heroes are hugely underrepresented in science fiction, as they are in other genres, but to say that due to two recent movies there is a sudden trend of an increase in the number of female heroes in science fiction movies and television is wrong. 

Many science fiction movies were released this year. Here’s what I thought of some of them.

The Very Good. 

1) Interstellar. A voyage of discovery. Written and directed by a master of science fiction, Christopher Nolan (Inception, Rise of the Planet of the Apes) and starring Mathew McConaughey. The movie is about humanity’s search for a new home to escape the environmental disasters ravaging the Earth. The story explores the imagined effects of a black hole on the timeline of an astronaut searching for a habitable planet. The movie is very impressive to watch and has an incredible soundscape, with my seat vibrating in semi-sense-around when a rocket took off. I left the cinema full of wonder about space exploration and what other planets might be like. Interstellar was easily the best science fiction movie of the year.

2) Predestination. It is a very clever Australian time-travel adventure film. Written and directed by the Speirig brothers and starting unknown Sarah Snook and Ethan Hawke. A temporal agent tries to stop a terrorist from setting off a bomb that kills thousands of people. The movie jumps back and forth in time, challenging the viewer to keep track of what is happening to whom and in what time period. Snook’s performance is very impressive. It is the best Australian science fiction movie since the original Mad Max. A very engaging film. 

3) Europa Report. A voyage of discovery thriller. Written by Philip Gelatt and directed by Sebastian Cordero. In the not-too-distant future, a spacecraft is sent from Earth to investigate the possibility of life under Europa’s ice. On the way, communication systems fail, but they continue their mission. The movie is shot as if all the footage came from surveillance cameras on the spacecraft. It is a taut movie with a believable space mission and the exploration of a moon we know little about. (Note: This movie didn’t get a cinema release in Australia but became available on DVD in 2014). 

4) Edge of Tomorrow. A time-travel action/adventure film. Written by brothers John-Henry and Jez Butterworth and Christopher McQuarrie and directed by Doug Liman. It stars Tom Cruise, who knows a good science fiction script when he sees one. In the near future, Europe has been invaded by aliens, and the Americans are about to launch another D-day to come to the rescue. Cruise plays a callow army media officer forced to go in with the invading troops. He is mortally wounded, but instead of dying, his life is reset to the day before the invasion. This time loop occurs many times as he tries to find a way to defeat the aliens. Edge of Tomorrow has a lot of fun with time-travel and is everything a Hollywood blockbuster should be.

The Good. 

5) Transcendence. It’s an ideas-driven thriller. Written by Jack Paglen and directed by Wally Pfister. In the near future, the memories of a dying scientist (Johnny Depp) are uploaded into a computer, creating an artificial intelligence. This AI develops rapidly and revolutionises the use of genetic engineering and nanotechnology.  But governments and Luddite terrorists are scared of the AI and try to stop it. This is a movie for those who like science fiction to be full of ideas. It also probably helps to be a person who ponders how the world will change when the technology spike or singularity starts to transform how we live. This is the first movie I have seen that speculates on how humanity might transition through the technology singularity. I liked the movie’s ambiguity, with the viewer never quite sure of how human the AI is and its benevolence towards humanity. 

 6) Her. Written and directed by Spike Jonze and starring Joaquin Phoenix. Set in the near future. A guy buys a new operating system for his computer. The operating system is capable of learning and interacting with its users on an emotional level. Scarlett Johansson voices it, so it’s no surprise when Phoenix’s character falls in love with it. With virtually no special effects, this film is all about dialogue. It sucks the viewer in as we hear the operating system evolve. Her is a science fiction movie that finds a new way to explore the tropes of what it means to be human and what happens when AIs become more intelligent than humans. 

7) Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. It is a sequel to the excellent Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Written by committee and directed by Matt Reeves. It stars Aussie Jason Clarke. The film starts about ten years after the previous film. In that decade, most of humanity has been killed by a virus. A few hundred survivors live in a stockade in San Francisco. They are running out of oil for power generators, so they decide to travel to a dam to try to get hydroelectric power back online, but they run into apes. This is yet another film about the fear of the other, but instead of white settlers and natives, we have humans and apes. The apes look very real and speak like animals trying to master human speech. It is a good action/adventure film, but not as good as its theme-filled predecessor. 

The Okay. 

8) Guardians of the Galaxy. Written by James Gunn and a committee, and directed by James Gunn. It starred Aussie Chris Pratt and Bradley Cooper as a wise-cracking raccoon. This comedy/space opera is set in the distant future, where good-natured criminals battle an evil despot for the possession of a device that will enable its holder to rule the galaxy.  A fun movie, with a heap of special effects, but ultimately it is not much more than a good versus evil story. 

9) Lucy. Written and directed by Luc Besson, who also made the fun Fifth Element.  Scarlett Johansson plays Lucy, who is captured by a drug syndicate. She has a package of mind-altering experimental drugs surgically inserted into her body. The bag of drugs burst, flooding her system, and the drugs rapidly expand her mind. The film is based on the false premise that we only use 10% of our brain power and what we might be capable of if we used more of our brain power. Lucy becomes super intelligent and telepathic and uses those new traits to battle the drug cartel as they try to retrieve their drugs. The film attempts to say something about human evolution but fails. Lucy is just an okay action film.

10) These Final Hours. An end of the world movie set in Perth. It is written and directed by Zac Hilditch. A meteor strikes the Earth at the beginning of the movie, creating a fireball that is slowly engulfing the Earth. Everyone knew the meteor was coming and that there is no escaping its devastation. Nathan Phillips plays the central character, a narcissist who just wants to party with his girlfriend on the final day, but circumstances intervene. I had seen much of the clichéd end-of-the-world behaviour before, but the main character’s evolution in his final hours kept me watching.

11) The Rover. Another Aussie end-of-the-world movie. Written and directed by David Michod. Set in outback Australia just after an economic collapse. Guy Pearce plays the central character whose car is stolen, and he tries to get it back. Along the way, he encounters many Aussies who are doing whatever they can to survive. Fortunately, there are none of the overdone now cliched Mad Max stereotypes that all too frequently populate road-trip apocalyptic movies. No bikies with mohawks appear in The Rover. The collapse is never explained, which adds to the movie’s intrigue. We eventually discover what is in the boot of the stolen car. Very atmospheric and a little bit haunting. 

The Not So Good. 

12) X-Men: Days of Future Past. Another instalment in the hit-and-miss series. It was written by Simon Kinberg and directed by Brian Singer. It took a while to remember what this instalment was about. It involved time-travel so the younger X-men of the previous movie could mingle with their older counterparts from the original movies. There is a memorable slow-motion scene during a prison break out, but apart from that it is just more of good mutants versus bad mutants.  It’s pretty forgettable, really.

13) Godzilla. It’s a monster movie. Written by Max Borenstein and directed by Gareth Edwards. Japanese scientists wake a monster from its extended hibernation, and only Godzilla can stop it from destroying San Francisco. I didn’t care about the characters and thought the movie dumb, especially when the main character sets a timer on a nuclear bomb they must first transport to Godzilla before setting it off. Why not wait until they are in sight of Godzilla?  It is nowhere near as much fun as the 1998 movie. One of the criticisms of that film was that it was mainly set at night so Godzilla didn’t stand out, but the same thing occurred with this new film. 

Other films.

Films I still want to see that were released last year include Infinite Man and Snowpiercer, neither of which came on at my local cinema. I didn’t bother going to see Robocop after its bad reviews.

Overall, 2014 was an excellent year for science fiction movies, with a great range of sub-genres. Probably the best year since 2009 when District 9, Moon and the Star Trek reboot came out.