With the trend of news stories earlier this year covering new artificial intelligence programs (like ChatGPT and Bard), the new release of The Creator in theaters feels dramatically prescient.
Denzel Washington's son John David Washington (Tenet, 2020) plays a hardened former soldier recruited for a dangerous secret mission set in an ominous future dominated by robots with artificial intelligence. This secret mission is surrounded by tense global relations between humans and robots trying to recover from an apocalyptic nuclear explosion. In an effort to defeat the millions of robots, a U.S. military team is sent to the jungle islands of southeast Asia to search for the creator of the robots and hopefully destroy it.
This film is a grand science-fiction thriller with explosive action sequences showing impressively ambitious visual effects. Because The Creator is not overly focused on the shootouts, bombs, or flying ships, and has an undercurrent of strong political commentary, it reminds me of other social justice science-fiction films District 9 (2009) and Captive State (2019). The military is overzealous exerting their dominance, and the robots vs. humanity is a metaphor of a race war. Not exactly revolutionary new ideas for the sci-fi genre.
What has a more lasting impression though is the idea of technology as the new religion. An ominous robot appearing as a young girl is regularly framed as a messiah figure sent to bring peace to the world. Her technological powers are unlike anything people have seen before. Maybe artificial intelligence (or people of other races) aren't bent on humanity's destruction.
But the acting is solid, the story is only predictable toward the end and the cinematography is hypnotically heart-stopping. This vision of the future is not covered in the expected shiny glass and polished stainless steel. The robots, machinery, and weapons look industrial, dirty, and worn which makes this whole universe feel more realistic and visually relatable (especially in our current world of increasingly dominant technology and huge exploitations of natural resources). This visionary style of The Creator obviously brings to mind the look of past sci-fi gems 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Blade Runner (1982), and Blade Runner 2049 (2017).
British director and co-screenwriter Gareth Edwards has directed other sci-fi films before like Godzilla (2014) and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), so he's clearly comfortable in this genre and makes smart decisions by filming on location (mainly in Thailand) instead of in a studio covered in green screens. The Creator is PG-13 and just a few minutes over two hours (exactly two hours and 13 minutes), so families and sci-fi lovers are sure to enjoy it. After leaving the theater, I walked outside and thought, "Not bad."
