Starring John David Washington, Gemma Chan, Ken Watanabe, Madelaine Yuna Voyles

Directed by Gareth Edwards

20th Century, in cinemas now

In a war against AI, ex-special forces agent Joshua is sent to kill their venerated Creator, and destroy the enemy’s mysterious secret weapon, but he has to rethink when he discovers that the weapon is in the form of a small child.

I was excited as soon as I saw the trailer for The Creator. I’m a fan of Gareth Edwards – I loved his indie sci-fi debut, Monsters. Rogue One is my favourite of the Star Wars spinoffs. So I was doubly excited. I’m also something of a student of AI movies: exploring the nature of consciousness has to be one of the richest sources of genre material there is. By the time I took my seat in the local IMAX, my excitement was off the scale.

And for nearly half an hour, I’m sure I’m not going to be disappointed. The premise – a war on AI sparked by a 9/11 style nuclear attack on LA – feels like a believable real-world riff on the Terminator franchise. After all, isn’t the growth of AI often cited as only second to climate change as the greatest challenge mankind will face this century? John David Washington makes for an engaging leading man who we know will have split loyalties. The movie takes care to make sure we are engaged with his journey, and the pain of losing his wife and his unborn child.

Sadly, it soon becomes clear that The Creator isn’t remotely interested in Artificial Intelligence or consciousness or any kind of coherent science fiction idea at all. If it were, the robots and ‘Sims’ might have decent Wi-Fi, or basic Bluetooth capability – or even the odd USB port. As it stands the film seems to be grasping vaguely at some kind of allegorical commentary on US foreign policy in South East Asia (and by implication Afghanistan and Iraq as well). AI becomes a cipher for race, but because none of the movie’s internal rules make sense, The Creator fails to be convincing about either.

If the AI are indeed just like people, with no distinguishing robotic qualities whatsoever (these ‘Sims’ eat and sleep just like humans) then why bother making them AI in the first place?

Perhaps I’m missing something. I tried to ignore these conceptual stumbling blocks and just enjoy the movie as a spectacular cinematic essay on the futility of war and ethnic division, but as it progresses the storytelling becomes more and more fragmented, jumping awkwardly from set piece to set piece, only stopping for moments of bum clenching saccharin sentimentality – and by the end making no logical sense whatsoever.

Verdict: The Creator is a big movie, full of perfectly decent popcorn chomping spectacle, but one that tries and fails to say anything worthwhile, other than ‘war is bad’, which amazingly I already knew. I couldn’t help thinking that an AI might have come up with something better.

5/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com

The Creator is not about AI. It’s a mistake most viewers are not going to be able to get away from and as such they will judge it by the very worldview that Gareth Edwards is criticising without even being aware they’re a part of what’s being criticised.

The Creator is, ostensibly, about a war between AI and humanity and the search for a ‘superweapon’ designed to defeat humans.

Except it’s not. It’s not a superweapon and it’s not ‘all humans’. It’s not even most humans.

Perhaps that bait and switch is a failure of the marketing process but it’s not a failure of the film. Like a book blurb that focuses on the wrong elements of the plot that inevitably leaves the audience feeling mis-sold. Most people can’t move on from that (rightly or wrongly).

Built from the DNA of Akira with a whole arm of Apocalypse Now, Zero Dark Thirty, Elysium and Alita, Battle Angel, The Creator is about something else entirely.

What The Creator is, is a profoundly anti-war and especially an anti ‘war on terror’ film. Even that is to present the secondary plot of the film.

The first and foremost subject the film is interested in is the nature of Othering – that process by which we ask questions about others in an attempt to establish whether they’re human enough to benefit from the protections and privileges we enjoy. It is a questioning of the process that majority populations throughout history and across the globe go through when they want to preserve their position and find a way to destroy those they feel threatened by or who they wish to continue exploiting.

To understand this film properly we have to return to the question of AI. For many in the Western mainstream there’s only one question about AI that matters – can it be ‘human’.

This is a solipsistic starting point worthy only of ridicule – centring humanity as it does as if we’re something special by which others are judged. It starts with the assumption that there’s some threshold which must be reached before dignity and compassion can be extended to other lives – whatever their form.

Worse still, this is EXACTLY the argument that the marginalised endure from majority populations almost without cease. Often the answer has been decided that the marginalised are less human, often legally defined as carrying less weight in terms of being witnesses or in literal terms of their value. In the US and throughout the British Empire, women and people of colour were determined to be sub-human intellectually and incapable of feeling and reasoning to the same extent as White Men. Interestingly this meant they were then free to be exploited because they weren’t fully human, their pain not fully human, their feelings and bodies disposable, their wealth stealable.

I loathe these arguments because, tunnel visioned as they are, they forget both their own history but also because that this is not the interesting philosophical point about intelligence (and dare I use this umbrella term, their humanity).

Sure the idea of the P-Zombie continues to exercise populist philosophers of consciousness, but it’s really about humanity’s struggle to reconcile its own being in the world, not about other intelligences we might encounter – be those women, Indians or cephalopod.

