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The Creator (2023)


The Creator is a film that once again tries to warn the audience of the dangers of artificial intelligence.

Director, Gareth Edwards, seems to only write movies where it's a band of military folks, freedom fighters, or terrorists who against all odds get the job done see: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, The Creator, and Monsters. 

John David Washington was quickly becoming a Hollywood go-to actor, but after the mediocre response to Tenant and now the lack of an audience for The Creator his bankability is going down. Sure he was great in the Blackkklansman, but it wasn't his acting that made that movie what it was. He has a hard time showing emotion other than stoicism. This might be why he's leaving the action/sci-fi scene and going back to Oscar bait with his next movie: The Piano Lesson.

The film suffers from victim mentality, hitting you over the head repeatedly for the first fifteen minutes with how the main character is a victim of artificial intelligence. The film suffers from horrendous dialogue. At one point Joshua, the main character, explains to his superiors that he had lost his wife and child like they didn't already know that. The delivery of his lines was really wooden and phoned in. The robots at one point have their guns on Joshua, he grabs a gun and turns over before any of the robots have the chance to react. Why does the AI have such a low response time? Also, how in the world does a self-described "Advanced Sim" (AI) not know where humans come from and why would it be programmed to be curious about something it could just look up? The antagonist even at one point says "See you in Vahalla" at one point. Oh, the level of cringe in the writing.

The film has plenty of not-so-subtle casting choices that promote a leftist ideology. If that's not your thing then you'll probably not enjoy the film. If it is your thing, you'll probably still not enjoy the film as you don't want to see those sorts of scenes and the general bad dialogue and writing. This seems like a film for a basement dweller who spends all day on X (Twitter) promoting propaganda. The production was expensive, the CG was okay, the writing was horrible, and the direction was Edwards' worst so far. Result: D+


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