Darren Aronofsky’s AI Videos Are A Fitting Tribute To America, I Guess

Darren Aronofsky's AI production studio Primordial Soup was announced in May of 2025 during Google's annual developer conference. The launch was meant to burnish the pioneering reputations of both entities simultaneously: Google released a new version of its text-to-video model Veo and an AI video tool called Flow, while Aronofsky, like a worrying number of other filmmakers, sought to forge a new and daring path into unknown technological territory by partnering with one of the world's biggest tech companies. In a classically hyperbolic statement crediting the dawn of a new artform with hardware rather than human creativity, Aronofsky said, "Filmmaking has always been driven by technology. After the Lumiere Brothers and Edison's ground-breaking invention, filmmakers unleashed the hidden storytelling power of cameras."  The first Primordial Soup project was a short film called Ancestra, directed by Eliza McNitt, which used a combination of AI-generated images, live-action photography, and computer-generated animation to make, in essence, a stupid, eight-minute version of Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. Ponderous, whispery voiceover narration from a mother to her unborn child plays over vignettes of macro photography showing cells, microorganisms, fish, and nature. Drop into the film without context and you would be forgiven for thinking you were watching a drug commercial.  It seemed like Primordial Soup, its name so brazen in Aronofsky's already infamous pretensions, laid low for the rest of 2025. In January of this year, it announced a series of videos exploring the founding of the United States, tied to the 250th anniversary, in collaboration with the most relevant and cutting-edge news organization in the country, Time magazine. The series is called On This Day … 1776 and has steadily been making waves online, mostly in the YouTube comments. "Wow this is freaking EPIC if you like dogshit!!!" reads one representative entry. "It’s like poop from a butt" is a little repetitive, but "This is the most beautiful thing ive ever seen since i spilled acid in my eyes after i drank all that mercury" communicates a vivid encapsulation of the experience of watching such pointless dreck.