In almost every way that counts, The Creator is the sort of film I’ve been begging for. Amidst endless sequels, reboots, and cinematic universes, here is an honest-to-god original Hollywood blockbuster. It takes itself just seriously enough, neither winking at the camera nor lapsing into ponderousness. Its special effects are truly striking, avoiding both the weightless last-minute sludge of the Disney machine and the eye-searingly ugly kitsch of Avatar (I said what I said). Its action sequences are legible and thrilling. It has an actual ending, for god’s sake. I enjoyed myself, and when people ask me if they should go see it, I will probably answer yes.

But I’ll probably hesitate, and I might hedge a little bit, and the other person might come away unsure if I actually liked it or not. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure either. This is because there is a subtext to The Creator– and it’s really barely sub– which is so baffling, and so bizarrely timed, that I was genuinely taken aback. As much as I enjoyed the spectacle and the experience of seeing it on an enormous IMAX screen, I was left asking myself: they couldn’t possibly have meant that, could they?

The Creator opens with an expository newsreel, evoking the cheeky po-mo space-age aesthetic of the Fallout games. At some indeterminate point in the future, artificial intelligence has been developed to the point that robots have become an integral component of the workforce (the newsreel is skillfully assembled, with stock footage seamlessly blending into shots of CG androids). We then cut to what appears to be C-SPAN footage from sometime further down the timeline: a detonation, evidently triggered by AI, has completely obliterated Los Angeles. The US has swiftly outlawed AI, but our enemies in “New Asia” continue to harbor “sims,” lifelike cyborgs who are only identifiable by the exposed gears in their necks. American forces are routinely sent on raids to hunt down and exterminate sims and other ‘bots; their ultimate target is the mysterious Nirmata, a rogue scientist who continues to push the technology in exile.

Our hero is Joshua, played by John David Washington, a retired black-ops blade runner called in for One Last Job to hunt down and retrieve Nirmata’s latest weapon. That “weapon” turns out to be a beatific, monk-like robot child (Madeleine Yuna Voyles) whose godlike powers position her as a potential AI messiah– a DALL-E Lama, if you will. Joshua already has reason to be skeptical of the powers that be– his wife, an AI sympathist played in flashback by Gemma Chan, was killed in a botched raid that also left Joshua physically and psychically scarred– but as he shepherds his tiny charge through a series of hideouts and encampments he comes to question everything he knows about the war against artificial intelligence.

The best and most refreshing thing about The Creator is that it looks and feels like an actual movie. This sounds like a low bar– and I suppose it is– but it’s one we’ve been conditioned in recent years to believe is well out of range of a major studio tentpole. I don’t mean this as faint praise, however; The Creator truly looks fantastic. Rogue One director Gareth Edwards (whom I only recently learned is an entirely different person from The Raid: Redemption director Gareth Evans) clearly put a lot of time and thought into crafting the world of his film. Each production choice is in service of a cohesive whole. Edwards understands what the George Lucas of 1977 knew, and what the George Lucas of 1999 evidently forgot: that, in order to craft a convincing world, you have to make it look like people have lived there for more than a couple of months. There are shots and images in The Creator that took my breath away, and I can’t remember the last time I said that about a (non-Dune) mainstream popcorn space epic.

However.

Why oh why oh why, in the name of Isaac Asimov, would you make a humans-vs-AI movie in the year 2023 and have the humans be the bad guys? The AIs in the film are mostly portrayed as humble farmers in tranquil Asian villages, clearly meant to evoke the US military boondoggles in Vietnam and Cambodia. Humanity, on the other hand, is represented by squadrons of government-funded soldiers of fortune; one typical grunt threatens to shoot a puppy within seconds of touching down at a suspected AI stronghold. While I do appreciate the film’s Cameron-like cynicism toward the military-industrial complex (particularly after so many years of superhero movies which often play like stealth recruitment tools), the primary criticism seems to be toward the methods of containing AI, rather than the ethics of the military having employed AI in the first place. More than once, the AIs are referred to as an “evolution,” implying that humanity is raging against the inevitable. At any other time, this could be read as a thought-provoking hypothetical; in the moment, it reads as undeniably sinister.

Could this possibly have been Edwards’ intention? While the movie has evidently been in the works for years, the director appears to at least be aware of the potential implications. In an interview with the MIT Technology Review, Edwards revealed that he toyed with the idea of scoring the film via an AI trained on the music of Hans Zimmer. He claims the resulting soundtrack rated a “7 out of 10,” but ended up opting for the real deal because “the reason you go to Hans Zimmer is for 10 out of 10” (left unspoken is the fact that such a score would presumably be uncopyrightable, which likely wouldn’t have pleased his overlords at Disney). Still, he seems to welcome the use of AI in the creative space: “The people that are going to be okay are the people who don’t deny this breakthrough is happening, and embrace it and learn it, and try to use it as a tool.” Considering the Writers Guild of America is only just now resolving a months-long strike in which a central bone of contention was the fear that studios would employ artificial intelligence to supplement or replace the work of flesh-and-blood screenwriters, this statement seems naive at best, and, at worst, more than a little scabby.

Again, I don’t want to be too hard on The Creator; it really is a hell of a ride, and as action blockbusters go it’s got more meat on its bones than just about anything we’ve seen in ages. But you can’t separate a film from the political and cultural circumstances of its creation, least of all a science fiction film. What’s more, The Creator clearly wants you to make connections to what’s going on in the news; the term “AI” is used to refer to the cyborgs far more often than the in-universe terminology “sims,” even in instances where the latter would seem to make more sense on a purely grammatical level. The politics on display here are at once thuddingly obvious (sample dialog: “What would you like?” “For all robots to live in peace.” “…How about ice cream?”) and maddeningly incoherent. To take them at face value is to raise questions which often feel unconsidered by the filmmakers themselves.

In the week or so since I’ve seen The Creator, I’ve found myself thinking of another wholly original sci-fi blockbuster from what now seems like eons ago: 1999’s The Matrix. The two films are certainly comparable in imagination, in visual invention, and in earnestness (though a far cry from his famous father, Washington sells wide-eyed credulity as well as any action hero since Keanu). But the Wachowski sisters, ever the futurists, were steadfast in their conviction that a man-made hell is still preferable to a computer-generated paradise. It’s tough to be sure exactly what The Creator believes, but it’s equally difficult to shake the sense that it’s both-sidesing the robopocalypse. To be clear, I am not particularly concerned that AI, in its current form, will enslave humanity or encase us in little goop-pods; I’m worried that it will make us boring as shit. The greatest threat currently posed by artificial intelligence is toward original, outside-the-box entertainment like The Creator. If we’re to see more of its kind, we need to pray that the studios take notice of its innovation and visual panache while completely disregarding its message.

The Creator
2023
dir. Gareth Edwards
133 min.

Opens Friday, 9/29 @ Capitol Theatre and multiplexes everywhere