The Creator Is a Pro-A.I., Pro-Freedom, Anti-Imperialist Sci-Fi War Movie
Conceptually, it's all a bit vague, but it sure looks amazing.
For most of this year, the Writer's Guild of America (WGA), which represents Hollywood screenwriters, was locked in a grinding labor battle with the studios that make Tinseltown's biggest productions. Among the most contested provisions of the dispute, which led to the drawn-out strike that ended this week, was the use of artificial intelligence—programs like ChatGPT—in the writing and re-writing of scripts.
Could Hollywood producers use AI to write screenplays, or to rework material written by a guild member? In the end, the Writer's Guild won a number of restrictions on how studios can use artificial intelligence. The WGA's viewpoint was clear: AI represents a threat to their livelihoods and work products.
It's hardly surprising that the writers would subscribe to this notion: For years, Hollywood has enthralled viewers with visions of killer AI, all of which offer some variation on the story of Frankenstein's monster, in which man uses science to create new life—and that life turns on its creator.
So it's at least a little bit ironic, then, that The Creator, the first big production to hit theaters after the end of the standoff between writers and studios stands defiantly in opposition to this technophobic outlook. The movie is pro-AI, pro-freedom, and anti-imperialist. Also, it looks amazing. The movie's big ideas are simplistic at best and often underdeveloped, but The Creator is nonetheless a gorgeous, immersive bit of blockbuster filmmaking, with some of the most impressive original sci-fi visuals in years.
Directed by Gareth Edwards, who previously helmed both Godzilla and Star Wars: Rogue One, The Creator sometimes often plays like an extension of ideas that first appeared in both of those films, particularly Rogue One. Rogue One, by far the best of the modern Star Wars features, was most successful as a sort of gritty war movie, positioning the Star Wars franchise's rebels as ad hoc freedom fighters, with different goals and different ideas about what sort of violence was justifiable, warring against an invading empire.
In Rogue One, the Vietnam parallels were lightly applied and somewhat vague in intention: The movie wasn't using real-world political reference points to make a clear, coherent point; rather it was using real-world political reference points to add heft and texture to the Star Wars franchise's fantasy universe.
In The Creator, the Vietnam parallels are still fairly vague, but much more heavily applied. The film draws heavily from classic Vietnam movies, especially Apocalypse Now: It follows Joshua Taylor (John David Washington), an undercover agent trying to track down a mysterious AI leader—what amounts to Col. Kurtz—who, after a failed raid, is reassigned to a mission to obtain a new AI superweapon. That weapon turns out to be an AI simulant, a sort of robot/human hybrid, who takes the form of a little girl, and who has some unique abilities. Taylor decides to protect her rather than take her in, and the movie then becomes an extended chase, with a ruthless American military officer (Allison Janey) attempting to hunt down Taylor and his charge.
The future war it depicts is not so much between humans and AI as between the America-led West and the AI-allied East; the American military is depicted as an overbearing, imperialist force that destroys free, peaceful communities that, unlike the West, have learned to coexist with sentient machines.
There are half-baked class, labor, and immigration parallels, too: Humans created AI to be helpers and servants—to do, in other words, the jobs that Americans wouldn't do. But that ended after a nuclear strike on downtown Los Angeles, which served as the inciting incident for the American war on intelligent robots.
All of this is packaged with such visual verve that it's easy to overlook the movie's simplistic thinking. Edwards produces a number of first-rate action sequences and memorable visuals, and his sprawling, lived-in, AI world seems to have a rich life of its own beyond the confines of the story.
Ultimately, the movie's tenebrous political metaphors don't add up to much more than a non-specific sense that freedom is good, that sentient AI has moral worth, and that American military adventurism tends to have disastrous downstream consequences. Sure it's all rather vague… but it's also not wrong. Writer's Guild, take note.
