’Aggro Dr1ft’ Is Built on AI and Video Games—Shouldn’t the Movie Be More Fun?
Sometime in the late 1990s, filmmaker Harmony Korine undertook a project that, in many ways, still defines his artistic ambition. The abandoned documentary Fight Harm saw Korine trawling the streets of New York City, instigating brawls with random passersby. (Leonardo DiCaprio and magician David Blaine reportedly served as the film’s camera operators, which speaks to the kind of hipster-celeb bona fides Korine boasted at the time.)
There were rules: Korine could only egg on people bigger than him, and he could never throw the first punch. It’s a posture he has been perfecting throughout his career: a provocateur who is also on the defensive, an instigator who can roll over and play victim. Here is a guy who literally begs to get punched in the face. But take the bait, and he wins. This attitude makes Korine’s films extremely frustrating to write, or think, about. His latest—which is, by its director’s reckoning, meant to revolutionize filmmaking itself—proves especially vexing.
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Culture GuidesThe 24 Best Movies on Amazon Prime Right NowMatt Kamen and WIRED StaffA fairly straight-ahead hit-man thriller, Aggro Dr1ft stars Spanish actor Jordi Mollà as BO, a masked gunman charged with taking down a burly, sword-wielding crime boss. When he’s not out on a mission, he rips around Miami in a sports car, zips around Biscayne Bay on a souped-up cigarette boat, raises an army of fellow assassins (including rapper Travis Scott), plays with his kids, and waxes on his own greatness (“I am a hero … I am the greatest assassin ever”).
What distinguishes—and, indeed, defines—Aggro Dr1ft is not its plot (it is vaporously thin) or characters (likewise) but its aesthetic. The film was shot with infrared cameras, and then packaged in post-production using AI technology, animation, and VFX—all rendered using video game engines. (Korine has referred to the multilayered process as “a technical snake.”) This gives recognizable shape to the various heat signatures onscreen: human, animal, vehicular, and otherwise. Sometimes, the AI generates swirling patterns on the human forms, which shapeshift mercurially like living tattoos. The color palette will swap suddenly, from red-orange to blue-green to yellow-yellow. Intermittently, a computer generated demon (representing BO’s conscience, or lack thereof) will loom, menacingly, in the sky.
In press and interviews accompanying the film, Korine has been vocal about the fact that Aggro Dr1ft is something other than a movie. “How do you take the whole idea of entertainment, of live-action gaming, and create something new?” the-allegedly-not-a-filmmaker pondered in a recent profile. “The obsession here is that there’s something else after where we’ve been—that one thing is dying, and something new is being born right now.”
Korine views Aggro Dr1ft (the first feature production from his new “multidisciplinary design collective,” EDGLRD) as some totally new form, distinct from the hoary old motion pictures of old. This despite the fact that it premiered at several international film festivals from Venice to Toronto to New York City, where it screened in spaces designated as “movie theaters”—and the more basic reality that it quite literally is a movie.
