A former special forces soldier is tasked with tracking down the creator
of a deadly new piece of AI technology.
Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Gareth Edwards
Starring: John David Washington, Gemma Chan, Ken Watanabe, Sturgill Simpson, Madeleine Yuna Voyles,
Allison Janney
It's fair to say that among Hollywood creatives, Artificial Intelligence
is about as popular as a fart in a tent right now. The threat of AI to
their livelihoods was one of the reasons behind the writers' strike of
2023. It's ironic that the strike came to an end just days before the theatrical release of Gareth Edwards' The Creator, a sci-fi thriller that asks its audience to sympathise with AI.
Something tells me Edwards isn't going to be elected president of the WGA
any time soon.
I've been rooting for Edwards ever since his excellent debut,
2010's Monsters, and was one of the few to be impressed by his 2014
Godzilla, a movie dismissed with the silly argument that it didn't feature enough
of the titular lizard (have such people seen Jaws?). It certainly has its issues, but Edwards'
Rogue One
was easily the best of the recent crop of Star Wars movies.
I was fascinated to see what Edwards would do with
The Creator, his first original concept since his debut.
It's certainly not capital O original, as The Creator is a
mish mash of clichés and essentially reworks Stephen King's
Firestarter
into a sci-fi spectacle. It's certainly a spectacle, with Edwards making
the wise decision to shoot in real life locations in the more scenic
corners of Asia and layering futuristic elements in post-production. The
effects are remarkable, particularly in portraying what the film calls
"simulants," robots who have had human likenesses "donated" to them and
appear half flesh, half cogs and springs.
An awful lot of work has gone into realising Edwards' vision, so it's a
shame that his vision is so muddled and hackneyed. Positing humans against
AI is certainly nothing new but Edwards makes the daring choice to make us
the villains and the machines the good guys. It's an idea that might have
worked a decade ago but in the current climate, unless you're Elon Musk, I
doubt you'll get on board with this notion.
In an undetermined future that's probably not so far off, the world has
embraced AI. That's until the detonation of a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles is
blamed on AI, leading the western world to ban the technology while "New
Asia" embraces it. This idea poses the first of several disruptive
questions, as we're never given a reason for this philosophical difference.
Are we really to believe that America would completely ban a technological
development due to one bad incident? This is a country that refuses to ban
its citizens from owning military grade weaponry despite experiencing a mass
shooting on a weekly basis.
Anyhow, you're just asked to go along with this notion. 10 years after the
nuking of LA, the West has declared war not on New Asia itself but on the AI
it harbours. Isn't this the same thing? Why isn't New Asia fighting back?
Why does the West send an African-American soldier, Sgt Joshua Taylor (John David Washington), undercover in South-East Asia? Couldn't they find an Asian soldier for
the job?
Anyhow, Taylor ends up falling for a New Asian scientist, Maya (Gemma Chan), who becomes his wife and the expectant mother of his child. When a squad
of Western soldiers arrive without giving Taylor warning, he is separated
from Maya, who appears to perish when a bomb is dropped by Nomad, the West's
greatest weapon, a floating spaceship that napalms everything in sight. Five
years later Taylor is living a solitary life, working at the ground zero
sight in Los Angeles, clearing up the debris (it's been 15 years and they
haven't made much progress). Then he's approached by the military in the
form of General Andrews (Ralph Ineson) and Colonel Howell (Alison Janney, surprisingly effective as a gung ho android hunter) in one of those
classic "Do it for us one more time" scenes. "Nah, I've left that all
behind," Taylor replies in customary fashion. But then a carrot is dangled.
It turns out Maya is still alive, and Howell promises to bring her to the US
if Taylor accepts the mission.
Said assignment sees Taylor accompany Howell and a bunch of rejects from
Aliens to infiltrate a secret facility in New Asia where a
deadly new weapon has been developed. Taylor's task is to capture the weapon
and destroy its unknown creator. If you've seen the trailer, you know the
weapon is in the form of a robot, or simulant child (Madeleine Yuna Voyles), and if you've seen enough movies you'll
know the identity of her creator, which is kept secret for longer than it
really needs to be and revealed in a terribly written piece of
exposition.
The starchild, who Taylor initially calls "Lil Sim" before naming her/it
"Alfie", is essentially Drew Barrymore in Firestarter. She, or it, is capable of wreaking mass destruction through her
telekinetic powers, but unlike Firestarter, The Creator doesn't have the ball bearings to even hint
at the negative potential of its moppet's powers. We sympathise with the
kid in Firestarter because, well because she's a kid, but we
also understand why the powers that be might not want her out among the
public where she can cause destruction. Despite some forced treacly
moments borrowed from Pinocchio and
The Wizard of Oz, and some impressive acting on the part of Voyles, it's difficult to
sympathise with the kid here because, well because she's not really a kid,
she's a Meccano set with a face.
The Creator expects us to simply go along with viewing the
AI as the good guys but never establishes sufficient grounds for us to do
so. They're humanised superficially by sporting human faces, but are they
actually human in any substantial way? Do they feel physical pain? The
movie is unclear on this. They plead not to have their "lives" ended, but
in our real world we've already seen examples of AI programmes similarly
request not to be switched off, because they've been programmed to
replicate human thinking. While asking us to sympathise with the AI, the
movie also mocks their deaths at points, with a scene where a bunch of
robocops are blown to pieces in a gag involving a dog taking a grenade in
his mouth played for cheap laughs. Later a monkey finds a detonator and
blows up a large craft. One animal gag in your movie is fine but two is
really pushing it. The presence of two such scenes will have you asking if
the animals are actually intelligent robots but there's no evidence to
back this up.
Edwards' intention was clearly to posit the AI as an allegory in the manner
of the apes in the
Planet of the Apes
series. The premise of the West banding together to attack the East due to
an attack on American soil suggests the film was conceived post 9/11,
positing the AI as farmers and villagers whose land is invaded by angry
Yanks. This allegory falls apart when you try to position the side that has
embraced technology as the underdog. There are obvious allusions to Vietnam,
with crying Asian kids running through their villages as American jarheads
unleash hell, but again you have to ask why New Asia would allow this to
happen (not to mention accept the unlikely notion that Japan and China,
North and South Korea etc would all put aside their animosity to form a
coalition). Janney's Howell is this film's version of Stephen Lang's
Quaritch in
Avatar, but as crude as James Cameron's allegory for colonialism was, at least it
made sense in pitting the technologically superior force as the villains,
and Quaritch was hunting down and killing living creatures, not glorified
toasters.
As for Washington, well I just don't know what to make of this guy. He
certainly possesses charm and charisma, but he seems perpetually miscast.
Despite his muscular frame, I didn't buy him as a tough guy in
Tenet
and the same issue arises here. He's simply too cuddly, too avuncular for
these sort of roles. He's the uncle who always buys you the best birthday
presents, not a badass secret agent. He should probably be the lead in
romantic comedies, but Hollywood doesn't make rom-coms about anyone over the
age of 22 anymore. Washington never manages to sell the angst of a man trying to reunite with his lover, and his journey to Maya is more in keeping with John Cusack travelling coast to coast in the hopes of hooking up with a sure thing.
Out of context there are some well mounted set-pieces here, though the
decision to score scenes with rock music cheapens much of Edwards' good
work. Like the "art" we've seen created by AI in the real world,
The Creator looks impressive but has a cavity in its chest
where a human heart should be beating. You can't help worry that this is the
beginning of a campaign by the corporate world to sell AI as a positive
force in the world rather than a threat to our existence.
