Submitted by: Patrick Cormack
Running time: 4mins
Four times, films from someone going by Patrick Cormack have landed in the IFL in-tray. This fourth and final insult is the one where I have to call time on it. Someone is taking the piss.
The unimaginative Machinima of The End of Days was inexorably dull. The half-baked Arthurian schtick of The Power of the Circle: The Pendragon 2025 was a contrived mess of hackneyed mythological clichés. But at least two of Cormack’s previous outings have a semblance of human intervention in them – even if that is just that they both feel like the shambling remains of a dream that died long ago, but doesn’t seem to know it yet. Those are still dreams from a person.
But Once Upon a Time in England, and now Poppi at the Gate show something worse. Another chapter in the ongoing saga of the death of ambition. Cormack is the latest ageing producer to succumb to the belief that, as his genuine efforts fail to make waves with viewers, he might as well churn out an endless of crap with generative AI instead.
And you know what, on YouTube, if he grinds out enough of this meritless dreck, maybe he’ll make some money out of it. I think throwing your lot in with a bunch of ham-brained tech vampires bent on destroying the planet, trading in your very last scrap of credibility as a creative, and alienating every other independent filmmaker worth their salt, is a piss-poor deal. One so shoddily negotiated that you could unironically describe it as Trumpian. But that’s your call, not mine.
The thing that is very much still my call, however, is how I get to evaluate the slop you serve up when you submit it to my film festival.
The IFL’s rules clearly mark out how filmmakers will be evaluated in relation to their use of AI. Cormack has fallen foul of that before with Once Upon a Time (in England). But he/they (for all I know, he is simply the handle of a large number of chatbot farmers – equivalent of a bunch of moronic toddlers stacked up under a trench-coat, pretending to be an grown-up filmmaker) ignored the first unrated evaluation, and spammed in another fully generated turd for good measure.
And at this point, the novelty has well and truly worn off.
Do I want to make the case about why any of this is bad? No. I’ve done that article to death.
Do I want to make jokes about a hideously literal pseudo-acoustic guitar song – about a dog that gets abandoned and dies – in a cynical and cloying attempt to assemble the most clichéd tearjerker of all time? No. Because it is cynical and cloying by default – Poppi at the Gate came out of a plagiarism machine, which can only approximate what a tearjerker is according to what it has already scraped the internet for.
Do I want to make jokes about how it can’t even do that right? About how even with trillions of dollars in investment, ripped by private equity from functioning businesses to fund the biggest case of Tulipmania in recorded history, the machine cannot maintain a five-fingered hand if one of its Ghibli-rip-off characters waves? About the sudden, jarring shift away from that style to a kitchen from Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared? About the comically undersized car the protagonist turns up in at one point? About how Poppi, the titular dog, looks like it wants to kill itself, even when its supposedly loving human is still nearby?
No. Because the computer that approximated all of this doesn’t understand what the difference to any of it is. It doesn’t have the lived experience to judge or misjudge these contexts, how they might look or make audiences react. And it doesn’t care about that. Because it can’t care about anything.
Perhaps this is something which submitters like Cormack feel gives them an extra degree of separation, of distance from criticism. Well, it doesn’t matter that everyone thought this one was worse than dog-shit, because it’s not like I spent any time on it.
That is not the case. I want to be absolutely clear when I say this: putting out Poppi at the Gate should absolutely, undoubtedly be seen as the most embarrassing thing anyone posturing as an artist can do. In many quarters, it is already seen that way, and I welcome the normalising of shame for people who like to make-believe they are artists by shoddily stealing from others. The End of Days was bad. But Poppi at the Gate is a humiliation. An admission that rather than learn from past mistakes, someone would instead elect to kill off their own ambition.
This film is nothing creative – so pointers on what it does or doesn’t do well are moot. There is still a lesson other filmmakers can learn from it though. Don’t. Make. Generative. Films. It is the single most pathetic thing you can do, it speaks poorly of you as a creator and a human being – and if you DO decide to ignore this warning, you have earned the ritual humiliation that will inevitably follow.