(courtesy IMP Awards)
One of the things that’s so appealing about science fiction and that makes it such an engrossing genre in which to immerse yourself is its seemingly infinite capacity for carrying all kinds of ideas, both big and small.
All storytelling does this, of course, but somehow science fiction aka sci-fi seems to do it better than most, able to wildly, imaginatively expansive in its scope while going deep and intimate in its emotional impact and reach.
Case very much in point, and to devastatingly good effect is The Creator, the latest film from Gareth Edwards who gave us the thoughtfully scary Monsters and the beautifully scarring drama of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, two movies which are testament to the narrative power of this most unique of genres.
Set in 2065, The Creator jumps on the AI bandwagon but in a way that is a whole league apart from anything we’ve seen before; gone is the black and white binary idea of AI bad, humanity good, and the idea that any impact on society of new technology happens in one linear, clearly demarcated way, replaced by a quietly nuanced exploration of what happens when one part of the global community demonises AI while another embraces it as a next step in human evolution.
As you can imagine with a clash this chasm-like in its origins, there’s little time for anyone to enter into any kind of thoughtful dialogue, and so, the story initially plays out as a David and Goliath battle between the United States and its Western Allies who see AI as a force for unspeakable horror and evil after it detonates a nuclear warhead over L.A. and New Asia, a grouping of nations in Southeast Asia who not only embrace this quantum leap in technology but see it as a force for good and human betterment.
Rather than trying to meet somewhere in the middle, the U.S. in typically brusque fashion bulldozes its way into New Asia using a fearsomely equipped military space station called NOMAD (North American Orbital Mobile Aerospace Defense) to attack AI wherever it can, and parachuting in undercover operatives like Sergeant Joshua Taylor (John David Washington) to get intel on the growing New Asia AI forces.
Demonised routinely by the U.S. military and legislators as the source of all evil and suffering in the world, Taylor is surprised to find the situation not so cleanly-cut on the ground, even going so far as to fall in love with and marry Maya (Gemma Chan), the daughter of Nirmata, the original “Creator” who invested his technology with the capacity for the kind of raw, compassionate humanity that actually Homo Sapiens seem to lack.
He’s by no means a convert to the AI cause and early in the film, his split loyalties come back to haunt him in ways too distressing for him to handle for years afterwards, but he has begun to appreciate, especially with some prosthetics of his own, that the impact of technology on human society is never quite as straightforward as the more conservative elements in society would like to portray.
Five years after his undercover gig comes to an end, Taylor is reluctantly drafted back into a military operation by Colonel Howell (Alison Janney) to find and destroy an piece of AI tech known as Alpha-O which has the capacity to destroy NOMAD and end the war with AI, something no one in the U.S. establishment can countenance.
Taylor only agrees after Howell promises that he’ll be reunited with Maya, but what starts out as a straightforward mission becomes anything but when Taylor discovers that Alpha-O is an innocent robotic girl who, yes, possesses, an ability to manipulate electricity but who was created by Nirmata to be the pure embodiment of the kind of humanity that AI has embraced but which sadly eludes the more thuggish members of our species.
All that narrative exposition which does not contains spoilers and reflects what you’ll know from the trailer going in is all there purely to set the scene for what turns out to be a quite exquisitely beautiful bond that develops between Taylor and the child renamed, rather affectionately, Alphie, who far from being a weapon of species-ending war simply wants to watch cartoons and see her creator.
While The Creator does disappear a little into its own enthralling narrative meanders, and sacrifices some narrative compactness for storytelling sprawl, it is by and large one of the more thoughtfully clever and emotionally affecting sci-fi stories to come out in some fashion.
Filling to the orbiting brim with BIG ideas and quietly-expressed but BIG emotions, it is a near perfect example of the genre, ably conveying thoughts on everything from Western imperalistic arrogance (there’s more than a hint of the Vietnam War as U.S. forces run roughshod over New Asia’s AI-sympathetic position) to the crass brutality of binary thinking while focusing in ways that will seize your soul at how raw humanity can get violently and tragically caught in the crosshairs.
Taylor in particular is a beautifully wrought figure, a man carrying a great deal of pain who realises once he’s back in the messy AI hell of the U.S. military’s making that the world is nowhere as simple as he bthought.
Given his experiences five years earlier, you know he’s buried in cynicism and detached to a necessarily self-protective degree from the war that’s never far from anyone’s door, but it’s only when he meets Alphie and realises how nuanced and human the whole AI issue really is, and that they don’t want war but mutually beneficial, respectful coexistence that he embraces the complexity of a situation that was never as simple as he once saw it or as Howell, the murderously vengeful military bogeyperson of The Creator still unthinkingly believes it is.
Written and directed by Edwards with his customarily affecting mix of intellectual thoughtfulness and emotional honesty, The Creator is, even at 133 minutes, a finely-honed and well-told (mostly) film that knows the world is far less straightforward that many would like it to be, and that if we could just stop for a second and think things through from a more humanistic and considered angle, that much of the pain, grief and loss that bedevils our world could be avoided.
And, who knows, we may just end up with the kind of world the AIs and humans of AI want which, given the sh*tstorm of the current age, would be no bad thing.