The Creator doesn't even care about what it's about
A movie about A.I. that doesn't give a shit about A.I.
I went into The Creator, the new movie directed and co-written by Gareth Edwards, almost entirely cold. I’d seen the trailer once, I’d seen a few positive or middling comments, and I understood the gist of the plot to be about a war between humans and robots. That was it. No reviews, not a lot of preconceptions.
It took about half an hour into the two-hour film before I started to get worried.
The good first: The Creator is one of the more visually striking science fiction movies of the last decade, particularly in the sci-fi action genre. It resembles, often in the best way, a compilation of cyberpunk concept art, influenced by Bladerunner, Akira, and the art of folks like Simon Stålenhag. In addition to looking good in the big, sweeping shots, the action scenes are legible and not drowned in a morass of smoke, particle effects, and the grey gunk you get when everything is filmed in front of a green screen and hastily rendered later. The filmmakers shot on location and selectively added CGI elements later. The total budget was $80 million, for something that looks considerably better than most $150-200 million films; Hollywood, take note.
I’d also say I liked the way Edwards incorporates flashbacks, sometimes abruptly and for only a few seconds, letting the viewers work out from context where and when we are. It felt like the main character, Joshua Taylor, was actively remembering something, rather than a more heavy-handed insert of backstory.
Unfortunately, despite this technical excellence, and the fact that the actors were trying to do a good job, the movie does not hold together.
One core reason for this is storytelling.
The Creator is an action movie, and in modern terms that means gunfights, explosions, and life-and-death incidents take place approximately every ten minutes. The movie does not slow down unless it’s pausing for a brief exposition scene to set up the next action set piece.
The plot of The Creator is this: Josh Taylor is an American spy. He lost an arm and a leg, and both his parents, when an A.I. nuked downtown Los Angeles when he was a child. The war led to the banning of A.I. in “the western world” but a nation called New Asia embraced A.I. and robots; the U.S. is naturally at war with them and trying to wipe out the bots.
Taylor, kitted out with cybernetic limbs, begins the movie in New Asia, married to a woman named Maya, who is expecting their first child. Taylor is undercover, he’s trying to find Nirmata (which we’re told means “the creator,”), some kind of super-genius A.I. designer, so the U.S. military can nuke this person from orbit. His mission goes wrong, his cover is blown, and Maya is killed in a botched U.S. raid.
Five years later (yeah, we’re STILL doing that) the military calls him back from civilian life, claims Maya is still alive, and throws him into a mission to find Nirmata’s new super-weapon. Which turns out to be a child android who is more-or-less robot Jesus. Josh tries to use the child robot to find Maya.
Will he eventually turn against his cruel military masters, come to feel something for this robot child, and learn that bots are people too? Yeah, you’ve seen this movie. Josh is literally cautioned against “going native” at one point.
The first problem with The Creator is that it never pauses long enough between action scenes to give Josh, the child, or any of the other characters any weight as people. Josh isn’t a terribly likeable character, but you could forgive that if he was a character at all. As written, he’s a sketch of a person, an outline based on a hasty reading of Save the Cat.
• Lost parents and limbs to A.I. bomb, hates A.I.s
• Loves Maya
• Maya fridged, sad
• Uses child for own ends
• Grows fond of child
• Saves child!
• Redemption arc: achieved!
The child? Not a character. Alison Janney’s Col. Howell? Not a character. Maya? Not a character. Harun, an android played by Ken Watanabe? Not a character.
For some of these, we get brief sketches, little tossed off bits of dialogue. Howell hates A.I.s after both her sons died in the war. Josh and Maya tease each other a bit. The child likes candy and ice cream. Harun… I dunno, he’s just kind of… there.
If this was ten years ago, we could argue about whether this movie passed the Bechdel test of the Mako Mori test, but we’re past that, right?
Here’s a test for you: does a movie let any two characters have a conversation, lasting longer than two minutes, that does not directly advance the plot? Is there a scene lasting longer than two minutes that does not advance the plot?
To let us believe in Josh and the child and Harun and anyone else as characters, it would have to have slowed down, waaaaaaay down, and let people just be. Just interact, talk, hang out, play, rest, contemplate. There are tiny flashes of this – the child playing with a group of human children, Josh’s former spymaster and his android girlfriend – but they’re blips. Every time Josh and the child settle somewhere for five seconds, it’s only to be attacked and to flee again.
That leads to the second major problem.
Gareth Edwards does not actually care about the ideas in his movie.
This is one of the purest cyberpunk movies made in the last 30 years. Androids, robots, A.I., cybernetic limbs, an entire nation where humans and robots live together!
So we’re going to find out something about this new world, right? About how robots think about themselves, about humans, about the roles they fill in this new society?
