The Creator film review — earnest AI epic remixes the sci-fi classics

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Long before ChatGPT, British director Oscar Sharp released Sunspring (2016), a short film “written” by an AI trained on sci-fi screenplays. (The result can be found on YouTube: still impressively weird.) At many times the budget, we now have The Creator, an earnest and spectacular epic starring John David Washington. The film is co-written and directed by another British filmmaker, Gareth Edwards (Monsters, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story). But it brims with so much déjà vu, it too can feel like the product of a data scrape of genre classics.

None of this is underhanded. Nobody calls their humanoid characters “simulants” without knowing people will recall the replicants of Blade Runner. And the movie is, nominally, about AI itself. 

As the tale begins in 2065, the US has already waged a successful war against the higher processing power in its midst. But the foe lives on as a guerrilla force, AI-driven simulants at large in “New Asia”, a geopolitical mass that will also look pointedly familiar. If Blade Runner supplies the circuitry, Edwards channels Apocalypse Now for scenes of US helicopters strafing paddy fields — a ’Nam by any other name.

Washington plays a US soldier wrecked by his own human powers of deception. A former double agent, he once disastrously betrayed his own wife, a pro-simulant activist. Emotionally, then, he has a lot going on. The same is true for the film, packing huge themes into old-fashioned costume. The west is represented by hoo-rah Army grunts. Simulants take double duty as proxies of the Global South and angelic robo-naïfs. 

What any of this really has to do with artificial intelligence is a puzzle, though it does mean a film released by Disney now insists that only murderous brutes could question AI. A penny for the thoughts of striking Hollywood actors.

Edwards is a movie nut of a particular stripe, the kind who, if he weren’t a gifted director, might keenly invite you to check out his Blu-rays. And to say The Creator calls to mind other blockbusters is not a jibe. The filmmaking has heft enough for it to feel like a remix, not mimicry. 

But for all the razzle-dazzle, we’re probably meant to do more than admire the view: to reflect on matters existential. Instead, what sticks in your mind is how much our ideas of technology, war and even love are now impossibly entwined with a feedback loop of images from old movies. Whether AI or human, we are all being trained on the past.

★★★☆☆

In US and UK cinemas now