Brian Trent

Spider-Noir is exactly what it says on the tin: a lovely homage to the noir genre, from moody shadows to Dutch angles, hardboiled detectives to femme fatales. It’s an ode to an older, more romantic era of filmmaking, pulling inspiration from everything from Double Indemnity to The Third Man, and avoiding cheap parody as it goes.

Nicholas Cage may be an enigma for the ages, but he’s eerily excellent as the down-on-his-luck P.I. with a secret, and delivers his lines with rapid-fire 1930s irony. Likewise, the supporting cast is roundly excellent and clearly loving the assignment, from Li Jun Li’s deliciously sultry lounge sinner with a past, to Lamorne Morris’ journalist bent on getting at the truth no matter where it takes him. The motley crew of villains range from sleazy to psycho, misunderstood to manic.

And let’s be clear (as I speak in my best Edward G. Robinson voice):

Listen buster, anyone NOT watching this in glorious black-and-white is missing the point, see? Got that, copper? You’re off your rocker!

Highly recommended.

A person who launders creativity through AI, using it to write their dialogue, describe their scenes, come up with their story, is only an “artist” when preceded by the word “con”.

Stephen King once opined that writers should throw their thesaurus into the garbage, because “Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.”

The same thing applies to using AI to “write”. Any word a writer needs to outsource to an electronic homunculus isn’t just the wrong word; it’s a brick in a self-made prison, and the prisoner is your creativity. Art isn’t something to be procedurally generated, slapped together as an empty pastiche of other people’s stolen work. It doesn’t help you “develop your own voice”; it suppresses your voice for its own stolen chorus.

In short, art matters.

And artists matter.

This is a line in the sand. It’s an existential battle.

Creativity is NOT an optimization problem. Tools are great. Tools can make things easier. But when tools replace humanity in all things, that’s extinguishment. If we stop believing that artists matter, that thinking and reading and deciding for ourselves matter, then we really have accepted imprisonment in the Matrix. If we’re okay with our paintings and books and films and games and music being cranked out by the cold equations of automation, then we’ve committed a type of human sacrifice. If we sit back and accept that creativity can or should be replaced, then this really is the last invention of the Krell.

This is the line in the sand.

Project Hail Mary is a smart, sweet sci-fi film, with Ryan Gosling delivering the very best performance of his career. With striking visuals and a sublime musical score, it offers a hard sci-fi story with exactly the right measures of humanity, humor, and pathos. I have a few nitpicks, but they’re minor against the cosmic scope of the picture. Recommended.