Wes Anderson's latest is as hollow as anything AI could come up with

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 recognisable, and also immediately replicated. There’s a series of books called Accidentally Wes Anderson, consisting entirely of photos of various pastel-coloured 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.