“They’re not real, it’s all programming,” Joshua, the protagonist, says repeatedly over the course of The Creator. It’s his way of both setting up the film’s central dilemma and to maybe convince himself of his own at times unconvincing, motivations.
Directed by Gareth Edwards, The Creator is the latest in a long line of films trying to reconfigure our anxiety around the growth of artificial intelligence (AI). There are elements of Blade Runner and Spielberg’s A.I. here but Edwards adapts old anxieties to a thrilling, vast canvas. Like beauty, life is maybe in the eye of beholder, the film, argues. The Creator is moody, enthralling as a visual spectacle and mounted on a scale that is jaw-dropping, in possibly every sense of the expression. It undoubtedly deserves to be seen on the biggest screen possible.
John David Washington plays Joshua, an amputated soldier with a history in the American army. With his wife, Maya (Gemma Chan), Josh is expecting their first child. The year is 2070 and the world has already witnessed the age of the AI droid. They drive buses, deliver food, make up the local police force and pretty much every municipal task you can imagine. They have, however, become mutinous to the point of building their own rebellious hideouts and secret civilizations. Called ‘simulants’, these robots look like humans, walk and talk like them and exhibit a streak of teary-eyed vulnerability. The human race has outlawed AI in the west and the site of the final battle has moved to ‘New Asia’, an incongruous mix of race, culture and language in the far future.
The humans are on the lookout for ‘The Creator’, the eponymous architect behind the creation of sentient AI. The film refers to it him or her in the Hindi as ‘Nirmata’. Key to finding this unknown oracle of a biblical reality, is a young kid, Alphie. Joshua finds himself in the eye of the storm as the closure he seeks becomes the clause that will ultimately test his allegiance.
Shot on extraordinary scale, tapering the edges of flawless life-like CGI, The Creator is a moody space trip across dimensions and literal landscapes. There are elements of land, water and the sky here, as the film, contemplative as it might feel, oscillates between action and broody revelation. There is a pensive quality to the performances here, that look hearteningly indistinguishable from the simulated ones. Humans have practically groaned towards acceptance but there is an obvious, colonial unease about it all. There are sympathizers and critics on both sides, though the film evades discussing the complexity of it all.
Edwards obviously borrows elements from iconic films, but he engineers a language of his own. It’s neither as grim and razor-edged as Blade Runner, nor as romantic as A.I. It is, in contradiction to the genre itself built around large swatches of land and water, eerily deserted fields of grain and sand, where robots and humans seem to co-exist. Shot in Thailand, it eschews the surrealism of mood, rather than machine-like concoctions. Even though the CGI looks flawless, especially in the film’s terrific action sequences, it evokes futurism through cinematography. The pursuit of the Nirmata, is essentially a genocidal process that humans are carrying out by taking and dragging an unnerving spaceship around the planet ready to bomb everything it suspects. Familiar territory is tread in the relationship between Joshua and the kid, as tables are turned on an some expectedly horrifying humans.
The Creator doesn’t offer much in the way of ingenious plot. It in fact repackages the ultimately-humans-are-evil trope in the context of life other than the two-footed mammal. To the ongoing argument around AI, it offers a speculative circus, a thrilling world of techno madness, but rarely something of value.
That said, the film’s strengths are attuned to its visual calibre, the astounding scale of its speculative wars. We have been feeding from the drip of superhero CGI for so long, it practically feels impossible to witness flashy, neon-lit futuristic cities that won’t be followed by someone in a cape on a crusade. To the crusade here, there is none of that comic-book shade or the dimly vacuum of imagination, sporadically lit by lasers and powers. This is clarity, deft vision and craft of the highest order.
The Creator won’t invite you to the edge of your seat. Instead it will urge you to consider it like you would a kaleidoscopic meditation on culture, pathology our anxieties about the future. It doesn’t tug at you despite its emotional antics, but it will confound you through the sheer breadth of its visual precision. Few films deliver the promise of immersion their budgets and casts suggest. The Creator, on the other hand, has been prefaced with neither hype nor anticipation. Making it all the more effective and shattering as a visual odyssey. It is visually at least, the most staggering film of the season. That in itself is reason worthy of the price of the big screen.
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