'The Creator', the far from innocent message of a film with an impressive aesthetic

@ElentirENG ES 9·30·2023 · 18:31 1

This week a new American film was released that addresses the always interesting topic of artificial intelligence.

'Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning' shows the most dangerous enemy in this entire saga
'Oppenheimer': a politically incorrect comment on two very current issues

This film has been directed by British filmmaker Gareth Edwards, author of two films that I really liked: "Godzilla" (2014) and "Rogue One" (2016), and a science-fiction film that seemed very original to me: "Monsters" (2010). These precedents encouraged me to go to the cinema to see this new film, in which almost all the critics agree on one point: its impressive aesthetics, which is very reminiscent, by the way, of science images. fiction created by artificial intelligence.

There is another aspect of this film that many critics also agree on: the vagueness of its script and the gaps in the story, and they are right. Edwards seems to have rested the weight of this film on aesthetics, suffering from the same problem as "Monsters": a good plot but poorly developed. All in all, "The Creator" has such a powerful visual apparatus that it surpasses "Monsters." But the drawbacks of this new film are not limited to a lazy script.

One of the aspects why "The Creator" is being compared to "Apocalypse Now" (1979) is that its protagonist is a lonely and conflicted guy with a mission in the middle of a hostile environment set in Southeast Asia. If in "Rogue One" there were certain reminiscences of the Vietnam War, in "The Creator" they are already evident, especially because in this film, the bad guys are the Americans.

From here, I preview some details of the film. If you are going to go see it, you may prefer to stop reading at this point.

But unlike many films about the Vietnam War, which cast a critical and even acidic look at the US intervention in that country (at the request of the South Vietnamese government and after suffering an invasion of their communist neighbors to the north, something that many films overlook), in "The Creator" the US is not that they are bad for doing something bad (a reading that could be entirely legitimate, of course ), but in this case the US is presented as an evil power against an imaginary country, New Asia, about which nothing negative is shown. It doesn't even seem to have armed forces (we only see its police) and it is never indicated what political system it has, although what we do see are some curious images of misery combined with high doses of technology.

The most curious thing about the film is that it presents us with a United States willing to destroy anything in a part of the world in which communist China today has enormous strategic influence, but it does not appear at any time . The film is set in the year 2065. We don't know if that dictatorship has disappeared or what has happened, but it simply doesn't count in the development of the film.

To this we must add another curious aspect: almost all the white Westerners in the film are bad people. They are presented as the bad guys of the movie, except for one who has decided to switch sides and then he is good. The protagonist is African-American, so he is saved from that rather racist cliché, specifically of that new racism that is becoming fashionable on the left in the US and other countries. On the contrary, all the Asians we see in the film do not show that evil character.

The anti-American attitude of "The Creator" is so evident that when watching the film I was wondering if a Chinese production company was behind it, but no: it is produced by two US studios (20th Century Studios and New Regency Productions) and one from Canada (Entertainment One). The "woke culture" promoted by the Western left is doing Beijing's dirty work, demonizing Western culture while showing other cultures (in this case Asian) in a totally uncritical way.

Perhaps that discourse is also what lies behind the particular vision that this film has on artificial intelligence. In other film productions we have been shown the risks of this technology, such as in the films of the "Terminator" saga and in "I, Robot" (2004). "The Creator" opts more for the treatment of "Blade Runner" (1982) and "A.I. Artificial Intelligence" (2001), in which robots are victims of ruthless human beings.

But Gareth Edwards takes that much further: in "The Creator" there are several allusions to AI as a form of evolution. This film adopts an openly sentimental and uncritical tone with AI, to present us with an artificial intelligence that generates beings that are more affectionate and peaceful than humans, beings that only want to live in peace and be free. Beings that only seem to be understood by the "good guys" in the film, who are the Asians. It is a deceitful discourse that simply ignores the risks of AI and its own nature, based on the implacable logic of programming in which the only moral limits that there can be are those that can be introduced by humanity. Ironically, what Gareth Edwards seems to admire about AI are characteristics of humanity and not the cold logic of machines.

Anyway,as far as its aesthetic side is concerned, the film is fabulous. In the rest it has disappointed me, since it has a message that is not innocent at all and that has a considerable ideological load even if it tries to hide it. I leave you here with the trailer: