Movie Review: ‘The Creator’ is a Dystopian Sci-Fi Epic

Rating: 92/100

Gareth Edwards made his feature film debut in 2010 with Monsters, after which he was entrusted with two blockbuster franchises, successfully creating an American Godzilla film in 2014 after Roland Emmerich’s abject failure of a Godzilla film in 1998, then taking on the beautifully tragic lost chapter of the Star Wars saga with Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. Now, after doing such a good job playing in other people’s sandboxes, Edwards returns to original science-fiction with his latest film, The Creator.

The film takes place in a dystopian future born out of an alternate timeline in which humans started developing artificial intelligence technology somewhere around the 1960s. Eventually, AI becomes an essential part of the workforce. That is, until a nuclear explosion credited to AI wipes out the entire city of Los Angeles. The Western world declares war on AI and any nation that continues to harbor it, particularly the fictional nation of New Asia which, based on the brief glimpse we’re given of the map, seems to be located in the southeast region of what we know of as mainland China. The United States establishes a skybase known as Nomad over Asia that is designed to drop nukes on AI bases.

Joshua Taylor (John David Washington) is an ex-special forces agent originally tasked with trying to get to the mysterious AI engineer Nirmata through his daughter, Maya (Gemma Chan). However, Taylor ends up falling in love with Maya. Five years after thinking he’s lost Maya and his unborn child to the war, Taylor is told by the U.S. military that Maya is still alive and, in exchange for Taylor’s help in finding and eliminating a weapon known as Alpha O, promise to help him extract Maya from New Asia. However, Taylor is shocked to find that this ultimate weapon is in the form of a child whom he nicknames Alphie (Madeline Yuna Voyles) and he finds himself unable to destroy the innocent creature.

The film creates an imaginative world that the viewer really cares about. Personally, I’m not usually a fan of films about the dangers of technology run amok. In college, I had a seminar on political films, and we would try to list films on each of the most important, broad sociopolitical topics that films could be made about. We struggled to come up with popular films about gay rights and women’s rights, but we came up with enough films about the dangers of technology to fill an entire chalkboard and then some.

From The Terminator to The Matrix, there’s a million films on the subject. And, even with the recent advances in AI technology, I usually find myself fairly apathetic towards the dangers of tech when there are bigger social issues such as my personal right to exist. But, as a transgender woman, it’s hard not to see the parallel between a world that’s debating over what does and doesn’t qualify as a real, living creature and a world that’s debating over who does and doesn’t qualify as a real woman, a real man, or a real representation of any gender. When viewed through that lens, it was hard not to feel sympathy for the AI.

The part of the film I found to be most unbelievable was the way that the United States’ hatred of AI became so monolithic following the attack on Los Angeles. It’s certainly true that terrorist attacks can lead to jingoism and scapegoating, as America witnessed in the wake of the attacks on September 11, 2001. But even in the wake of that terrorist attack, there were still a number of people in America who refused to fall in line with President George W. Bush and called out the encroachments on civil rights that were being justified in the name of fighting terrorism.

This movie depicts very few Americans with that nuanced of a view of the war against AI. Our main character, Taylor, seems to be apathetic towards the war, at least once he meets Maya, and instead becomes motivated purely by love. His loyalty becomes to Maya rather than any particular government, which means that his allegiance changes as he learns more about her real goals. But, aside from one brief news report depicting a protest against Nomad, there wasn’t much indication that anyone in American society was pushing back against the simple, black-and-white idea of humans good, machines bad.

Where are the anarchists and communists calling for an end to imperialist wars? Where are the pacifists calling for peaceful solutions to the problem? Granted, part of the problem may be that the film is almost exclusively following military personnel, who have completely bought into the imperialist narrative. Still, it would have been nice to see someone besides Taylor caring about nuance in this war.

The film does do an excellent job of portraying the love story between Joshua Taylor and Maya. These days, it’s getting harder and harder for movies and television to really make me care about a heterosexual love story, but there’s something about Taylor’s love for Maya that is universally relatable regardless of your own sexual or romantic orientation. Taylor’s relationship with Alphie takes on a bit of a Mandalorian-style dynamic, with Taylor playing the role of reluctant babysitter to a precocious child with the ability to control electronics. (Incidentally, I’ve decided that the ability to control electronics with my mind is now the superpower I most want to have.) The relationship between Taylor and Alphie is the heart of the movie and leads to a tragically beautiful ending that’s on par with Rogue One.

If this movie really takes off, and it definitely should, then I look forward to right-wing media having a meltdown over this film. The United States’ military are, without a doubt, the true villains of the movie. It’s not very ambiguous in that regard. In fact, had Edwards tried to make this movie in the 2000s, I doubt he would have gotten it made, as the parallels to the American “War on Terror” are strikingly obvious and likely would have scared off any studios. Now that the war is almost universally recognized as a colossal mistake, it’s easier to go back and make that criticism. But I still fully expect a conservative pushback against this even in 2023.

Photo courtesy of Disney