The sheer strangeness of the AI ads for Civil War
To market a good film, the studio used unethical AI to create images that run counter to the movie.
Alex Garland’s Civil War came out in theaters last Friday and even more than when the trailer came out, people are arguing about the concept, the plot and what a new American Civil War would be like. I’m an admitted fan of the film — you can read my review here — and I find much of the discourse around it grating, in part because people are making assumptions about it without having seen or are upset the film isn’t explicitly about their interpretations of modern politics. I have a piece on that coming out by the weekend here on Let’s Do the Panic Again. But first let’s talk about the actually awful take on a second American Civil War: the strangest, baffling ads A24 released on social media on Wednesday.
(Images via A24)
The six posters for Civil War show different major cities impacted by the war. Armored convoys in New York City. A ravaged Miami street. The Sphere in Las Vegas blown out and wrecked. An armed boat on a lake in Los Angeles. And they all look….off. People on social media quickly realized they were AI-generated pieces. They riffed on it, pointed out how easily refutable these are — when an iconic Wilco album cover shows you messed up your poster, you definitely missed the mark — and asked why this even happened?
This post contains spoilers for Civil War.
Artificial intelligence was one of the center pieces of the massive Hollywood strike in 2023. Writers and actors were rightly concerned with the dangers posed by AI, and the apparent gleeful excitement from studios to use it. The technology doesn’t actually create anything new, it trawls already created art, stealing from it to create pieces that at best look like something from the uncanny valley. It’s become the latest big tech hype machine, a popular grift from the people who brought you crypto. We’re already seeing magazines try to use AI in place of writers, to disastrous impact.
It also was a strange move from A24, an independent studio that has a lot of good will for its artistic endeavors (even if they did bury Under the Silver Lake). During the SAG-AFTRA strike, the studio even got an exemption for two movies it was shooting. Doing this after the writers and actors successfully won a fight against studios and AI is bizarre. Doing this after the controversy around Late Night with the Devil is bizarre. That film, a horror movie surrounding a 1970s late night talk show gone wrong, used three brief interstitial art pieces made in part with AI. (I loved the film despite that, I cannot claim absolute moral purity on the AI issue here). It earned a lot of backlash for it. Late Night with the Devil was at the very least shot in 2022 and took a while to get released in part due to funding and distribution issues. Civil War is A24’s most expensive film, it has major marketing power behind it. It’s not clear if the ads were made entirely in house or by an outside marketing company but it is ethically strange and just an odd choice.
The other issue is that these locations are not in the film. Everything you see in those AI-generated ads? Completely made up. It was odd enough when the initial posters focused on the torch of the Statue of Liberty turned into a fortified position. New York City appears in the movie, and it’s certainly closer to the fighting than say Chicago, but it’s not a major battlefield. It has an insurgency, chaos, limited resources, but it’s not that. But that poster at least appeared to just be digital art, not AI.
The apparent explanation is bizarre. The Hollywood Reporter, citing a source, said these ads were made to “help imagine the nationwide impact of the film’s fictional war.”
“These are AI images inspired by the movie,” a source said. “The entire movie is a big ‘what if’ and so we wanted to continue that thought on social — powerful imagery of iconic landmarks with that dystopian realism.”
It makes you wonder, did the marketing team pay attention to the worldbuilding in the movie? Civil War is light on specifics of how the war started, but it’s very clear what parts of the country are most impacted and where the front lines are; it’s the end of the war against the loyalist government of the unnamed President (Nick Offerman), the fighting is raging in Charlottesville, Virginia, not Chicago or California. Displaced Americans are fleeing the fighting, but dialogue in the movie shows that large parts of the country are away from the war or outright trying to ignore it.
The Los Angeles one is particularly infuriating as a resident of the city. With the swan, the lake and the skyline, it looks like it’s supposed to be Echo Park Lake. Except that’s not what the popular swan boats at the park look like, there are no houses right on the banks of the lake and the skyline is not correct. This is the one that I first saw and had me asking if this was AI. It definitely seems as if the AI machine used for this took a “swan boat” and generated an actual, giant swan on the water. Also, the idea of putting an armed inflatable boat in the middle of Echo Park Lake is just weird. It’s not the biggest park, you’d be surrounded on all sides right in the open, there are more important parts to control or patrol in Los Angeles, and so on and so on.
One of the film’s biggest strengths, beyond incredible performances and razor-tight tension, is the way the movie uses very real, very familiar, very American landscapes to sell its horror. These aren’t big landmarks, at least until the battle in Washington, D.C., but rather the long stretches of roads through the suburbs or between towns, dotted with the odd gas station. The dying malls of America are reimagined as truly empty spaces, crashed helicopters sitting in vast, open parking lots. One of the film’s most haunting images comes from a shot of a highway overpass. These are all instantly recognizable spaces. Anyone who has driven through the United States east of the Mississippi River has seen these locales. There’s power there that AI art of vague landmarks lacks.
Promoting a movie is hard, sure. Civil War is already a bit of a hard sell, given the way the premise has people reacting, making big leaps about it without having seen it. And maybe it is even harder to sell a film called Civil War that is about the end of the war, not the start, which apparently many viewers are upset about. But why this? Why build this round of marketing on images that run counter to the film, using technology rightly hated for its bad ethics? Even generic floating head-style posters would be better. Alex Garland was making a very specific point, using very clear and familiar imagery in Civil War. The marketing team seems to have missed that.