The Creator
It should be noted that the concept of man vs. AI isn’t new. Nor is the idea of sympathetic AI new. You only need to look at the T800 in Terminator 2, Johnny 5, Data from Next Generation, Chappie… And the list goes on and on.
Nor is it the first to feature AI in the form of a child or that AI can develop feelings and emotions. You need look no further than the movie AI: Artificial Intelligence (don’t judge us; it was before the dumbasses came prepackaged into our search engines and if you said “AI,” people probably wouldn’t know what you meant).
And while I’m reasonably certain The Creator isn’t the first movie to feature mankind as the villains of the story, I’m hard-pressed to think of a movie that has such a succinct reasoning behind mankind’s inability to exist with anything that could potentially meet us at our level.
We’re assholes.
As Colonel Howell (played by Allison Janney) puts it when talking about the rivalry between Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens (and I’m paraphrasing here): it wasn’t that Neanderthals were stupid; we were just meaner.
As the story unfolds and the twists of the plot take their somewhat predictable path, I kept coming back to that line as foreshadowing for the rest of the movie. We’re the assholes.
But just because this movie doesn’t really break new ground doesn’t mean it’s not enjoyable. It is. But it’s enjoyable in the way that summer beach reading is enjoyable. Meaning, I don’t know of many people who bring Kafka to the beach (for example).
I think the most disappointing thing about this movie is that it was released on Hulu. The movie features some truly stunning visuals that deserved a big screen.
If you’ve got Hulu and want to watch it, I can recommend it. If you’ve got a home theater or a big screen TV with a ripping sound system, even better. But if you’ve only been considering adding another subscription to your monthly bills, I don’t think this is the movie that should tip the scales.
The Chimerical Dark 