The Creator (2023)
The robots! Oh, the robots!
Won’t anyone think of the sentient robots that everyone cares about and we all love so much and please don’t question all of the art and literature and jobs we’re obliterating with advanced robotics and AI currently?!
Please! Bread and circuses for you poors!
Think of the robots!
Think of these robots that have a simulacrum of a soul but don’t require rest breaks or pay checks!
Look, that one even has a pet cat, like you! But doesn’t complain about dangerous work conditions, unlike you!
I love sci-fi and all the stories about robots with intelligence so advanced it blurs the line to human.
I was tickled by “HER” (2013) and the concepts of a fully conversational AI in your phone. I love Martha Wells’ “The Murderbot Diaries” series (2017+), Issac Asimov’s “I, Robot” (1950), “Battlestar Galactica” (2004-2009), and even “Wall*E” (2008) no matter how many times my kids make me rewatch it.
But this movie was very clearly a piece of pro-AI propaganda.
That line makes me sound like a tin-foil-hat-wearing looney, but bear with me.
Set in the near-somewhere future after a nuke obliterated downtown LA, human-equivalent AI was blamed for the attack and then made illegal in the United States. And because this is Hollywood, a general in USAF blues made the announcement, instead of, I dunno, the Speaker of the House or the President
Cut to 10-ish years later and Joshua (John David Washington) was living happy and quiet in “New Asia” (best guess: the Philippines) with his wife Maya (Gemma Chan), though his cover was promptly blown when it was revealed that he’s been part of a looooooong term undercover strike force trying to hunt down AI in foreign countries.
I’m not going to pretend the US doesn’t do that currently – I’m sure there are countless parts of the Fed around the globe doing deep-cover missions to rat out whoever is determined to be an enemy at the time. The difference is that we don’t hunt down those individuals with indiscriminate nuclear attacks.
Ugh.
The USS Nomad was built after the attack in LA; it was a gigantic orbiting weapons platform in low-Earth orbit that existed solely to laser-scan the planet below until it found an AI, then drop a nuclear weapon on it.
Not a trained laser beam.
Not a finely targeted killswitch missile.
A full-on nuclear warhead with clearly devastating results, every time.
Another five years later, Joshua was out of the military and Maya was presumed dead, until Colonel Howell (Alison Janney) re-recruited him as part of a special strike force to find and eliminate Nirmata – an entity who’s existence they have as much solid proof of as Jack Frost or the Easter Bunny – and the carrot-of-hope of potentially finding a maybe-mysteriously-alive Maya.
Joshua, being a desperate and stupid man, immediately jumped at the chance to kill Bigfoot’s shadow. His strike force brought him back to New Asia and into a very advanced research bunker where the US Army’s intelligence thought Nirmata was. Instead they found a robot child named Alphie (Madeline Yuna Voyles) and immediately it was revealed that Alphie wasn’t Nirmata at all!
Spoiler! - Maya was actually Nirmata!
Not that it actually matters.
So Joshua took Alphie on a wild excursion across the tropical countryside to find Maya.
Along the way we found out that Alphie was the next-bestest-betterest-super-goodest AI on the planet and could completely deactivate the USS Nomad by touching it, which would be super bad for America because… other countries don’t like getting bombed indiscriminately, probably.
Later, when the Army found Joshua and Alphie, they landed absolutely massive battle tanks (seriously, the size of conference halls) on the beaches of an unspecified fishing town, for the sole purposes of catching Alphie.
There are all sorts of problems with this concept: more moving parts means more broken parts, history and physics have shown that massive vehicles don’t do well on unimproved soil, the USS Nomad was already in orbit and capable of dropping ordnance, and how was an amphibious landing of two gigantic tanks any more useful than just air-dropping a bunch of additional troops into the field???
To some other issues:
We already have intelligent non-human life on Earth: dolphin, octopus, cuttlefish, whale, just to name a few. This movie required us to believe that not only had General Artificial Intelligence been perfected, but that humanity was largely okay with those robots integrating into society with us while the rest of the planets’ ecology was destroyed and actively ignoring the other intelligent life around us.
Also, some of the robots were shown as Buddhist monks, implying that they believed in a higher power which just… doesn’t make sense when they know they were created by humans. David Brin’s “Uplift” series had that resolved in the 1980s; why would robots believe in a higher power?!
Colonel Howell was also personally involved in the operation in New Asia, actively carrying a gun through the various towns that were being destroyed.
Colonels don’t do that, they sit in the office while troops carry the guns.
Get your shit together, Hollywood.
And of course, I find it very hard to believe that the DOD didn’t find a way to carve out an exception for AI soldiers for battlefield ops as a way to limit human danger while also saving costs by not having to pay for food or retirement or whatever.
The soundtrack was fine; I don’t remember it being particularly good or bad.
The special-effects were top-notch, which I expect from Disney.
This movie was incredibly frustrating to watch.
Partly because director Gareth Edwards also directed “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” (2016), which is easily my favorite entry in the Star Wars cinematic canon, so I was expecting a lot more; and partly because it was such a stupid, ham-fisted attempt at an allegory for “imperialism bad” and “don’t be racist” and also “AI is your friend, you should love it without question.”
This was the second movie with John David Washington where the plot was some big-concept sci-fi idea that was expressed with all finesse of a passing kidney stone.
The other was “Tenet” (2020) and you already know how I feel about it.
Going forward, if I see JDW listed in the credits, I’m going to have to question whether it’s worth my time.
I did finish it, thus why I can give it a 1-Claw rating instead of not even posting a review.
This was not good fiction. This was propaganda from Disney to try to sway public opinion on AI while they try to kneecap writers and actors pay, and it conveniently came out during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA actors strike, where the actors were on strike because Disney and other major studios wanted to replace humans with AI to save on costs.
Do not waste any amount of your time watching this.
“I, Robot” (2004) was a pretty bad adaptation of a phenomenal book, but it’s a better movie than this.
