“This is not what I signed up for,” my wife said, as we walked out of the theater. “Not saying it was a bad movie, but it was not what I signed up for.”
Which, honestly, is fair. The advertising underplayed the extent to which this is a War Movie, with both words capitalized, buried inside a science fiction world. And War Movies are definitely not my wife’s thing.
It’s a war movie way more than, say, “The Terminator” is. The backdrop of Terminator is a war, and there’s some exposition shots of a war happening, but the movie itself is a Chase Movie, about a small group of characters chasing each other around and having daring escapes and near-misses, and although the outcome of these chases resolves the background war in an abstract way, that’s not really the point by the end of it. It’s about Arnie’s journey towards a human moment, and John Connor turning his childhood trauma into leadership greatness, and Sarah Connor’s struggle to be taken seriously and not dismissed as mentally ill. It’s *personal*.
“The Creator”, while it certainly gives its main characters journeys and is effective in doing so, is much more *about* the outcome of a war between humans and A.I., as an allegory for the kind of general class/race struggle that so dominates the Western World’s zeitgeist nearly a quarter of the way through the twenty-first century.
If you like War Movies, this is a novel and interesting one, and you should see it. If you don’t, it’s probably going to be a lot to deal with from a central nervous system perspective.
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WARNING: SPOILERS FOLLOW. If the above made you excited to see the movie, consider stopping reading and going out to see it. If you don’t think you’re likely to see it, or you just don’t mind spoilers, read on.
The basic plot of The Creator is: Undercover operative in a human-A.I. war falls in love with his (human, but on the wrong side) target, marries her, gets her pregnant, and then she gets “killed” by a new superpowerful human weapon. Later, he finds a child-A.I. who is the machines’ ultimate weapon and he is supposed to kill it, but instead he teams up with it to try to find his wife (who is not only still alive, but is the greatest A.I. designer who ever lived), falls in love with the kid (who turns out to be based on his actual kid), and they take out the evil human sky weapon together, thus decisively turning the tide of the war in the direction in the A.I. (who, in the film’s one true cop-out, have already specified that when they win they’re actually *not* going to kill all the humans, because they just want to live in peace and actually it was a human false-flag operation that started the war in the first place. Um, lower the stakes much?!)
Yes, if you’re wondering, this film is incredibly anti-human and especially anti-American, which, in addition to limiting the film’s commercial potential (tracking to make less than its budget back domestically, not a total disaster but far, far from a hit) I find to be frankly kind of cloying and indulgent at this stage of cultural development. It’s not brave to hate on America/The West/Humanity anymore, it’s expected!
There’s much that’s positive to be said about it:
—The visuals are stunning and the production is first-rate. I’d compare it to “Dune” in terms of the seamless and clever use of CGI, and I’d compare it to a higher-budget “Ex Machina” in terms of costume and makeup effects.
—The characters are really well-developed and make you care. I’d expect nothing less from the writer-director of “Rogue One”, the greatest Star Wars film ever made, but it’s still worth saying that he nails it here, to the point that the film is genuinely harrowing in parts, especially if you’re a new parent.
—The allegory, while heavy-handed and misanthropic, is genuinely new and an interesting take on the A.I. trope. The world is developed thoroughly and believably, no easy feat when describing a radically different future.
—There are a bunch of really cool set pieces and sci fi gags (e.g. temporarily bringing back the dead by downloading their brain and loading it into an android) that drive the ploy and are just a lot of fun.
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There are three basic things, though, that kept it from being a masterpiece for me (and I *really* wanted this to be a masterpiece, I love war movies and I love sci fi, and the last combo of that we really got was the masterpiece/modern classic “Edge of Tomorrow”, so my hopes were high.)
The first thing was, as already described, a strong thread of cop-out anti-Americanism and misanthropy that all but broke the fourth wall and instructed us who to root for. It’s one thing to complicate a narrative beyond the “A.I. is Skynet and wants us all dead” trope that Terminator pioneered, it’s another thing to make the A.I. into saints that only a monster would root against. That moral balance needed to be more finely struck than it was, and there were a couple of eye-rolling moments along those lines.
The second thing is what I call the “Minority Report” problem. I *loved* this Spielburg classic as a kid, but when I went back to revisit it in the last few years, it really struck me how full of holes the plot was. Not in the sense of “psychic powers aren’t real”, but in the sense of “they seemed headed for certain death and then there was a cut and now they’re getting away with no real explanation of how it happened”.
As a writing problem, I get this. Good reversals and clever escapes are really hard to think of, and it’s absolutely a temptation to tell yourself “that’s not really the point of the scene anyway". This is a movie about family and victimization and class struggle, not about how the protagonist locates his next target.
