Although I have yet to write an essay about it, I deeply love 2016’s Rogue One. It pulled off an impossible feat, turning what superficially seemed to be a superfluous story in the Star Wars universe into something essential, awe-inspiring and heartfelt. Director Gareth Edwards has a scant filmography beyond that, so I was very curious about his next film, The Creator, that was released seven years later.
This is high-concept science fiction that wants to be a bit of Star Wars, a dash of Blade Runner, a soupçon of The Terminator, as well as some other influences. It wants to be a philosophical musing upon what it means to be human, as well as how often humanity fails to be humane. It ponders what is the next step in our evolution. But it also wants to be a stunning action film. In the end, it just chases its own robodog tail and not adding up to be very much at all.
One fatal flaw of this film is it isn’t as smart as it thinks it is. Elements such as chapter title cards convey an unjustified pretentiousness that adds insult to injury. If you’re going to be so smug, then it probably isn’t a good idea to have such lowest-common-denominator action pic moments as our hero opening a door in a spaceship so that everybody inside but he gets sucked out into the vacuum. Admittedly, star John David Washington is a beefy guy, but I still didn’t buy him escaping the fate of everybody else inside the ship just by holding onto a bar right next to that opening. To be fair, I also never believed a similar scene with Sigourney Weaver in the climax of the excellent Aliens.
But this is not an excellent movie. Red flags were going up for me even in the first seconds of the runtime, where we are subjected to a 50’s style newsreel, complete with ironic music, about robots fully integrating into society. We see them doing things like performing surgery alongside human surgeons. But what we’re seeing isn’t taking place in the 20th century. Really, we’re not sure when it is taking place, though the timeline communicated in the film has a nuclear devastation of LA in 2055 blamed on the artificial intelligence which will be the film’s alleged villain. There’s a general addressing Congress about this in what appears to be television footage from the 70’s. So, in the mid-21st-century, we have cyborgs with sophisticated AI integrated into society but our media technology is that of a century prior?
Most of the plot takes place 15 years after the nuking of L.A., and a war between humans and AI is in full swing. Apparently, the robots are all in a part of the world rebranded as “New Asia”, though humans live there as well, and in apparent complete harmony. Some robots are obviously machines, while others are indistinguishable from humans, so long as you don’t see the back half of their heads.
For whatever reason, the cyborgs that most closely resemble us have a large hole through their going sideways through their heads, with all kinds of rotating gears and mechanical shit exposed to the elements. It seems to me one of these droids would need that exposed area as much as they would need…well, a hole in the head. And if these synthetic humans are building more of their kind, why wouldn’t they just finish the job and make it so it would be impossible to tell the difference between them and the real thing? I can tell you the answer: because it looks cool on the screen, that’s why.
Washington has been sent on a mission into New Asia to find and destroy a new weapon that’s been developed which is rumored to have the potential to destroy humanity. In a bit that obviously wants to be Aliens, he’s initially grouped in with a bunch of grunts under the command of Allison Janney. The scene where they land and begin ground maneuvers is soundtracked by Radiohead’s “Everything In Its Right Place”, so Edwards apparently wanted to make a music video for that song. Really, I can’t blame him for that, as I would love to do the same.
This scene also makes obvious analogies to previous American invasions of territories in Asia and how well that has gone for us. It is no surprise the mission is a disaster, quickly leaving only Washington, Janney a hardened warrior played by Marc Menchaca as the survivors. Washington is separated from the other two, and is believed by the others to have gone rouge.
You see, Washington went on the mission only because the wife he believed was dead has been reported alive. She may also have an association with Nirmata, who is supposed to be the inventor of AI and who is revered like a god by their creations.
This makes the young girl android (Madeleine Yuna Voyles) discovered by Washington a sort of Christ child. Dubbed “Alphie” by him, this is the rumored weapon that has the potential to destroy humankind. Everybody is dumbstruck by how a robot child exists, but it seemed to me they have the potential to make a realistic anything using their technology. Earlier, we saw robot field workers, which I guess are robot botanists, which then makes them robotanists.
