The Creator

As the war between humanity and artificial intelligence rages on, Sergeant Joshua Taylor, a gruff ex-special forces soldier, having lost his entire family to the ravages of the conflict, is recruited to hunt down and kill the elusive architect of advanced AI, the mysterious Creator known as Nimrata. This Creator is rumored to have built a weapon that will end the war and bring about the extinction of mankind. But upon venturing deep into enemy-occupied territory, Joshua discovers that he is unable to complete his mission, as the world-ending weapon is actually an AI in the form of a young child.

Right from the start, I want to say… this is a gorgeous film, with stunning special effects. As far as that is concerned, The Creator is really impressive. It is, without a doubt, a constantly cool-looking film. Beyond that, the movie is basically just doing everything it can to resemble a piece of profound science fiction, but without doing any of the actual work, as a result, it’s got nothing to offer.

This is the whole problem.

Rich in atmosphere. Short on substance.

Director and co-writer Gareth Edwards’ film has the pretty shell of a serious sci-fi drama, but inside, it’s stuffed with hot garbage, nothing but recycled images and ideas from far better films. Any strengths it might have had at the start of the movie have all faded away by the time the story has lumbered on to its obvious ending, having grown progressively thinner and increasingly superficial as it went on, all while leaning hard on these big emotional moments that simply do not land at all, mostly because the film puts zero effort into actually earning any of them.

But hey… at least it looks cool while doing it.

The Creator starts out with a fun 1950’s “World of Tomorrow” tinged montage that brings us up to speed on a world where artificial intelligence started out decades ago as a welcome element of our society, insinuating itself into every facet of our lives, from chefs to surgeons, nannies to cops, and athletes to astronauts. Nothing but shiny happy people holding hands. At least until Los Angeles is nuked, killing millions, with AI rebel forces getting the blame. An American-led coalition of Western Nations then outlaws AI, and immediately launches a war against anywhere else in the world where AI robots remain welcome, mainly focusing on New Asia, a new nation formed out of an amalgamation of various Asian cultures. The Americans primarily wage this war from high above the planet in a massive low-orbit military platform that rains death down on the developing nations far below.

This sequence is all really well done and effective, but after that, there isn’t a single moment in this film where you don’t know exactly what is going to happen next.

Not a single one. Not for a moment.

The plot is basically… a grizzled former samurai is asked to bare his blade once again, something he has vowed never to do. He was once a killer of some renown, and is now haunted by the sins of his past, because he not only lost his parents and his city to AI, and the resulting war has not only literally cost him an arm and a leg, but he also lost his wife and his unborn child too. As a result, he’s super sad. Like, he’s the most sad now. The most. Will he ever learn to love again? Can a tiny little Precious Moments Figurines-like Christ-bot be the one that teaches him?

I don’t want to spoil it for you, but… yes. Yes, it can.

Nominally, this is a film about love, family, grief and redemption, but it’s all surface, it’s all stated, it’s all obvious. It’s so broad and shallow, it almost feels like they made the film out of the synopsis. I do appreciate that America and its imperialist foreign policy are the bad guys, which makes sense, but it’s all told using some very out-dated feeling Vietnam War/Cyberpunk visual language. The film as a whole is not just heavy with metaphor, but heavy handed with it too. If there was ever a moment of subtlety in this movie, or at any time during its Production, it was long ago taken out back to be curb-stomped by bloated pig-men in filthy leather war gear as they snorted and screamed to the heavens “Fuck you, subtlety! Fuck you!”

Stomp, stomp, stomp.

Not every facet of this film is bad. The cast is great. John David Washington makes the most of the broad strokes that define his character. Gemma Chan, Ken Watanabe, and Sturgill Simpson all do a great job, and Allison Janney is perfect, as always, as the relentless, self-righteous, vindictive, and entitled American Mama Bear, who is more than willing to murder anyone different from her. Also, the film really does look good. Plus, who doesn’t love a sequence where a monkey detonates a bomb attached to a massive American tank… although, if you look for a metaphor in that moment, it quickly becomes a bit problematic…

Anyway…

This was a real “down with American imperialism” film, which I’m definitely for, but it was also a weirdly pro-AI film, which I’m against. Honestly, I’m shocked this film didn’t get pushed back a little bit simply because of that, because the meta-awareness of the current real world issues with AI really hampers the empathy for the characters, who are already struggling in a plodding and tediously evident story. How do you put out a movie at this point in time that suggests AI replacing humans in a variety of scenarios isn’t such a bad idea, especially when it’s one of the exact scenarios that the Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTA have been striking against? Where are the PR people here? Were they replaced by AI?

It’s a little bit of extra off-putting weirdness for the big pile of disappointment.

Because that’s the worst part about The Creator for me, the disappointment. I really wanted this to be good. I did. It looked awesome. Everything about it is potentially right up my alley. But honestly, the moment I saw the first trailer, as soon as I saw that the plot was gonna revolve around a preternaturally wise and cherubic robot child being shepherded by a gruff human soldier, so that the cherubic robot child can teach us all, both human and AI, the value of love and acceptance, I knew this thing was going to turn out to be shallow pap. I knew it.

And damn it, I was right.

I’ve heard this film called a dumb person’s idea of smart sci-fi, but I think it’s worse than that, it’s a lazy person’s attempt at smart sci-fi. It’s obvious that at some point, the people behind this film decided that they just didn’t want to carefully color in all the small, but very important and very much needed, spaces of human emotion and character arcs. They were just too in love with the big picture itself to bother. They didn’t want to have to take all that time to carefully consider, to address the details, and instead, they just splashed buckets of paint all over the thing and called it good.

Thumbs down.