AI tries to mimic Werner Herzog in “About a Hero”, churning out a droning drama minus the real Herzog’s soul, wit, or existential weight.
Nine years ago, Werner Herzog made a film about the internet and the rapid advance of AI. Now, AI has made a film about Werner Herzog. Well, almost.
Piotr Winiewicz utilized AI to make a film that mimics a Werner Herzog film. The Polish director allegedly left the scriptwriting of his first feature to artificial intelligence. He plied a program with data of Werner Herzog films, then tasked it to devise a screenplay. The result is classified as documentary, drama, and mystery. Or maybe the mystery is whether this is a drama or a documentary? The weird story doesn’t document anything.
However, it is also not a work of human creativity but the product of algorithms.
The program goes by the name of “Kaspar”. This taunting allusion to Herzog’s 1974 biopic of the German foundling Kaspar Hauser, Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle (The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser), serves as a good indicator of Winiewicz’s lack of subtlety. This clunky sarcasm drags through the attention-grabbing concept.
Curiously, it also mars the machine-made screenplay, with a story revolving around the murder of a worker in a factory for kitchen appliances.
The man goes by the bizarre name of Dorem Clery and lives in the fictional German town “Getunkirchenberg”. AI Kaspar Hauser seems to assume that weird names are a Werner Herzog thing.
Another of Herzog’s supposed characteristics is a voice heavy with gravitas and gloom. Such a digital narrator voice calls Getunkirchenberg “a place of undetailed whereabouts and global insignificance”. Intentionally or not, this low-brow parody gets a few laughs.
The murder plot is rather incoherent and hardly engrossing. Dorem himself never appears and remains a blank space. He was involved in a dubious project about a powerful device, known as “the machine”. This device is an obvious signifier for artificial intelligence and may have caused Dorem’s demise.
His widow, Eleonore (Imme Beccard), shares his strange fascination with machines. Her growing obsession with her toaster has explicitly libidinous aspects. Is Dorem’s spirit in the appliances? Is it mind control? No one knows.
Meanwhile, a skeptical reporter (Vicky Krieps, doing a lot with an underwritten part) becomes suspicious of the factory where Dorem had been working. But nothing much comes of this suspicion.
A deepfake Herzog double conducts a few interviews with Dorem’s co-workers.
Most of them are also deepfakes, while some appear to be real. The disquieting storyline seems a bizarre game where the audience shall guess who is actually human. A monotonous, droning soundtrack suggests something ominous, but this is really all just pretension.
Neither the interviews nor the murder plot go anywhere.
The images have an equally stilted, brooding air about them. Rigid long shots capture drab, depressing interiors and an eternally grey sky. An oppressive air of apathy and vague fear seems to hover over the town of Getunkirchenberg. But this dreariness is never captivating.
Everything feels exhaustingly derivative. What else would one expect of a digital imitation of an artist’s works?
The Herzog-like interviewer and narrator is rather obviously not the actual Werner Herzog. Even if it was the actual Herzog, such a cameo appearance would just be one more publicity stunt.
Bottom Line: Lots of Werner Herzog’s mannerisms but none of his philosophical depth.
Overall Rating (Out of 5 Butterflies): 2
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