But, in any action movie, believable turns and escapes and set pieces are what quality construction materials are to building a house. They’re not the *point* of the house, and ideally nobody will even notice them, but if you build a house without them, it’s a crap house no matter what color you paint it or how well it’s designed. You just have to take the time, both in the writing and on screen, to make that aspect work, and this movie had some rotted boards in the basement, unfortunately.
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The third thing, the last thing, that kept this movie in the realm of “good, not great” for me was an issue base-level conceptual development that is a common feature of A.I.-based sci fi films, dictated largely by the laws of drama itself, but still in need of a solution by whomever is going to make the next classic of the genre.
Here’s the underlying situation on a conceptual level: In this film, A.I. is
1) Humanity’s mortal enemy in an all-out war for domination,
2) Approximately as powerful as humans, such that the outcome of the war is in doubt.
3) Recognizably human in terms of emotional and moral values (e.g. A.I. loves its kids, has qualms about using violence, fears death, etc.)
Of these, 1) has just been done many times before, 2) seems dramatically necessary if you’re going to take another run at 1), and 3) is necessary if you want to make the A.I. the good guys, or at least plausibly the good guys, as this film clearly wants to.
“Ex Machina” became a classic by avoiding 1) altogether, making the A.I. robot vulnerable and underpowered until the very end in a nice twist on 2), and making 3) the central question of the entire film. That’s awesome and Alex Garland is a genius (Also “Devs” was great and criminally underseen, it’s on Hulu if you haven’t yet), but also, Ex Machina was a small and specific indie movie that isn’t directly comparable to this one. It’s budget was 1/10th the size of this film.
It seems to me, though, that if you’re going to do 1) and make a film in this genre, you’re going to have to find a way around 2) and/or 3). Make a war movie where the powers of the humans and A.I. are wildly disparate (Think “Saving Private Ryan” but with A.I., a small band of heroes storm-tossed in a huge war they can’t hope to win), and make a war movie where the A.I. aren’t faceless killing machines but also aren’t mechanical humans. (For a great example of this done with aliens instead of A.I., check out Verner Vinge’s classic novels “A Fire Upon the Deep” and “A Deepness in the Sky”).
This insistence on 3), having very human-like A.I., is also why it’s such a cop out for the film to forcefeed us misanthropy and anti-Americanism. The film wants us to root for the A.I., but the A.I. are basically just “humans but without blame”. They even look just like humans! This has allegorical value, but allegorical value can’t lead the way past such blatant emotional manipulation. The real daring would be to try to make us root for an A.I. side of a war that *wasn’t like us*. If you can do that, you’ve genuinely earned your misanthropy by working without a net.
We need an A.I. war movie that takes that kind of conceptual risk. Is it even possible at that budget without the studio hacks trying to bring it back towards the center? It would probably take James Cameron or Chris Nolan to make it, but a boy can dream.
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The Creator’s conclusion, from a sci fi perspective, doesn’t make a lot of sense. It leans heavily on the quasi-magical powers of the kid-weapon, which are never really explained and don’t seem to have consistent rules, and it’s a little too pat that destroying this one mega-weapon ends the war and everyone knows it. (Like in Star Wars, they all celebrate when the Death Star blows up, but then later the war is still going on and there’s another Death Star that they were able to build way faster than the first one, so… maybe a little premature on that celebration?)
But, on a human level, the ending really works, and it shows you the incredible power of acting and character-building on screen. Even in the midst of this set piece that doesn’t make sense, you genuinely *care* about this kid and her quasi-adopted father and her designer-mother, because they’ve taken the time to develop those relationships and show us that they grow and change.
That’s what keeps this movie in the good-not-great place and keeps it from slipping down into the “regrettably disappointing” category—this story might hate humanity writ large, but it loves its central characters, and we love them too, in spite of who they fight for.
In conclusion: Give this a pass if your nervous system can’t handle war movies, and watch it with middling expectations if you’re a fan of the genre. Better on a big screen, I think, than it would be on a TV, so if you’re planning to I’d try to catch this before it leaves theaters. In the meantime, keep hoping that the A.I. revolution waits long enough that someone makes the definitive post-Terminator A.I.-war classic that we, the viewing audience, so richly deserve.
END
Thanks for reading! As always, if you enjoyed this writing, please help me out by liking, commenting, or sharing this post with friends. Have a great week, and I’ll be back next Sunday with another original story.
Probably not my kind of movie but I thoroughly enjoyed your review!