Review of The Creator (2023)
Seen in 2023.
10–15 years into a land war in Asia, the main advantage of the USA and its allies is a big space station with missiles. Their enemy, a group of Asian nations that have welcomed artificial intelligence in the form of anthropomorphic robots, may have developed a secret countermeasure: A robot child that can telepathically control electronics.
The script of this movie is dumb. All of the characters in it are also dumb, but they have to be because the premises of the story are so lazy. The AI in it makes no sense, whether technologically, economically, militarily or spiritually.
Technologically, it’s all retrofuture mechanics where you configure the moving parts by hand, like an over-evolved Curta inverted and spinning inside the head of the more human-like robots. There is no in-universe rationale for any of this. In a 2024 interview with Corridor Crew, director Gareth Edwards explicitly confirmed his out-of-universe goal, which was to make a movie about robots but “humanize” them. The spinning-cylinder design was selected to preserve the skin of the throat of the human actors, because this makes them look more human and “alive”. The rest of the tech is heavy on monochrome screens and grainy holograms, with landline phones instead of smart ones, even in the more advanced AI-aligned society. It is not clear whether the Internet is supposed to have been dismantled, or why there are no software agents outside humanoid robot bodies, or why the robots look human and alive.
Economically, the robots are made by hand in factories, as if AI could not assist in automation or decentralization in a decade of war. That war looks like a metaphor for the Vietnam War: In every meaningful way it’s a human-on-human conflict where artificial intelligence is just an allegory for a different human culture. In that way it’s even more rounded than The Lifecycle of Software Objects (2010). Interestingly, there is no socioeconomic class metaphor, which makes for a notable difference between this movie and Elysium (2013).
Militarily, it’s mostly visible-beam weapons and strangely shrapnel-free oily explosions, with no real differences between the offensive or defensive capabilities of humans vs. robots. There are portable EMP guns, but no chemical or biological weapons and no drones. This cannot be explained by the loose notion that the AI faction is only trying to defend itself, not go on the offensive. There is no known reason why the AI faction won’t shoot down the space station or hack it from Earth.
Spiritually, humans and AI are again identical. There are numerous Buddhist robot monks in this movie and they look awesome, but they’re nonsense, like the psychic powers. Magic is another important difference between this and Bloomkamp’s Elysium, but it’s such superficial plot-token magic that it doesn’t even build up to a theme. The link between the title (“The Creator”), the child (“Alpha and Omega”, Revelation) and Christian pop culture is the theme. The message is that we should avert AI-related problems through spiritual communion. It’s a useless message, but there is a broadly humanist thread at the symbolic level, unrelated to the robot designs, that I think improves upon Bloomkamp’s cynicism.
I enjoyed the visuals. Most especially, the middle looks good. There are three brief sequences of temps mort in SF backpacker Thailand, marred by jump cuts and dialogue but still rich with beauty: Both natural beauty and the beauty of ersatz Simon Stålenhag’s design sensibility meeting the messy, political futurism of “Pocketful of Dharma” (1999). One of these sequences is at the very end of the 子 chapter (“THE CHILD”) and the other two are in 母 (“THE MOTHER”). Some single shots were created from reference and scouting footage just for the novelty of applying VFX to non-actors, thus robotizing everyday life in Thailand. I enjoyed the scattered Japanese in signs and dialogue, but the orthography is chintzy (there’s a ハッピーボウル restaurant in Thailand where the ー character goes the wrong way). Thai and Japanese soldiers have all learned one another’s languages, somehow.
I went to the cinema for this movie because it’s an honest attempt at a big-budget SF original, not based on a book, game, previous film or other IP. It’s highly derivative, all the same. The worldbuilding has no new ideas, and few good ones. The presentation is Blade Runner (1982) meets Baraka (1992), with too much of a loosely sketched romantic drama instead of the angst of Akira (1988). See it for the visuals and hope for smarter things to come.
References here: Mars Express (2023).