The Creator (2023)

With artificial intelligence (AI) all the rage in popular culture at the moment, here’s a war movie, robots versus human beings, that has surprisingly little of interest to say about it. AI is basically the Nazis and commies of yore in this movie, “the enemy” enough to warrant the big guns. But is AI really evil? is basically as far as it goes in the big idea department. More to the point, there’s a lot of ordnance going off here. And for the feels, there’s a story about a fiercely loving military family torn apart by the requirements of duty and humanity. But the basic deal is the robots have created a super-weapon which the humans must destroy, unless the robots can destroy the humans’ super-weapon first. For once I’m leery of spoilers—I mean, it’s still a relatively new movie—so I’m not going to get much into plot details. Instead, I have to marvel at the way director and cowriter Gareth Edwards (Rogue One, the 2014 Godzilla) basically dodges any complexities of AI, reducing his tale mostly to standard warfare battles, explosions, and high tech. Kapow! Take that! Pew-pew-pew! It has a bit of a tricksy plot, but more in the spy story vein, as it’s not always easy to discern everyone’s motivations and loyalties (let alone what is going on from scene to scene). The plot does throw up some twists and turns but not in ways that seemed very interesting to me. I wanted to know more about this AI beyond simple domination and/or survival, the basic binaries we get in movies like The Creator. It’s skillfully enough done—looks good, blows up good, has some interesting ideas about what future warfare will look like. I’ve just never been very interested in war movies—well, I did like some of the nuance in the Vietnam War movies before they hardened into cliches. But once 9/11 and the “war on terror” was part of the national experience, I really haven’t been into them, acknowledging that the cinematic innovations of, say, The Hurt Locker, offer up some exception to the general rule that war movies are a lot of tedium. The Creator, for all its pretensions to vague religiosity and heavy science fiction “evolutionary” sophistication, is too basically a war movie. If you’re into it for that, it’s not bad?