‘The Creator’ 20th Century Studios.
By Geoff Daniels
The Creator (2023) is a film that finds itself out of time. Although it is a stunning display of Gareth Edwards’ mastery of visual effects and atmospheric imagery, this imagery rests on a flimsy base due to the repetition — rather than the alteration — of conventional science fiction tropes.
The story of The Creator is one that may have been groundbreaking in a time past; post ChatGPT, AI “art,” and the plethora of AI tools being placed into the cultural
zeitgeist in the last year, the film loses itself in a muddied water of mundanity and unoriginality. The Creator presents a world where sentient AI is a reality, leading to AI humanoids
becoming integrated into society.
However, this process comes to its most apocalyptic end, as AI is deemed responsible for the destruction of Los Angeles after the accidental explosion of a nuclear device. War ensues, pitting humanity against AI as they flee safe havens in Asia. The United States is unrelenting in its genocide against the AI as they build a super weapon in an effort to eradicate it, Joshua, played by John David Washington, is a special operative tasked with finding the AI’s response to this weapon, the child Alphie, and eliminating it.
Over the history of the genre, films such as Metropolis (1927), Blade Runner (1982), and Ex Machina (2015) have all explored the subject matter of sentience in machines, as well as how
these machines approach humanity. These films act as character studies, studying human society and the personal relationships humans have with industry, technology, and artificial intelligence.
All three films have extremely compelling stories that, especially in the case of the latter two, offer very nuanced and contemplative views into the concept of robotic humanity and how we operate and will operate in the future when it comes to robotics and AI. It is in this nuance that these films find great success, and have become the classics that we know them as today.
‘The Creator’ 20th Century Studios.
Where The Creator falls short is in its approach to this subject. The film takes no new turns, no detours while telling its story, as it relays in very simple terms how AI can be human and their humanity means that we should see them as more than just machines.
The way The Creator tackles the subject of AI is fairly two-dimensional, relying on the well-worn sci-fi trope that uses A.I. as an allegory for how we perpetrate suffering onto others and how we should see humanity in everything despite how different they may seem. Although this concept has its place in the genre and in cinema at large (as shown by the stories of the three films I mentioned previously), The Creator fails to innovate on this premise and therein lies its problem.
This problem is only accentuated by the premise being extremely diluted for today’s audience due to the reality of AI as it exists now. This allegory does not resonate as soundly as it once did not in small part due to AI no longer being an entirely fictional concept. The science fiction films that I previously mentioned benefitted from AI and robotic life being a distant fantasy.
However, in the last six months. AI has become a reality, even if it is not the most stereotypical version of AI as seen in films and other media. ChatGPT, AI art and other AI tools are representative of the technology as it exists today, and this AI today is a buzzword used for a rapidly expanding technology, none of which is representative of the stereotypical robot that looks human and develops emotions.
All of this is to say that the presence of AI in society has made the tropes used in The Creator even less effective, and therein lies its struggle. Although there is always the argument that this film was not designed to be a nuanced contemplation on humanity and machine — rather a blockbuster original intellectual property — this lack of innovation severely limits the film’s staying power and renders its IP something catastrophic: boring.
The Creator is a film that is too late, and too simple. Its reliance on story beats from a long-gone era of science fiction as well as the fictionalized elements of its story becoming science fact in reality makes it a dazzling but ultimately thin experience.
At least it’s not A.I.-generated art out of 5.
About Reece Nations
