Review of the ChatGPT scripted movie The Last Screenwriter

The Last Screenwriter claims to be the first feature-length movie totally written by ChatGPT. The original cinematic world premiere was cancelled due to hundreds of complaints made to the cinema’s owner. It became free to watch on July 5.

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.

One Response

  1. I agree that it’s not that great. I think the acting was pretty ordinary too, but that may have been due to the script. Hate the thought of people using AIs to write novels.

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