A Surprisingly Relevant Blockbuster About Artificial Intelligence
www.theatlantic.com › culture › archive › 2023 › 09 › the-creator-movie-review › 675462
This story seems to be about:
- AI ★★
- Alphie ★★★★
- America ★
- American ★
- Artificial Intelligence ★★★
- Asia ★
- Avatar ★★
- CGI ★★
- Chris Weitz ★★★★
- Creator ★★★★
- Edwards ★★★
- Gareth Edwards ★★★★
- Gemma Chan ★★★
- George Lucas ★★★
- James Cameron ★★★
- John David Washington ★★★★
- Joshua ★★★
- MacGuffin ★★★★
- Madeleine Yuna Voyles ★★★★
- Maya ★★★
- NOMAD ★★★
- Rebel Alliance ★★★★
- Rogue One ★★★
- Thailand ★★
- US ★
- Viet Cong ★★★★
- Washington ★
This story seems to be about:
- AI ★★
- Alphie ★★★★
- America ★
- American ★
- Artificial Intelligence ★★★
- Asia ★
- Avatar ★★
- CGI ★★
- Chris Weitz ★★★★
- Creator ★★★★
- Edwards ★★★
- Gareth Edwards ★★★★
- Gemma Chan ★★★
- George Lucas ★★★
- James Cameron ★★★
- John David Washington ★★★★
- Joshua ★★★
- MacGuffin ★★★★
- Madeleine Yuna Voyles ★★★★
- Maya ★★★
- NOMAD ★★★
- Rebel Alliance ★★★★
- Rogue One ★★★
- Thailand ★★
- US ★
- Viet Cong ★★★★
- Washington ★
Gareth Edwards’s new blockbuster, The Creator, couldn’t have picked a better moment to arrive on the big screen. A sci-fi epic from a director who plays best in theaters (his previous films include Rogue One and Godzilla), The Creator is set in a world where artificial intelligence inhabits its own stratum of society, as a robotic underclass invented to serve humans. When he started co-writing the movie with his Rogue One collaborator Chris Weitz in 2018, “AI was up there with flying cars and living on the moon,” Edwards recently said. Now it’s a topic of constant global discourse, hailed and feared as an innovation that is reshaping societal norms on a daily basis.
The machine intelligence in The Creator is a far cry from the enigmatic chatbots dominating the news in 2023. In the film, AI has evolved into a species unto itself, a cadre of humanoid robots who initially function as part of American society but are eventually forced to leave the country after a cataclysmic incident sparks a global human-AI war. This is all explained in a brief, cable-newsy preamble, before the viewer is plunged into the middle of a conflict that practically never lets up. Here the topicality grows trickier, because The Creator is not really about AI as we currently understand it. Rather, it’s a broader metaphor for every insurgent foe America has fought since World War II.
This is not new for the sci-fi genre: Star Wars was designed by George Lucas, rather explicitly, as a Vietnam War allegory, with its Rebel Alliance imagined as a sort of Viet Cong resisting its larger imperial oppressors. The Creator functions along the same lines, but it boldly underlines how America has become the bad guy, seeking to wipe AI off the planet even though all of the world’s robots have already fled to Asia. Much as in James Cameron’s Avatar films, the U.S. military is presented as fearsome, ruthless, and largely immoral; it creates a terrifying orbital platform named NOMAD that circles the skies, dropping gigantic bombs on targets near and far.
All of this is fascinating—but it’s also largely background noise. The Creator is not too interested in world-building beyond these basics. Its protagonist, Joshua (played by John David Washington), is an undercover operative embedded with a group of robot guerrilla fighters, and the film follows him as he falls in love with a rebel fighter named Maya (Gemma Chan); he eventually deploys to Asia in search of a mysterious superweapon that takes the form of an adorable robot child named Alphie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles). The pace of the movie is relentless, chasing Joshua behind enemy lines; barely five minutes goes by without some massive explosion or exchange of gunfire.
[Read: The coming humanist renaissance]
This action takes place against many stunning backdrops: The Creator looks tremendous, partly because Edwards shot the film in gorgeous landscapes around the world (mostly in Thailand), taking every advantage of this natural beauty instead of depending on CGI sets. It’s an approach to blockbuster action that’s far more engaging than the empty, grayscale battle zones of several recent superhero films, and it looks just as good or better than Edwards’s previous two blockbusters, despite being made on a far smaller budget.
It’s just unfortunate that the story is overflowing with familiar tropes. Alphie, the well-meaning superweapon who functions as the film’s MacGuffin, descends from a long line of cute-kid characters designed to curry audience sympathy, but she lacks any real personality. Joshua’s love interest, Maya, is off-screen for almost the whole film, confined to a few ethereal flashbacks that leave her feeling like an underdeveloped plot device. Though Washington does his best to infuse Joshua with some real grit and spirit, the spectacle of The Creator is the film’s real star, which isn’t quite enough to sustain a running time of more than two hours.
Even so, The Creator is a high-level craft achievement that is undeniably cool on a big screen. I was intrigued by many of the ideas bubbling away within the movie’s larger world; I wanted to know more about the AI warriors and civilians Joshua encounters, and the society around them. American imperialism has been portrayed as villainous in other movies, but there’s some transgressive thrill to the film’s bluntly negative depiction. Still, the allegory stays thin throughout, light on details but easy for any audience member to recognize. Here, robots are just another Rebel Alliance to rally around. They’re easy to root for, yes, but they’re mere clones of underdogs past.