"The Creator" - Movie Review
A "Rogue One", Eddie Murphy's "Golden Child" meets "AVATAR" kinda of flick. Meh.
“Creator” synopsis … with some spoilers.
What does it mean to be human ? A theme explored for millennia.
"The Creator" is (sort of) a story of "overcoming the monster". But when you learn who the monsters are the film misses the mark to an extent. This is story that seemed more hyper focused on being apologetic for the Asians dare I say the Chinese in addition to tech & AI peppered with what seemed to be anti-white, anti-west and even some vestiges of anti-human sentiments. This film had similar themes to AVATAR.
The Protogonist portrayed by John David Washington is a black man commissioned by a US military dark op faction to befriend and capture the developer of a weapon that would render the West incapacitated. A brief colloquy in a conversation ensues at the beginning of the film of how neanderthals, who purportedly expressed some intelligence and culture, were wiped out by their homosapien counterparts i.e. "us". There are a plethora of theories as to why neanderthals went extinct but for the sake of the plot this anecdote was shoe-horned in and is at tad of a strawman but I digress.
This was a straight up propaganda film in my opinion. "The Creator" story depicts a youthful young monk-like A.I. android elevated to an almost messianic like status as being the existential threat to the West and it's weapon of mass destruction "NOMAD". I don't think it all a stretch to say that just about all A.I. "beings" in the movie were represented as Asian save a few villagers near a province in "New Asia" attacked by "NOMAD"; a menacing "Snoke" like mega satellite machine used as a type of hunter-killer "bird of prey".
The film seemed to try too hard to be philosophical bordering on disjointed or even detached from the message it was attempting to convey.
What we know about machines is they learn to “learn” via code irrespective of what it is. For humans, learning is a consequence of experience but nearly all humans are still very much in the dark as to a plethora of existential questions "who am I" "why am I here" etc. Machines wouldn't need to ask these questions even if they could of their own volition.
Nationalism Vilified ?
The United States while not mentioned specifically was alluded to by the initials “US” branded on the side of one of the colossal sized battle tanks. It seems deliberate the U.S. is vilified as being the evil empire, promoting slavery (of bots) as “New Asia” and A.I. struggles to be "free". Think of a “star wars” or “Avatar”paradigm except in reverse.
“Mechanimalism”
Yes, technology can kill us but this goes back to the rather academic idea that a gun cannot by itself pull its own trigger. Technology can be programmed to act autonomously but let us remember that human inventions are and will always be inexorably fraught with human errors and any machines humans create will always manifest and exploit (in both small and large ways) human traits, human tendencies, and human weaknesses as well as human evils. (This was the point movies like "Forbidden Planet", "The Matrix", "A.I.", "I Robot" and many others we’re all trying to make and did so with far greater impact in my opinion. What humans have essentially done, is create the means with which to forcefully look at and confront their own sins which it seems the movie tried to do, in vain I might add, in it's own way but with too many other themes which over shadowed its somewhat flaccid intent on conveying a moral message.
Deifying Tech
I couldn’t help but feel like the entire film was a “lecture” on this profoundly disturbing idea that Western Culture and ideals are inherently bad and oppressive, while technology has been anthropomorphized and elevated to somewhat of a transcendent deified status. Technology has made us intellectually lazy and for all it's worth does little more than provide mechanisms, that in some perverse way forces us to reflect on our own shortcomings and mistakes. Themes of death, downloading your consciousness et. al. were thrown into the mix of the story as well. But the idea that technology is somehow going to supplant humanity is a theme we hear oft repeated by today's pundits. Technology, politics and racism, perverse egoism have all become the new “religions” of the 21st century it seems.
Humans have so deified technology and invention so as to think that it will right all of the wrongs humans failed to resolve, or questions it fails to answer. Ignorance is bliss but only for so long.
The effects were decent, the cinematography was exceptional and I thought solid.
Movie Score
This movie gets a rating of 2 out of 5 lenses.
