Movie Review: "The Creator" (2023)

I am not usually into Sci-Fi movies and more than often I will go out of my way to avoid them. I went to see this one at the Odeon on the night of the 28th of September and was quite surprised that I was leaning into it. For someone who gets bored by Sci-Fi very quickly, I was often impressed by its more heartfelt storyline that induced moments of tragedy, leaving it feeling less like a dry, robot-based science fiction movie and more like an adaptation from something that should have been written by Isaac Asimov in his Robot Dreams book.

Working with the pipe dream that one day, human and AI-based robots could live together in harmony, this book explores deeper themes than just your usual Sci-Fi stories. Be that as it may, this film has too many faults for me to simply gloss over. Hanging in the balance therefore, this film scores half marks: half for being entertaining and dealing with more ethical problems and losing half for being a little all over the place and a bit too predictable.

The film is about a man who returns to a workforce locating a highly dangerous AI designer after suffering badly in the past. He finds that this horrifying weapon being created is actually a child and of course, the rest is about the moral dilemma of what it would mean if he killed the child and what it would mean if he saved it. Several ethical decisions later it seems almost too obvious as to what happens in the third act of the story.

The film had its advantages. The first of which being that the requirement to switch off the device juxtaposed with the ethical issue of the device being a child means that there is already quite an interesting story there - even if everyone and their pet dog already knows how this is going to go. The next part is that the first act is actually relatively interesting regardless of how much was spent on those explosion scenes, they sure do look good on the big screen. (However, when it comes to explosion scenes, the one in Oppenheimer is far more bone-chilling and they hadn't even killed anyone yet. The Creator has an explosion that wipes out one million people and it feels like there should have been more too it. They cheaped out on the wrong scenes. This is a fault).

The film also has its disadvantages. Even though at its base level, the film is entertaining, the entirety of the predictable third act went on for far too long. It seemed as if the movie itself didn't know where it wanted to end and the inevitability of the ending just took longer to get to. Another disadvantage is the fact that the film itself has these very long dramatic scenes, but in scenes where the film could have been more dramatic it chooses almost not to be. For example: the scene where the child is in the facility in L.A is almost glossed over in favour of showing us landscapes of robot temples in comparison. We understand that the film is trying to show us scape and as an audience we enjoy that, but sacrificing drama for the sake of it almost seems damning from the beginning.

One final disadvantage of this film was the inconsistencies with language. When the leading man asks if the children are enjoying their car ride as they plough through the police officers at great speed and danger, one of the children raises their hand in a comical way. However, it is well documented that in many other parts of the film, language has often been a barrier because nobody speaks English.

How come a child who seems barely old enough to speak their home language understand a man speaking English with a heavy American accent at a speed where many native English speakers would struggle to understand him? How could the people he borrowed a ride from understand what he was saying though everyone else including the AI child for a time, requires a special translation device? There's too much to unpack there. But these are just some examples of the inconsistencies with language that happen in this film.

All in all, it is entertaining and easy to understand though I do not think that it warrants a second watch. There were too many things that I was left trying to patch up. It seemed almost a let down because it seeks to be entertaining. If you are looking purely for an entertaining Sci-Fi movie that deals with emotional and ethical themes then I do suggest that this one would be better than others. But if you're a Sci-Fi purist, then possibly take a look at the Foundation series instead.