Screens/Reviews

The Creator
Where: In theatres
What: Movie, 133 mins.
When: Now
Genre: Science-fiction
Rating: NNNN (out of 5)
Why you should watch: Timely look at AI-powered future world with hints of Blade Runner and stuff that “blows up real good.”

MY FIRST THOUGHTS watching The Creator, which proves to be an excellent new sci-fi film from Rouge One: A Star Wars Story director Gareth Edwards, (who also co-wrote the film), is that Hollywood has found a new “woke-proof” supply of villains: AI creatures.

Now that much-needed global awakening has made it harder to demonize racialized folk to supply reliable groups of stereotypical bad guys, who to “hate”? The makers of The Creator appear to have found a new supply of bad guys with bad deeds attributed to renegade AI robots (called Simulants or Sims) early in the film, which seems to announce we’re in for a few hours of robot ass-kicking at the hands of good-guy humans.

But things slowly prove more complex and we’re forced to look at The Creator’s AI creatures as a little less artificial and a lot more human. For the truly paranoid among us, some might fear the film’s “soft on Sims” approach might be the result of an AI-generated script.

Set in 2070, we see a world on edge with renegade Sims being blamed for nuking L.A., leaving half the city in (gorgeously filmed) post-apocalyptic rubble. The United States, powered by blustery generals — who look like they’re straight out of a Vietnam War movie — want revenge and have created a Death Star-like sub-orbital killing machine to hunt down the robots. Meanwhile, the nation of New Asia is peacefully coexisting with the robots, producing a safe haven that has been thwarting American efforts to eliminate the AI beings.

Hardened American special services operative Joshua (John David Washington) has been sent to infiltrate the AI world of New Asia, and when his pregnant wife disappears in a botched U.S. raid on his hideout, he becomes disillusioned and refuses to help any further AI-fighting efforts.

But of course, we know he will eventually join the fight. This and other familiar tropes that surface in The Creator are just comfortably reliable elements that help propel the story rather than annoying cliches.

Washington proves a believable and compelling leading man and looks like he’ll be following his famous father Denzel on to Hollywood’s A-list.

Convinced (or tricked?) into believing his wife might still be alive, Joshua finally agrees to join the U.S. efforts and covertly slips into New Asia to find “The Creator,” an AI mastermind said to be in possession of a doomsday device that could be the end of humans.

Without giving away too many plot details, Joshua eventually discovers a Sims child holds the secrets to The Creator and the film morphs from a Blade Runner update into a hero-saves-a-child story, a la The Mandalorian or The Last of Us, without Pedro Pascal saving the kid.

As New Asia begins to look more and more like bombed hellscape that was Vietnam after the war, and the U.S. response to the Sims plus the many civilian deaths it unleashes seems increasingly heavy-handed, the critiques of American foreign policy become at least implicit in the tale.

That said, The Creator works as compelling entertainment, it’s Blade Runner-esque tattered future world gorgeously, disturbingly depicted.

And to quote my favourite-ever Canadian film critic, John Harkness (who wrote for me for decades at NOW) as he would quote his “favourite” Canadian film critics SCTV’s Billy Sol Hurok (John Candy) and Big Jim McBob (Joe Flaherty) whose highest praise for a film was that stuff “blowed up real good” — stuff blows up “real good” in The Creator.

The violence doesn’t seem as endless or as pointless as in the many MCU films, though I wouldn’t be surprised if The Creator yielded its creators their own AI-fighting film franchise.