Interstella 5555 | AI Rules the Nation

Artificial intelligence has been depicted in films for many years, often as a form of technological evil beyond our comprehension - think Skynet or Hal 9000. Many narratives have been written to warn against the dangers of these ultimately human-made advancements, but that’s what all technology is, or at least is intended to be - created by us, for our convenience, for our sustainability. AI is worming its way into our future just as those sci-fi flicks foretold (minus all the blockbuster brutality), perhaps to an extent of excessive dependency - recently within the creative fields we’ve seen an uptick in the use of AI as an immediate tool to solve objective challenges, between ChatGTP to find and fix your script’s spelling and grammatical errors, or data automation for digital marketing.

The sentiment around these methods has been airing on the side of optimism in recent years, but where the controversy arrives is when AI steps once too far, into the realm of the artist. Here, all lands are subjective, where invention is new, inspired, and pure imagination is bound by nothing one’s own mind can’t handle. Art is, in my opinion, the most effective way of reflecting the jumbled state of the human conscious - I don’t believe we as a species were ever intended to make sense of ourselves entirely, so our artistic output is less about attempting to accomplish that in a linear sense and is instead regarding the assortment of words, notes, brushstrokes or the like on a page, in an attempt to reflect a state of being. This works greatly to music’s aid and why we feel a connection to the form even when there is sparse lyrical content to be analysed and instead, pure abstractions to be mulled over - one could interpret the peaks and troughs of a symphony entirely different from another, and it’s those subjective takeaways that see our creative interests run wild. It would appear, then, that worries of AI’s capabilities as a resistance against earnest artistic output are more than justified. Actual living ‘artists’ are utilising AI to create for them, a prominent example being Synthpop band Tears For Fears using a ‘mixed media digital collage’ for their newest live album’s artwork. In the realm of filmmaking though, there are increased fears of artist’s voices diminishing in the face of writing programmes, or their own unique visual language being weakened against cheaper software generated alternatives. Just today, on X (the less said about Elon Musk’s utterly sloppy utilisation of AI on that platform, the better) I came across Evil Dead II’s legendary shot of Bruce Campbell being strung through the woods, in a shot & sequence so bizarrely cool that I could hardly describe it in words - but, it wasn’t. It was a recreation of the shot using Hailuo AI’s Director model, and all of the original’s ingenuity dwindles to nothing, despite it attempting to capture the same atmosphere. (Link Below)

AI Approximation of Sam Raimi’s ‘Evil Dead Shot’

At the very least AI is a helpful tool, an inevitable revolution that will be used more frequently in the future. Daft Punk accomplished a similar feat for electronic music in the 00’s, providing an intergalactic edge to the genre that hadn’t yet been explored. Just as space captures our imaginations through its vast grandeur, the band’s mystique was boundless for a time - their sophomore album Discovery released a year into the new millennium and became a smash hit, which, if my focus today wasn’t on its coinciding film release, I’d gush about ad nauseam. Whilst electronic music dominates the mainstream today with copycats abound, dilution not quite their goal but an unfortunate unintended consequence, Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo have been consistently credited as the most idiosyncratic EDM auteurs of the genre’s artistic peak.

You would mistake Daft Punk for being strong advocates for the current advancements of AI then, considering their whole aesthetic is one derived from our own colourful imaginings of how people and ‘bots would converge in a distant future, which translates very literally into much of their music. However, it wasn’t until Random Access Memories where the duo would elasticise their EDM roots in the pursuit of more mellow ballads and greater lyrical showings (but even then, we are talking about Daft Punk here - they have their limitations in that regard). Repetition is the name of their game and so too is our consumerist culture and the rapid mechanical advancements that keep modern society in an ever moving chokehold, it is topics such as these that Daft Punk would write about in innovative classics like Harder Better Faster Stronger, which is still perhaps Daft Punk’s political peak preceding Human After All - yet, the track only has eighteen unique words! It’s the ingenious build here that keeps the subdued commentary chugging along, and this centrality to their work in other tracks such as Technologic or Television Rules the Nation was just one component of the band that made them so pronounced in their time, though Discovery is an easy highlight for the band in that sense. 

Thus, in collaboration with Toei Animations and infamous manga artist Leiji Matsumoto, the magical and wholly unique Interstella 5555 was born. A film that marches to the beat of Discovery’s nebulous keys, the film sees a gang of alien superstars captured by a wickedly human studio exec, brainwashed to play for his pursuit of profit under the false belief that their skin is shared. Bangalter, Homem-Christo and additional writer Cedric Hervert did an ingenious job of portraying these essential and historically written upon problems born from the industry into a colourfully gratifying, love-ridden sci-fi adventure. The villain’s money misgivings are translated through a shrine-like space where golden vinyl is attained upon the literal sacrifice of an artist’s life. It is about as succinct as thematic storytelling can be in its singular hour, and thank god that those roots will forever be untainted. There’s an even greater success here when you consider that the film was conceptualised around Discovery rather than vice-versa which is a fundamentally restrictive method of filmwriting akin to writing a prequel, but if that doesn’t speak to the album’s innate conceptualities despite any clear overarching idea, then the film will certainly do the talking if the music hadn’t already sold you.

