The Creator - Review Thread

Film fans spill endless amounts of ink complaining about the fact that Hollywood mostly only makes sequels and franchise fare and don’t invest in original or standalone IPs. It’s a mantra that gets repeated so often that you’d think people would instinctively be a lot more excited when Hollywood actually listens and does invest in something like that but all too often these people who constantly ask for original blockbusters really do not put their money where their mouths are and when actually given something like that will just say “meh, whatever” when this unknown prospect doesn’t immediately sell them with a trailer or have some other hook or metanarrative generating buzz. That having been said, no movie is owed a good review just because its success would hypothetically send “the right message” to Hollywood and maybe encourage other original movies to be made. Being a “real movie” instead of a studio marketing concoction will earn a movie my attention and some benefit of the doubt but at the end of the day it has to deliver. And this brings us to the film of the hour, Gareth Edwards The Creator, an $80 million science fiction movie based on an original screen story by its promising young director and which boasts the ambition of being a high minded movie about war and the ethics of robotics. Everything about that makes it sound like something I’d normally be excited to support, and yet… I don’t know. The final product has a lot going for it but I must say I have serious reservations.

The film opens with a montage of retro-futuristic news reports suggesting an alternate history (though the timeline is a bit muddled) in which humans developed artificially intelligent robots to do their work for them but that this ended when the artificial intelligence seemingly launched a nuclear weapon at Los Angeles leading to the western world banning the technology but coming into conflict with “New Asia” (which appears to be a confederation of Southeast Asian countries) who want to keep this technology, which has sparked a war that has gone on for fifteen years as the film begins. The film follows Joshua Taylor (John David Washington), who was involved in an undercover operation five years earlier that sought to uncover a master programmer known only as Nirmata and was so deep undercover that he has married a local woman named Maya Fey-Taylor (Gemma Chan) with ties to Nirmata, but she was killed by a missile strike when this mission got botched, which also led to Taylor losing an arm and a leg. Now the western army seems to have gotten the upper hand in the war because of a floating battle station they’ve developed called NOMAD but are worried that this advantage could be undone with a super weapon being developed by the other side and Taylor is convinced to go on a mission to find this but his real motives is go to New Asia to see if Maya may actually still be alive. Once there they find the “super weapon” and it’s actually just a child robot called Alpha-O (Madeleine Yuna Voyles) who has some sort of ability to shut down technology with its mind. As the mission goes south Taylor finds himself behind enemy lines with this child/weapon and goes on the run being pursued by both the New Asian Police and the Western forces who now believe him to be a traitor.

It does not take a rocket scientist to see what Gareth Edwards is trying to do with this war story: it’s plainly an allegory for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The nuclear strike on Los Angeles is meant to be September 11th, the war against A.I. is the war against radical Islam, Nirmata is Osama Bin Laden, and NOMAD is the drone strike program. Edwards sets all this in what is more or less Vietnam, so there’s probably some of that mixed in but otherwise it’s pretty clearly a take on the War on Terror and one that’s probably a little stale at this point. Maybe it’s a little misguided to view an event as disastrous as Iraq to be already tapped for storytelling of this kind but it probably says something that this kind of allegory already felt pretty tired when Star Trek Into Darkness tried to do it a full decade ago and generally speaking this sort of thing lacks bite when the war it’s criticizing is already over. Beyond that the film kind of handles this allegory rather clumsily and without a lot of nuance. Misguided as the “war on terror” was, there were in fact actual terrorists in the middle east being targeted by it. Here we’re told late in the film that the strike on Los Angeles was actually caused by human coding errors and that the decision to blame it on A.I. was a cover story, meaning that the war as a whole was a psy-op against fully innocent and harmless people rather than a tragic over-reaction to a legitimate threat. If you’re take this seriously as an allegory that revelation is kind of indirectly sends this into dangerous “Bush did 9/11” territory, and even if you don’t take it that way it mostly seems to just serve to give the movie a clear set of good guys and bad guys to root for and against in a way that seems like something of a copout. Needless to say this also means that the movie doesn’t actually have much of anything meaningful to say about Artificial Intelligence, which is mostly just used as a McGuffin to explain why the fictional war started, and in doing so it pretty well discards what would have been a keen opportunity to comment on something a lot more topical.

So, I don’t think the ideas here really amount to the kind of “smart sci-fi” that this bills itself as and maybe I shouldn’t be too surprised at that given the track record of Gareth Edwards, a guy who seemed to have a lot of potential but who at this point I’m starting to think has mostly amounted to being sort of a less bro-y and action driven Zack Snyder. Like Snyder he’s not really someone I can dismiss as a total hack as he does have a legitimate knack for strong imagery and knows how to make movies that feel like they have real passion behind them and aren’t just regurgitating audience pleasing formulas but who also don’t really have the engines under the hood to really power them. But… those visuals do count for something and this movie does indeed look very good. Edwards shot the film in the ultra-wide 2.76:1 aspect ratio (previously used for Ben-Hur and more recently The Hateful Eight) and uses some pretty top of the line special effects given that this was more of a mid-budget film by Hollywood standards than something like a superhero movie. Like his Rogue One it exists in a nicely worn out and detailed world and Edwards seems to have put a lot of thought into the design of various world elements and his robots, which are like humans but with the backs of their skulls replaced with mechanics look really cool. There are also some pretty decent action scene to be found here, not necessarily anything too pulse pounding and memorable but it does hold its own.