{"id":667961,"date":"2026-10-28T16:32:10","date_gmt":"2026-10-28T16:32:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/667961\/"},"modified":"2026-10-28T16:32:10","modified_gmt":"2026-10-28T16:32:10","slug":"castle-walls-review-primes-first-fully-ai-generated-show-is-here-and-its-a-vaseline-smeared-mess-television","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/667961\/","title":{"rendered":"Castle Walls review \u2013 Prime\u2019s first fully AI-generated show is here, and it\u2019s a Vaseline-smeared mess | Television"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just as the world reels from Elon Musk\u2019s AI-powered The Odyssey remake<\/a> \u2013 though \u201cremake\u201d feels rather generous for a seven-minute splat of synthetic sludge \u2013 another bucket of AI gunk is dropped on to our faces. For Prime Video\u2019s AI-generated TV series Castle Walls, produced by Turkish production studio Ay Yap\u0131m using a melange of generative video tools, has arrived, billed as the first end-to-end AI-created series to premiere on a major streaming platform.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s certainly more epic than Musk\u2019s production, consisting of two 17-minute episodes. Set in the 11th century, the show revolves around the historic Alamut Castle, although it\u2019s entirely absent of any real sense of time or place. I was briefly intrigued by the opening images, with their bold palette of blues and mustard browns and yellows \u2013 but as soon as the \u201cpeople\u201d appeared, looking like Vaseline-smeared Madame Tussauds creations slowly melting in the sun, everything came crashing down.<\/p>\n

\u2018Like Vaseline-smeared Madame Tussauds creations slowly melting in the sun\u2019: screenshot from Castle Walls. Computer-generated: Amazon Prime Video \/ YouTube<\/p>\n

There are lots of heady moments across the first two episodes of this oddly paced show, with cranky-looking men aplenty and over-milked visual metaphors involving the likes of snakes, blood and fire. Everything looks like it was cooked up with the prompt: \u201cGive me eye-watering visuals.\u201d The opening shot depicts an eagle being transported across a desert in a cage (\u201cmake it look cinematic\u201d), followed by a longshot of the castle (\u201cmake it more cinematic\u201d) then an aerial shot of men arriving on horseback (\u201cmake it MORE MORE MORE cinematic\u201d).<\/p>\n

\u2018Overloaded with grand and imposing imagery\u2019: screenshot from Castle Walls. Computer-generated: Amazon Prime Video \/ YouTube<\/p>\n

We learn of the arrival in Alamut of a \u201cfreak\u201d who \u201cdoesn\u2019t eat or drink\u201d and is intent on claiming these sweet digs for himself. This is Hasan Sabbah, who is supposed to be charismatic but looks plasticky and spectral, with a complexion like wet glue. He has somehow inspired an army of followers and ventures into the castle\u2019s dungeons to recruit one more: the notorious warrior Azazil.<\/p>\n

The frame is overloaded with grand and imposing imagery: when Azazil says goodbye to loved ones, of course the scene takes place in front of a milky sunset. When he fangs it across the desert on a horse at night, of course there\u2019s a white full moon glowing resplendently above. When the doors of the mighty castle creak open, in the lead-up to a big moment in episode two, of course incandescent orange sunlight streams through the widening gap.<\/p>\n

\u2018Viewers seem less interested in what the technology promises than in what it threatens to take away: art imbued with humanity.\u2019 Computer-generated: Amazon Prime Video \/ YouTube<\/p>\n

Make no mistake: the technology powering this is amazing and will profoundly alter the state of motion pictures. Productions like Castle Walls are among the first out of the gates, and therefore prone to snarky commentary. Perhaps AI will end up being broadly comparable to early silent films: revolutionary at the time, but quickly eclipsed by more sophisticated applications of the technology. But whereas the earliest motion pictures, famously dubbed the \u201ccinema of attractions\u201d by the historian Tom Gunning, provided some carnival-like wonder, these AI works tend to evoke a more cynical response from the general public. Viewers understandably seem less interested in what the technology promises than in what it threatens to take away: art imbued with humanity.<\/p>\n

The sensible path forward is surely for human and machine to enter into a reciprocal and carefully collaborative process, where artists only use algorithms and prompts to enhance, rather than replace, human creativity. On that front, Castle Walls did use human voice actors and was reportedly written by actual human screenwriters: Kerem Deren and \u00c7isil Hazal Tenim. \u201cThis is not a production that bypassed human skill; it is one that used AI to amplify it,\u201d Ay Yap\u0131m has said.<\/a><\/p>\n

But that\u2019s hardly something to crow about, given how banal and chuckleheaded the writing is, puffed-up with lines like \u201cI\u2019ve stopped being a decent man\u201d and \u201cif I am the sheaf, you are the sword.\u201d Were they really trying to make good art? Maybe that\u2019s a question for ChatGPT.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Just as the world reels from Elon Musk\u2019s AI-powered The Odyssey remake \u2013 though \u201cremake\u201d feels rather generous…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":667962,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,61,60,80],"class_list":["post-667961","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/667961","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=667961"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/667961\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/667962"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=667961"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=667961"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=667961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}