The Creator is a Thinking Person's Blockbuster
An enjoyable epic that has the potential to entice a larger audience to participate in key conversations about the future. Spoilers ahead.
The Creator is not your average sci-fi movie. First, it is not based on pre-existing intellectual property or a multi-billion dollar franchise. It is nonetheless an epic story, with high stakes and plenty of action. I can’t understate how rare this combination has been, which is why I felt the need to write about it today.
As someone who has watched sci-fi since childhood, I am used to storytelling that is less on the show and heavy on the tell. The film bucks this trend by trying to balance the two. I found it mostly successful. The Creator’s script throws you into scenes with heavy consequences and a high amount of world building in its lines. The viewer is left piecing together the bits of context in the dialogue, adding to our engagement with the story.
The Creator doesn’t try to surprise you in its plot. The tropes and cliches are instead meant to ground you in a world that is realistic yet unfamiliar. Gareth Edwards has done this before with Rogue One, a movie based on doomed characters working to accomplish something that we all knew they would be successful in. While some found this a flaw, I found it as a way to enjoy and observe other aspects of that film, as it is so with this one.
It is this simplicity that allows us to better appreciate the film’s craftsmanship. The world is carefully built with great attention to detail. It evokes grand architecture and ideas, but grounds every environment with believable extras. It uses plenty of visual effects, which can rub some moviegoers the wrong way. But the cyborgs and advanced military technology looks as close to seamless as I’ve seen in live action.
As visual effects grow more affordable, we’ve seen a handful of cheesy sci-fi blockbusters, led by recent Marvel creations and guilty pleasures such as Pacific Rim. Rather than throw caution to the wind, The Creator grounds you just enough to focus on its world building and main characters while showing an ambitious version of earth.
The verisimilitude comes in small doses. The ideological development of the world’s powers makes sense. Background characters feel real and interesting. The world is filled with propaganda that steers average people toward ideological ends. The main characters bring a combination of nihilism, naivety and other complex emotions to bear throughout the movie.
Like the best blockbusters, you are thrown into meaningful scenes over and over again. The characters all carry a powerful weight when we first encounter them on screen. You get the sense that people in this world have changed because of this conflict, in ways that they won’t come back from. You are regularly exposed to people who have sacrificed everything. Whether they are justified in their actions or not is up to the viewer, but you can plainly see the desperation at play.
For these reasons and more, I enjoyed The Creator. I don’t compare it to 2001: A Space Odyssey or other heady sci-fi classics, but instead put it in somewhat of a new category. It is a blockbuster that leaves you thinking about the consequences of AI, how powerful people will attempt to exploit it, and whether humanity is meant to evolve through technological advancement or not. These are trademark sci-fi questions, told in a way that has the potential to bring more people to the conversation. I’m eager to see how it performs at the box office.
In short, yes, go see The Creator. We would be lucky to get more blockbusters like this.
Spoilers: The Impact on our Modern Debate Around AI Safety
Politically, the film is wary of the western war machine that clearly evokes memories of the War on Terror. Those on the political left who are skeptical of the cunning ruthlessness of the American-led global west are likely to root for New Asia, a powerful centralized government that utilizes and advocates for peaceful integration between AI and humanity. Rather than subjugate the west, they claim to just want peaceful co-existence, positioning the west as the obvious aggressor.
We are clearly supposed to side with the defenders. Yet, this group sees AI as an “evolution” of humanity. Today, we are fearful of taking our first steps towards that future. Liberal media have been very skeptical and critical of AI. They have even platformed thinkers that are advocating for placing limitations on AI, or destroying of it altogether. They focus on its potential for job loss, catastrophe and income inequality.
Rather than considering those issues, this film clearly paints artificial intelligence as a liberating force for everyone. The citizens of New Asia try to hide protect their robot comrades. Its characters are passionate freedom fighters. They show a level of love and symbiosis with technology that makes you rethink individual human potential.
In a way that I appreciated, the film does still leave room open for showcasing this society’s flaws. New Asia is more welcoming to AI, but it is also just as much of a police state that wields advanced technology, total surveillance, and propagandizing power over its citizenry to fight a war for its own ideological survival. This makes me wonder where we are heading if these are the two alternatives with artificial intelligence. Is it just a “pick your flavor” authoritarianism scenario? Is AI too dangerous to leave up to individual actors and localized politics?
The film also clearly draws out the geopolitical consequences of AI advancement. In New Asia, a place that started out clearly weaker than the western forces, AI is an equalizer. Did the US realize this, creating some sort of false flag that would allow them to press their military advantage before AI gave New Asia and insurmountable advantage? That’s definitely on playbook for the dominant empire in a grand conflict. For this example and more, AI development is a geopolitical issue to consider for the decades to come.
I share the film’s vision that humans are better with technology than without it, but I certainly want to spend more time thinking about the consequences of AI. While American business seems excited about integrating it, the rest of society needs to catch up. Even if we can’t understand the consequences, we owe it to ourselves to understand its development enough to know which way the wind is blowing.