His friend Sturgill Simpson marvels how Alphie is not only growing like how a human would, but that her ability to control other technology will one day become so strong that she can command the world’s sum total of it. Now how the hell did he come to that conclusion after a cursory examination?
The goal of the opposition, as explained by Ken Watanabe, is to somehow get Alphie on board an American satellite called Nomad and destroy it. Nomad is a curious thing that looked to me to be not unlike the planetary “gate” in the massive final set piece of Rogue One. This thing has the ability to detect bots through the use of a wide, but highly visible, beam and then do precision missile launches to take them out. I was curious as to why such advanced technology uses a highly visible beam but, again, I know it is only so we can see our heroes evading it. I was equally confused by why it doesn’t just carpet bomb the shit out of New Asia, since our side doesn’t seem to have much regard for life, human or cyborg. Even more baffling is a several-story-tall, tank-like thing the Americans use to destroy a village. If we were able to sneak something like that in, then it seems like we should just be bulldozing the enemy territory.
And concerning this “New Asia” business: the mix of English and other languages seems more suspect than it does in other films of this type. I suspect I was only aware of this to the extent I was because I had to turn on subtitles, as (per yet another annoyance of this age of film) the characters usually mumble. God forbid you turn the sound up loud enough to hear them, lest you suddenly be deafened by the next barrage of ridiculously loud sound effects.
Anywho, the subtitles sometimes identified somebody as speaking Thai or Japanese or New Asian (which apparently replaces one of more dialects of Chinese), only to have translated text, giving the hearing-impaired viewer a curious advantage over those who don’t need the subtitles. But the identification of each language also betrayed some bizarre moments where I believe a character should not have been able to understand another person, and yet they do. Even without the text overlays, I suspect I would have noticed a couple of moments where a character doesn’t understand English until, conveniently, they do. There’s even a cyborg delivering a life lesson to some children in a remote fishing village, and he’s doing so in English, though I doubt the wee ones would be learning that language in such an isolated locale.
There aren’t just robot teachers in that area, but even robot monks, which instantly reminded me of the Electric Monk from Douglas Adams’s Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. I know their creator is revered by them, but I questioned exactly what are the tenets of a robot religion, especially one that inspires them to create temples with statues of mechanical saints. Then there’s Alphie, who is resigned to being a conscious being without a soul, telling Washington: “Neither of us can go to heaven, because I’m a robot and you’re not good.” A cute line, but which scans as false to me.
Taking this one step further, why do we see robots mourning their dead? How exactly would a robot die, except for critical parts no longer being available? Can none of these bots be repaired? When watching movies I often joke that a character is going to die when one gets shot in the shoulder, as that mysteriously seems to be the Achilles heel for a great many. But this film takes that one step further, with pretty much every android getting wounded in any part and everybody going, “Oh well, they’re clearly dead now.”
I was hoping the film would at least have mind-blowing visual effects. Alas, aside from the seamless integration of CGI into the heads of the humanoids, everything was a bit dodgy. Large vehicles fared the worst, which I found odd, as that is the kind of thing which was perfected a while back. I was unconvinced by every moment in this film that had a large vehicle integrated into a real environment. One of the worst is something that describing would be a spoiler, though I will say I was so confused by the true purpose of this machine that I could not help but recall a similar moment in Galaxy Quest where an exasperated Sigourney Weaver ponders why something so deadly and pointless would even be part of a spaceship.
I was disappointed by The Creator in almost every way a movie can. This is a smug film that has some interesting ideas it fails to explore successfully. It has little in style to distinguish it from the many previous works it cannibalizes. In what should have been a visual delight, it has few impressive special effects. Worst of all is I did not care one whit about the characters nor whether or not they survived. I’m somebody who gets misty eyed when a certain robot meets a horrible fate in Rogue One, and I was astonished the director of that film could leave me so disinterested in a cast that is largely cyborgs.
Dir: Gareth Edwards
Starring John David Washington, Madeleine Yuna Voyles, Allison Janney
Watched on blu-ray