Grade: D… With The Creator’s confusing and drawn out story about the future of menacing AI, I left the theater nearly half asleep and wondering if I could use AI in some way to get a little over two hours of my life back.
In today’s world, technology rapidly evolves as AI (artificial intelligence) is rapidly learning. It is almost a given that in the future, robots will become our overlords. Just like movies that have preceded The Creator like Terminator, Ex Machina, and a dash of Blade Runner, all of their stories warn the viewer of the dangers of a robotic takeover. The Terminator movies, for example, literally put the viewer in a front row seat of the battle between humans and machines. Back then in the nineties, it was awesome to watch Sarah Connor fight off the T-1000 exo-skeletons in order to save the future of the world. While The Creator does warn the viewer of the potential dangers of a robot takeover, it does it in a far less exciting way.
In The Creator, John David Washington plays Joshua. Joshua is a former human soldier that is tasked to go undercover amongst the robots. With the help of a robot child, Alphie (played by Madeline Yuna Voyles), Joshua’s mission is simple, find and kill “The Creator” who is literally the creator of the dangerous AI that is determined to take over earth. The problem is that “The Creator’s” identity is a mystery and therefore challenging to track down.
I saw The Creator on an IMAX screen. The look of the movie and cinematography are excellent and it is well acted across the board, but the movie just felt like a waste of time and, save for the ending, I was pretty bored. The Creator did not introduce any new ideas about AI that have not already been presented in other movies of a similar genre. The story was pretty thin and the reveal of “The Creator” was very underwhelming and predictable. I correctly guessed who “The Creator” was very early on in the movie.
While The Creator had the potential to create a message of caution to the audience, it is more likely to create your own dreams. Unless you have seen all of the other movies out in the theaters, it is safe to skip this slog of a movie.