One of the most ambitious sci-fi films of the decade finds an audience on Prime Video

Throughout the 2010s, and belatedly into the 2020s, massive, corporate-backed intellectual property has dominated both the local box office and the American journalistic conversation about cinema in general. We live in a world where journalists, when they have the opportunity to sit down with Martin Scorsese to discuss new masterpieces like “Silence” or “The Wolf of Wall Street”, decide to ask him about Captain America and his place at Marvel. Cinema universe. Vocal destroyers of the dominant paradigm have repeatedly yawned that Hollywood should devote more time and resources to new ideas. After all, why be the next Star Wars when you can be the first of something else? Where oh where were the original sci-fi/fantasy ideas?

But when an ambitious filmmaker tries to create something new and surprising for a wide cinema audience, it usually fails. Audiences seemed more interested in attaching themselves to a recognizable corporate product than exploring a new myth, new characters, or new sci-fi concepts. Films such as “Strange World” or “Gemini Man” or “Gods of Egypt” are rejected by the audience, and even films based on known literature – “During the Runk”, “Mortal Engines”, “Valerian and the City of a Thousand”. Planets” have crashed and burned. These movies don't have anything wilder or weirder than what you'd see in an MCU movie, but without the IP, audiences were left on the sidelines.

We want original ideas, but reject them when they arise. Even if some of the above films are bad, clumsy, too generic or too weird, their original imagery and ambitious concepts should at least be discussed and celebrated more openly. Big mistakes are more interesting than successful pabulum.

Among the victims of the public's capriciousness were Gareth Edwards' 2023 sci-fi epic The Creator an anime-influenced sci-fi film about humanity's genocide against robots. The film was made for a relatively modest $80 million, but only grossed around $104 million. However, 15 months since its release, viewers are discovering “The Creator” on Prime Video.

The “creator” setup is timely. By 2055, humanity will allow AI to take over most aspects of its infrastructure. However, in doing so, it allowed the AI ​​to inexplicably (accidentally?) detonate a nuclear bomb in the middle of Los Angeles. In response, humanity waged a vicious, militant campaign against the AI, and several countries banded together to form a worldwide, ultra-violent, anti-robot task force to kill them all. It's now 2070, and there's also a menacing, hawk-like scanning ship—the USS NOMAD—that regularly circles the globe, capable of detecting where any robots might be hiding.

This is, of course, a bleak ethical conundrum, as robots have become self-aware, and many of them have lifelike human faces. Indeed, robots have become so sophisticated, they have created their own cultures and religions. Killing robots is now just military genocide. The military hopes to find a being named Nirmata (Nepali word for “creator”) and kill him/her, as rumors spread that Niramata has created NOMAD's destructive superweapon.

However, the weapon at issue is Alpha-O (Madeleine Yuna Voyles), a small child robot with a calm demeanor and a child-like understanding of the world. Most of The Creator will feature the film's main character, a soldier named Sgt. Taylor (John David Washington) as he guides Alpha-O (or “Alfie”) through dangerous territory, rethinking his philosophy of life.

The concepts behind The Creator are ambitious, and Edwards offered some tantalizing concepts within his otherwise straightforward sci-fi story. The idea that the robots have developed their own belief system is fascinating, and Edward would have been wiser to focus on that instead of stopping to have military firefights. After all, it's a pretty simple metaphor for acceptance and peace. Star Trek lite, if you will.

Of course, perhaps one of the reasons The Creator is doing so well on Prime Video is its negative talking points. It will definitely start some conversations. While Edwards' film ultimately emerges as a drama about acceptance and the horrors of xenophobic military action, it also seems to send a subtly unpleasant message about AI.

Some audience members may be old enough to remember movies where AI robots were seen as a dangerous threat to humanity (see: The Terminator, Alien, and many more), so it's strange to see a movie like The Creator where AI is portrayed as subtle, humane and worthy of protection. It can't be a coincidence that a major studio owned by Disney is trying to portray AI as gentle and helpful in 2023. Could The Creator Be Corporate Propaganda? Is it trying to soften the audience to the idea of ​​pervasive and harmless AI just so that real-life AI investors can continue to develop the technology for their own purposes?

/Rafael Motamayor himself reviewed the film “The Creator”, and he said the movie was cool… but that it wasn't very good. Many critics berated the simplicity of its ideas, and some were even openly offended. In Freak Central, critic Walter Chow Edwards took a hard line on the fetishization of Asian cultures and the clumsy use of Vietnam War visuals. Chow wrote that too many white filmmakers use Asian bodies as fodder for Western spiritual navel-gazing.

Are people attracted to the cool visuals of The Creator? Does it have heady science fiction ideas lurking deep within it? Its problematic existence as a pro-tech corporate tool? Is it a blurry image? Whatever it is that attracts people, the film is now getting more exposure than ever before. Perhaps the conversation and deconstruction will continue.