AI can’t make art. It can steal several other people’s art, mash it into a worthless slurry, and pass it off as something new, but it can’t create anything. Artists and art enjoyers generally hate AI. Producers and IP holders long for a future dominated by AI art. Though everyone knows the right side of this issue, the fight continues. Four years before ChatGPT became a going concern, Peripheral dramatized the idea from an author’s perspective in an imperfect but endlessly fascinating way.
After 148 days, the Writers Guild of America strike officially ended on September 27, 2023. Other strikes remain ongoing. One of the most notable issues on their list of demands was keeping AI out of the writers’ room. Studios imagined using programs like ChatGPT to write terrible scripts, then paying real artists a pittance of their original salary to fix the machine’s abysmal work. Writers won on this and many issues. Rest assured, film and TV projects in the United States are safe from this problem, if only temporarily.
RELATED: This Joaquin Phoenix Movie Predicts the Future of Human-AI Relationships
What is Peripheral about?
|
Director |
Paul Hyett |
|---|---|
|
Writer |
Dan Schaffer |
|
Cast |
Hannah Arterton, Tom Conti, Rosie Day |
|
Runtime |
89 Minutes |
|
Rotten Tomatoes Score |
90% based on 10 reviews |
Peripheral follows Bobbi Johnson, an author at the end of her rope. Bobbi’s first book, a masterful political thriller called Bite the Hand, became a bestseller and sparked increasingly dangerous riots. Bobbi comes from humble beginnings. She’s a recovering addict who escaped poverty through the success of her first novel. The pressure of creating a follow-up has left her paralyzed. Just as she runs out of money, her publisher offers her a state-of-the-art AI editing system. She resists, preferring her beloved typewriter. Desperation forces her to take the deal. Once the new hardware is installed, she notices it making changes beyond grammar and syntax. Bobbi rebels against the system, but her fear, self-doubt, and the ever-ticking clock of her deadline keep her under control. Her body is warped. Strange hallucinations terrorize her mind. Reality seems to fade into the machine. Bobbi loses herself in technology, but there’s something more threatening behind the screen. It’s a haunting story about social control, artificial intelligence, and the death of art.
Who directed Peripheral?
Paul Hyett directed Peripheral. Hyett is better known as a special effects or makeup artist. He has only directed four films, but he’s provided visual details to dozens. Hyett frequently worked with director Neil Marshall on cult hits, including Dog Soldiers and The Descent. Hyett’s films tend to be low-budget horror features with limited releases. His first film was The Seasoning House, which follows a deaf woman fighting to escape human traffickers. He followed that grim experience with Howl, a pulpy monster movie about werewolves attacking a train. His worst film, The Convent, is a somewhat naked knock-off of The Nun. Finally, Peripheral is his latest film. Hyett has been off the radar since its release in 2018. Peripheral is easily his best feature as a director.
What is Peripheral’s Rotten Tomatoes score?
Peripheral has an impressive 90% positive critical score on Rotten Tomatoes. Their average score is 6.8 out of 10, but the reception is somewhat mitigated by the fact only ten critics weighed in. Audiences were slightly less warm to the project, offering a 78% positive score. Most critics compare the film to the work of David Cronenberg. Peripheral earns the comparison through similar themes and execution. It could be well described as a modern take on Cronenberg’s Videodrome with the benefit of modern technology. In fact, Speaking with Starburst Magazine, Hyett had this to say about his influences on the style of Peripheral:
In the back of my head was Videodrome, I love that film, but I didn’t want to go for that dirty, grainy, style, I wanted to give it its own look. I kind of wanted a sort of Cronenberg-esque tinge. The director of photography, Peter Taylor, was Ridley Scott’s camera operator of choice and worked on Gravity, Gladiator and stuff, and we talked a lot about how we should do this and give it its own personality. It’s hard when you’ve got one person in one location in one room, trying to give it a weird look.
Writer Dan Schaffer, known for cult comics like Dogwitch, crafts an intelligent script that is rarely hampered by questionable editing choices. Hannah Arterton’s performance as Bobbi holds the film together, often carrying the feature on her back alone for long stretches. Impossibly, Arterton’s most substantial credit is an Amazon Prime show called The Peripheral, which has no relation to the film. Tom Conti, best known as the title character in Nagisa Oshima’s masterpiece Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, delivers an excellent performance as Bobbi’s literary idol. Despite some rough edges, Peripheral is too unique to miss.
As the battle against AI art continues, more creators may find themselves feeling like Bobbi Johnson. Technology can be a powerful tool to create, but it can also be the death of art in the wrong hands. Many have pointed out that Luddites weren’t angry at machines. They rebelled against their bosses, who cast them aside in favor of cheaper metal and wood. Peripheral attacks that idea and goes well beyond it. Art can be the spark that ignites revolution and changes the world. AI will never accomplish that, and that’s part of why the people at the top like it so much. Peripheral is an excellent horror movie that also happened to stumble into blistering relevance.
Leave a Reply