Interstella is more proof than ever, then, that Daft Punk really are human after all - so incredibly human in the defence of artistic integrity in a way that no computer could conjure, and that sentiment stretches far and wide across their discography but crash landed at its strongest in 2003 when the film debuted. Twenty years later in an interview with the BBC following the band’s retirement, Bangalter conveyed this very sentiment in a similarly succinct manner - ‘It's just that people sometimes misinterpreted Daft Punk's aesthetic as an unquestioning embrace of digital culture. We tried to use these machines to express something extremely moving that a machine cannot feel, but a human can. We were always on the side of humanity and not on the side of technology’. This blurring of the lines between man and machine is not to communicate a sense of conflict between future and past, but to instead preach the need for their coexistence. Interstella echoes this once central thesis of Daft Punk - the film’s quartet may not be techies but they’re certainly otherworldly in that way, yet their fans on our Earth love their stuff all the same. It is not the music fan that is subjugated in Interstella, rather it’s the music maker, and the murderous hand that rests above them - if a sequel to the film was ever written, perhaps these rapid modern advancements of AI would act as the primary antagonistic force… but why write that into fiction when it already exists?

Of the more major controversies surrounding the use of AI in the film industry as of late, I find last year’s rerelease of Interstella 5555 to be the most intriguing, not only because of my very personal adoration for the film, but also the bizarre sequencing of events that led to a great deal of speculation on my lonesome. It was for the film’s near twenty first anniversary in 2024 that saw it hit the big screens for a late second occasion. Its utilisation of AI upscaling in order to deliver a clearer image stole what should have been a celebration for a film that rallies against exploitative industry standards. Instead a fairly justified hate campaign from fans went against a practice that dilutes Matsumoto’s painstakingly detailed anime art style all for some smoother edges - worse still, the legend of the artform passed away early 2023.Here, we have a classic example of a dead man’s creation being manipulated beyond his approval, and I find it odd that Toei Animations never had any intention of carrying out an officially marketed-as 20th anniversary rerelease for the film - suddenly he passes, and it seems they’re all in on taking his work and letting some software do the rest.

AI is not a purely recent advancement and it’s important to remember that - as a random example, another one of my favourite films in The Irishman used deepfakes as a cost-effective alternative to CGI when de-ageing its actors which still looks pretty fantastic to my eye, and that technology has been around since the 90’s. Whilst it seems the consensus on purely generative AI is unethical, it’s examples such as these that seem to work the same angle that spark such debate regardless. When you have a pair of artists so devoted to the ‘side of humanity’ like Daft Punk claim they were, it seems strange that they would sanction such a decision to manipulate an artist’s output for profit in the way Toei did Matsumoto’s, just as the film itself warned us against.

Maybe, after all the squabbling, we’ll come to realise that AI is something that is, not just preferred to be, but required in its fullest form to aid the progression of the arts on a technical level. Such a scourge will no doubt cause a divide between consumers, in fact it is already happening as we’ve seen with the recent discourse surrounding Brady Corbet’s latest The Brutalist and plenty more, but Interstella’s case is an interesting one because of how it skirts the line between the realm of singularly enhancing a film’s technical qualities, whilst simultaneously taking a dead man’s technicolour designs and turning them into something that’s minutiae is unrecognisable when up close. Interstella’s rerelease is really more an unfortunate question of ethics than a thought-provoking discussion about our future as artists but in my determination, this is hypocrisy in the face of a legend’s lasting legacy and a reminder of the capitalist sensibilities that us creatives should be holding pitchforks in opposition to. Many have theorised that Toei Animations actually blindsided Daft Punk when initial discussions around the film’s rerelease were being held following Matsumoto’s passing, as the method of upscaling here seems so antithetical to attitudes they’ve shared over the years but ultimately, reports suggest nothing of the like. Have these musicians changed their tune, or are they, just as they did twenty years ago, seizing the opportunity to develop their shared creations? Yet, even after all that - does the upscale even look better? After all this conversation, the core of the whole thing is, simply, whether or not it was worth all the trouble. To my eye, it only looks ‘better’ in the way a cheap model-based video game looks better than a polished sprite-based one - Interstella 5555’s rerelease sees the prioritisation of a clean look over stylish preservation, and speaking as an artist myself - that is quite the shame.

Comparisons between the original master of Insterstella 5555 (right) and the AI Remaster (left)

What a cruel reality we could soon be living in, contrary to the anthem Daft Punk offered as Discovery began its A-side spin - where music, film and art by all extension, is not a freeing endeavour born from wonder of the beyond and the creativity within, but a restrictive curse of binding life contracts, a cold world where once our living hands laying contact with the metal of the machine in pursuit of technical progression, instead leads to a system where death is a disc turned gold. Bangalter and Homem-Christo write it best as the album & movie comes to a close…

♪ you know you need it, it’s good for you ♪

Written By Jack Mortimer | IG: @jackcmortimer | LB: jackcmortimer