The Creator is a high concept wherein an ersatz Pinocchio meets artificial intelligence, and whoever thought of it must have been literally high — so much so that they completely forgot that Spielberg had already done it in his overrated A.I.
Now, Godard did say that the best way to criticize a film is to make another film, but that film has also already been made (and there are seven different versions to choose from) and it’s called Blade Runner — the movie that retroactively puts to shame the likes of A.I. and The Creator, starting with the fact that it doesn’t revolve around a fucking kid.
For what it’s worth, which is not a lot, A.I. more or less parallels Pinocchio’s journey (and indeed, whether by design or accident, it’s closer in spirit to Collodi’s original, serialized version of the story, with its cruel and anti-cathartic conclusion), and the protagonist goes as far as overtly patterning himself after his wooden forebear.
In contrast, The Creator’s Alphie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles) bemoans at one point that she can’t go to heaven because she’s not a person, but never does she express a desire, let alone go out of her way, to become a ‘real girl’ — and why would she? For all intents and purposes, Alphie is already there (and then some) and so are all of her fellow androids (more on that below).
Director Gareth Edwards’s screenplay turns the Robot War trope on its head by having the droids be the good guys (which of course raises the question, who the hell are we supposed to root for?), but other than that the script isn’t so much about change and equality as it is about sameness and the status quo.
Robot resistance leader Harun (Ken Watanabe) inadvertently illustrates this noncommittal approach when he claims that “nothing” is going to “happen to the West when we win this war … We only want to live in peace.” Yeah, right; that’s like saying that nothing happened in the Deep South after Brown v. Board of Education.
(Harun also asserts that “We would never attack mankind.” Yeah, I’m pretty sure there’s a law against that; then again, if the humans in this movie had bothered with Asimov’s rules they would have saved themselves — and the audience — a lot of grief)
Moreover, the whole plot is predicated on Alphie never breaking away from her predetermined purpose. She wants robots to be free, but what use is freedom without free will? The emphasis is thus placed on Sergeant Joshua Taylor (John David Washington); as Alphie’s self-appointed guardian, it’s up to him whether or not Alphie fulfills her mission — but does he give her a choice? Does he even tell her what she needs to know in order to make an informed decision? Or is he just using her in much the same way as the androids wanted to use her?
It doesn’t seem to occur to anyone that maybe Alphie doesn’t want to be a weapon. Or, conversely, that she might agree to go along with the plan nevertheless. But no one ever bothers to ask her any more than anyone bothers to discuss the pros and cons with her. Essentially, Alphie is little more than a cute little prop.
For a RobotLivesMatter flick, The Creator sure does take its androids for granted. These bots have all achieved sentience, but they’re not just “more human than human;” they’re better than human in every possible way (from the looks of it, some of them may even have reached nirvana). Somehow, they are preternaturally inclined to humanity’s foremost virtues while simultaneously unamenable to its vices (their only possible flaw is their willingness to quote-unquote sacrifice Alphie; not being a bomb, however, she need not immolate herself). This all-encompassing one-dimensionality renders the “simulants” (because that doesn’t sound anything like ‘replicants’) as uninteresting as Edwards is uninterested in how they became so enlightened in the first place.
Curiosity is not this film’s forte, nor is, for that matter, intelligence — artificial or otherwise. Usually, when a movie does the dreaded Dictionary Opening, my first thought is, ‘why didn’t they just use one of the words in the definition as the title instead of the title they did use?’ For instance, if The Creator were titled Nirmata, and an intertitle at the beginning defined ‘Nirmata’ as “Nepalese for ‘the Creator,’” I’d wonder, ‘why didn’t they just call it The Creator?’ But they did call it The Creator, so what on Earth is the fucking point of this?
Furthermore, the “mysterious unknown [redundant much?] architect of advanced A.I.” known as Nirmata (who is not so mysterious that Stevie Wonder couldn’t see their identity coming a mile away) is “worshipped by Artificial Intelligence as their creator; savior; God.” Thus proving that even artificial intelligence can be pretty fucking stupid.
Like near everything else in the film (which also has shades of Total Recall and The Golden Child, amongst many others), the religious robot angle had been done before by someone else — although I can’t say that it was done better, because Edwards doesn’t really do it at all; it’s just one more thing that is introduced merely to be glossed over.
All things considered, The Creator is severely underwritten and it looks less like Humans vs. A.I. than Humans vs. CGI; the best I can say about it is that at least this time CGI doesn’t kick our asses as bad as it often does — but then that’s what’s known as a Pyrrhic victory.