Nope.
Not a goddamn thing.
The backdrop gives us a few hints – androids and robots working alongside humans, even wearing monks’ robes at Buddhist temples. So robots are capable of faith, philosophy? Maybe! But that will not be explored at all.1
And Edwards’ lack of interest in the science fictional concept at the core of his film is made more obvious because the script never pauses to consider how robots might actually be different from humans.
In The Creator, if you shoot a robot, and it falls over, it’s dead. Forever. Everyone treats it as though it is gone for good, there is even a scene of a robot on a funeral pyre. (That’s… not going to work.)
But, if the brain isn’t blown up, can’t you just plug their memory into a new robot body? Can’t they back up their memories regularly? Can they share memories? Can they network together? Can one mind be spread across many bodies, or multiple minds time-share one body?
All questions that hundreds of science fiction novels and short stories and even a few movies have pondered. And Edwards blithely wanders past them all, on his way to his next fight scene.
This is a movie where a robot picks up a cellphone to make a call. I just… I don’t… what?
Fuck me, are the writers that bereft of basic insight?
Have they read ANY science fiction?
Okay. So the movie has no interest in the robots in “New Asia.”
It also has zero interest in the humans of “New Asia.”
We briefly see a map of this… country? Federation? Your guess is as good as mine. It comprises, as far as I can remember, a good chunk of southern China, along with Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, most of Indonesia, and maybe the Philippines? It may have gone as far west as Bhutan or Nepal.
That’s a massive area! It must have a population of somewhere between 700 million and a billion people, it’s got wildly varied cultures, languages, ethnic groups, and faiths! How did this place become a country? Why did its people accept robots? What kind of government does it have?
Nope. You don’t get even hints of that.
“New Asia,” a term that gets more flattening and condescending every time I type it, was created to be a backdrop. It’s a bunch of National Geographic photo spreads and Apocalypse Now stills, shuffled together and scribbled over with cyberpunk stuff. Robots in rice paddies. Robots with saffron and crimson robes and prayer beads. Robots in a big city with military checkpoints. Robot guerrillas on hovering sampans, with AK-47s.2
This is raw, uncut cyberpunk Orientalism. We’ve known this is an issue for a long time – throwing a western protagonist into a future Asia goes at least back as far as Case in Chiba City, under a sky the colour of a television tuned to a dead channel. At its best, it could be a sincere attempt to show that the future happened everywhere, not just in America or Europe. At its worst, it was pure exoticism, cut with century-old Yellow Peril tropes.
This lack of thought by the filmmakers is revealed in how the movie frames the war between the U.S. and New Asia. This is a straight-up Vietnam War allegory, with American squads dropped in via gunship, threatening villagers in thatched huts, generally being war-crime goons. There’s a lot of bombing from the looming, massive American military space station which, and I am not kidding about this, manages to sneak up on characters several times during the film.
But if America is at war with New Asia, who exactly are they fighting? We only see ragtag rebel types, led by Ken Watanabe. There are repeated references to hidden bases.3 It seems that a country of hundreds of millions of people with multiple huge cities can only muster an informal insurgency. Yet the Americans aren’t actually occupying the country, and American military incursions are met with response from heavily armed New Asian police – none of it makes any sense.
This is a movie that sacrifices character and ideas for action, and centres yet another story of an American learning to be a better person via a sojourn in an “exotic” foreign land that is even more thinly sketched than the protagonist.
After I saw the movie, I glanced at some of the pre-release hype. A good number of early reviews lauded The Creator as one of the best science fiction movies of the decade. I have no idea what movie those people saw, but I wish it had been the one in my theatre.
The movie I saw was a thin layer of striking images, stretched over an entirely hollow core.
Current Reading
Speaking of science fiction stories that have some thought put into them, I’m mid-way through Emma Mieko Candon’s The Archive Undying. It’s dense and weird and has giant robots and rogue A.I.s, and is in many ways exactly what The Creator is not.
After that, I need to tackle Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light. Finally going to see what happens to Thomas Cromwell. I hope he gets to retire peacefully!
As always, remember to never like, subscribe, or share this post. This post is one of those action movie bombs that features both a digital countdown clock, AND it beeps, with increasing frequency and volume, the closer it gets to exploding. Y’know, for the convenience of the people you’re trying to blow up with it!
Closely related, Josh’s advanced prosthetics are not important at all. They make him neither stronger nor weaker, they never fail at a crucial moment or give him an unexpected advantage. There is no moment where he contemplates that he might be more similar to the androids because of them. They are mere window dressing, here to tell us we are in THE FUTURE!
At one point, characters take a boat most of the way to the Himalayas. Geography, schmeography!
Edwards’ is heavily drawing on Star Wars plotting here.