In the future, a nuclear warhead is fired at Los Angeles, and the US government blames the AI for it, thereby banning all Ai in technology. The Western world declares total war against AI in New Asia, where humans still live peacefully with AI in the form of robots and androids. US sergeant Joshua Taylor is an undercover agent who got intimate with Maya, whose father is Nirmata, the architect who helps AI evolve. Maya was hit in a strike, but Joshua returns to Asia to try to find her and Nirmata. He only stumbles upon a cyborg child, Alphie. As they are hunted down, Joshua finds out Maya was Nirmata, and that she encoded the DNA of their fetus in Alphie. Also, allegedly the nuclear attack was a human coding error. The US Army kidnaps Alphie, but Joshua helps her escape and go to the US secret weapon NOMAD in space. Alphie has the ability to shut down and control all technology, and thus destroys NOMAD, but Joshue dies inside it.
"The Creator" is a dark, depressive and unpleasant hypothetical contemplation of the relationship between humans and artificial intelligence (AI), and through it of some more universal themes of a fear between one species surpassing another one—can there be a peaceful co-existence or is the existential conflict over domination inevitable? The director Gareth Edwards crafts a fluent, dynamic and suspensful sci-fi film, with a lot of sense for technical achievements, especially the visual effects of robots, androids and the space war station NOMAD which scans and bombards targets on Earth, whereas its two main actors, John David Washington and Madeleine Yuna Voyles, are convincing in playing Joshua and Alphie who bond emotionally, giving it tragic weight. It is also a chilling commentary on the mentality of total war, where the enemy is fully dehumanized to such an extent that this reaches the level of xenophobia (a robot screams in panic and emotional appeal, but Joshua just cuts off its cable, despite a disturbed woman watching, claiming it's "just programming" and that its consciousness isn't real). However, the film focuses too much on action sequences at times at the expense of the more philosophical elements, whereas its last third falters due to several plots holes and inconsistencies. For instance, it is established that Alphie has the ability to simply shut off all technology—so why didn't she start using this much earlier, when the army arrived to kidnap her and fly away in helicopters? Why would precisely Joshue be summoned to execute her in the laboratory, and not someone else? These huge plot holes and a forced sentimental ending weaken the movie which, ironically, for some reason by that point entered the chatbot territory, since some of its elements felt mechanical and stiff.
Grade:++
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