The Cannes Film Festival showcased two opposing visions of American cinema. Steven Soderbergh premiered a documentary about John Lennon that uses artificial intelligence to reconstruct his last radio interview. The result is a cold, artificial visual monstrosity that has generated rejection. In the other corner, James Gray presented a work of excellent classicism, where the human face of actors like Adam Driver, Miles Teller, and Scarlett Johansson recovers emotion and traditional narrative.
AI as soulless digital makeup 🎭
Soderbergh used generative AI to animate photographs and recreate Lennon's audio from original recordings. Technically, the process involved neural networks for lip-syncing and synthetic voice models. However, the result is a parade of plasticized faces and erratic movements that break the emotional connection. The technology, instead of serving the story, buried it under a layer of irritating artificiality. The documentary feels like a laboratory experiment, not a tribute to the musician.
Lennon resurrected to give us cringe 😬
Seeing John Lennon move like a digital mannequin frozen in 1980 is an exercise in discomfort. The documentary achieves what seemed impossible: making us miss Lennon's real voice more than the one AI tries to imitate. It looks like a corporate video from the 90s, but with more budget and less soul. If the Beatle raised his head, he would ask for his walkman back and for the computer to be turned off. At least James Gray reminded us that flesh-and-blood actors still know how to do their job.