Everyman Bristol
A big new science fiction franchise arrives with hardly any fanfare. But maybe that's the point. The Creator is not The New Star Wars or The Next Extended Marvel Universe, although it could clearly take a sequel or seventeen. Gareth Edwards directed the very good Star Wars cul-de-sac, Rogue One, which was distinctly stand alone and left now room whatsoever for a follow-up, unless you count Andor. So maybe The Creator stands of falls as a self-contained entity. Which It should please the people who found Ashoka intimidating, at any rate.SPOILER WARNING: In Rogue One, everybody dies.
The Creator feels big. It feels important. Maybe a little self-important. Mythic, even. It vomits out an intriguing alternate history in the pre-cred with more panache than anything since Watchmen, although admittedly without the help of Bob Dylan. It's an action movie, certainly, but it keeps behaving as if it's an art-house picture. I found myself making mental notes of which films it reminded me of. Rogue One, obviously, if only for the ending. Platoon, for it's artistic treatment of the horrors of war. Silent Running, for the down beat ending and the hippy sensibilities and the cute robot and the hydroponics. (No Joan Baez either.) 2001 for its chapter headings and mystical weirdness and its sacred children. Blade Runner for its oriental cyberpunk stylings. Avatar for American servicemen going native. Openhiemer, for the callous American military and the very large explosions. Captain America: Civil War for the Shield Helicarrier. District 9 for the slightly heavy handed political allegory. The Matrix, obviously. The Terminator films. I've actually never seen Terminator, but I bet I'm right.
Does this mean it's derivative? The plot is certainly the weakest thing about it. But if the major twists are all pretty transparent, the corkscrew has enough kinks in it that the film's structure surprises us. It's rare that I genuinely think -- as opposed to fervently hope -- that a film is coming to an end thirty minutes before it actually does; where the downbeat ending is a prelude to an apocalyptic climax. At one point it's heading for horribly sad; then changes direction into uplifting and triumphal but finally settles for poignant but hopeful. It is shockingly sentimental. The Shield Helicarrier appears to have a hydroponics section purely so that the hero can be reunited with his true love in wavy long grass.
We're thirty years in the future on a parallel time line where AI was developed in the 1950s and has progressed to robot policemen, robot soldiers, and robot civil servants, with a mysterious figure called THE CREATOR having developed sentient robots with human faces and apparent emotions. But the AI in (what is referred to as) New Asia has accidentally nuked Los Angeles, provoking America into a war against the machines.
The film is almost completely uninterested in AI as a concept. It was presumably conceived rather before Chatbot made the possibility of humans being replaced by predictive text algorithms a genuine possibility. It's pretty much taken for granted that the android level AIs have feelings and agency and emotions: a lot of the story would have been the same if America was at war with aliens or evil humans. Robot are easy enough to spot, but the big cavities in their heads: this isn't Westworld or Blade Runner. It's about being on the wrong side in a genocidal, racist and presumably un-win-able war, and yes, they do describe the nuclear site in LA as Ground Zero. A lot of the plot would be similar if the enemy were aliens or communists or Palestinians.
Our hero, Joshua (John David Washington) is embedded in New Asia with a Maya (Gemma Chan) who may be the daughter of THE CREATOR who designed the sentient AIs. He has fallen in love with and married her, and she is pregnant with his child; but the American military nevertheless nukes the site from orbit. (Joshua spends the rest of the film with robotic prosthetics, a point which is not particularly underlined in the script.) Years later, the military reveals that Maya may still be alive and that THE CREATOR may now be working on THE WEAPON which could take out human technology remotely and win the war. He's offered the chance to extract her before they nuke the site again, and agrees.
There was a moment in the first half hour -- when Joshua and some tough talking marines are trying to extract Maya from a New Asian / AI base -- when I thought I had irrevocably committed myself to watching three hours of Vietnam-only-with-robots. (Shall I tell you a secret? I never enjoyed District 9 that much. Or, indeed, Apocalypse Now.) But in fact, the various sub-chapters of the movie are in very different styles. It turns out [and this really is a MAJOR SPOILER but I don't see how I can review the movie without say so] that THE WEAPON is an AI simulant in the form of an eight year old child, who says all the cute and poignant things you would expect a child to say in this sort of picture.
JOSHUA:"Only good people go to heaven"
CHID: "Then neither of us are going to heaven, because you are not good and I am not a person."
She doesn't at any point doubt the existence of spoons, but you feel it's the kind of thing she might do. Naturally, Joshua bonds with the child; and the middle-section of the film is a kind of road-movie-chase as they try to escape US agents behind enemy lines. But the final act shifts much more to the language of James Bond or the MCU as Joshua and The Child try to destroy Nomad (the American nuke-the-site-from-orbit station) before it wipes out all the sentient robots in United Asia.
The film has a structural complexity which belies a relatively gung-ho storyline. There is quite a lot of flashbacking and flashforwarding and quite a large cast. The ending is so sentimental that it ought to be quarantined, but it also has a kind of mythic resonance which very nearly works. The technology and the backstory are sufficiently well developed that your heart buys into them, even if your head periodically says "hang on...wait a minute". I think I probably only absorbed about two thirds of the world-building on a single view, and will happily sit though it again to make sure I understood it all. It's not the kind of imaginary world that makes you think "I want to live there" (or more likely "I want to play in an RPG set there"); we're always looking into a cinematic goldfish bowl from the outside. And maybe something which aspires to be both a proper grown up war movie and an all out action flick with robots will end up falling between two demographic stalls. But it convinced me and fascinated me and very slightly moved me.
I'm Andrew.
I am trying very hard to be a semi-professional writer and have taken the leap of faith of down-sizing my day job.
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