It’s also why much of the criticism of The Creator is going to centre around its apparent failure to explore this question because many people engaging in this subject seem to think it’s the only question to be explored.

It’s not and this is both where The Creator is likely to disappoint but why it is really worth your time.

It will disappoint because The Creator assumes other intelligences are equally real and meaningful as our own. It doesn’t question it or even put it on the table for debate.

It is worth your time because it starts from here and then challenges you, the viewer, to reflect on whether, by insisting on some arbitrary standard of proof you aren’t, actually, standing in for the US Army in this film. I’m not saying that if you don’t like it you’re bigoted but perhaps, if your criticism is that there’s no discussion of whether AI can be intelligent by human standards, you’re really standing alongside slave owners, misogynists and eugenicists throughout history. At least by the film’s standards.

The Creator is primarily concerned with whether, when faced with people who are as legitimately human as we are, we can still find a way to dehumanise them and then treat them as objects or property – to be disposed of at will in the furtherance of our own agendas.

The answer to this, tragically, is yes and, brilliantly, also no. This is where the second thread of the film sits as a support strut to that first theme.

This film’s anti-war stance, its opposition to the war on terror (and underneath that the obvious read across to its criticism of the Vietnam War) means that in this time and place it’s also deeply critical of America’s foreign policy. The analogue between the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan are clear (from the fake claims about weapons of mass destruction to the use of extraordinary rendition and summary executions and imprisonment).

On the surface the US Army is team bad guy. Read into that what you will. This supports the general critique of Western universalism and its mythic propaganda of manifest destiny and White superiority. In that the film is anti-colonial, antiracist and has more in common with colonial critic and revolutionary Franz Fanon than philosophers of mind John Searle and Kenan Malik.

The film is, therefore, more concerned with a world view that sees others as resources to be exploited (or erased if they resist that exploitation) than it is in whether those being exploited are human.

Why?

Because if you enter into the debate about whether they’re human you can err on the side of saying they’re not until they’ve proven they are and, in the meantime, exploit them to your heart’s content. This is Colonialism 101. And lest we forget, colonialism is the target of this film’s deepest well of anger.

That John David Washington’s character, Joshua, is at the centre of this film is two parts biblical narrative and one part Blade Runner 2049. The former because, via the cypher of his name, he starts by wanting to know who’s on his side and ends by realising he must be on someone else’s, just as Joshua before the walls of Jericho came to understand that God was on his own side and if Joshua wanted to follow it wasn’t God who would move.

It’s parallel to Blade Runner is that, throughout we see the world through Joshua’s eyes but, ultimately, it’s someone else who’s the real main character. As with Akira, it’s the military industrial complex which seeks to exploit the next generation, stealing from them their agency, their space in the world and, if deemed necessary, they very lives.

It’s not for nothing that Alphie is designated to be researched and only killed when his value to the US Army has been exhausted – it’s a salutary reminder that colonialism is the glove the hand of capitalism wears to justify and obscure its real motivation; the extraction of wealth. In that it sits comfortably alongside Denis Villeneuve’s interpretation of Dune.

As the film has it, people were fine with AI providing free labour until it proved inconvenient.

If there’s any doubt that this is a film critiquing all of the above, the additional references to slavery and emancipation lend weight to the idea that The Creator isn’t interested in retrograde and regressive questions about what and who passes the ‘humanity’ test.

Indeed, Joshua’s presence as a man of colour serving the US Army is never out of focus – all his compatriots are White. His boss is White and they never forget to ask him to do the dirtiest work so their hands remain clean. The challenge for the exploited is how to survive the exploiters, their abusers, and Joshua’s ‘integration’ into the US Army serves as that story writ large.

Joshua’s arc isn’t simply coming to accept that Alphie is a full being deserving of dignity and compassion. Joshua’s arc is also about his rejection of the system that has exploited him and, within living memory, considered him no better than the AI he’s tasked with hunting down.

Last but not least. This film sets down a point that many of us who are marginalised repeatedly find allies and the indifferent centrist unable to understand. The oppressor does not see us as worthy of life, only worthy of exploitation and disposal. We, however, only want to live. If we win, what happens? We get to live and they get to live. If they win, we die. It is the central conceit that centrists and those who are unaffected by exploitation fail to grasp and it’s laid out here pretty clearly. Much of the criticism I’ve seen of the film doesn’t even recognise this as something to be discussed – and I only wish I was surprised.

In focussing on whether AI is ‘worthy of designation and recognition as intelligence’ we stumble blindly into the oppressor’s scheme.

Sure, we can think about what consciousness is – it’s hardly an easy question – but it’s vital that we build our quest for this in full awareness that it is not value neutral, that, in fact, throughout history it’s been used to exclude, control, erase and exploit for the gain of the already powerful.

Verdict: The Creator asks us to walk intentionally into a world where others – be we European, Asian or metal – are just as fully real as we are and only then start the moral debate about values and co-existence.

Wherever the mainstream narrative is one about the mythical colonial might of the majority population this film is likely to be misunderstood just at the same time as it’s talking about the deepest of human questions.

Rating? 9 communities out of 10.

Stewart Hotston