Midweek Update: The Bland Humanism of 'The Creator'

Director Gareth Edwards asks, "Can't we all just get along?"

There’s a part of me that wants to push all my qualms with The Creator to the side and just celebrate a visually stunning sci-fi blockbuster that’s not based on any pre-existing IP. That would be nice. But looking past the details for some broad, mushy feel-good pablum would also serve to repeat The Creator’s fatal flaw. For all of the glorious images in director/co-writer Gareth Edwards’ new movie, the entire film feels imprecise by design. Edwards seeks to show that humanity is not so different, and that our differences are superficial. It’s the well-intentioned message of a “Co-exist” bumper sticker and just as shallow.

The film requires three prologues just to get started, first with a definition of “Nirmata” (which is Hindi for “the creator”), to explain that “Nirmata” is the God of A.I. Then we get a newsreel that explains we created robots to help us, but when a nuclear weapon went off in Los Angeles, humanity blamed A.I. and the West pledged to rid the world of robots even though they now lived in peaceful co-existence with the East. Why the world broke along these particular geopolitical lines and why the A.I. was accepted in the East (or “New Asia” as it’s called in the movie) is never explained, but fine. Then we get to our main character, Joshua (John David Washington), an undercover agent for the West who has fallen for Maya (Gemma Chan), an Eastern woman, but their peaceful life gets disrupted during a raid where she and their unborn child are seemingly killed by NOMAD, a giant space laser built by the West to wipe out A.I. Five years later, Joshua is pulled out of retirement to find a new secret weapon with the promise that finding the weapon will lead him to Maya, who is still alive. However, Joshua then discovers that the secret weapon is a robot kid, whom he dubs “Alphie” (Madeleine Yuna Voyles). Alphie is basically a walking remote control with the ability to turn machines on and off at will, which would be pretty useful if you needed to shut down a giant space laser. Joshua sticks with Alphie in the hopes that Alphie will lead him to Maya, but they’re now on the run from the U.S. military, who want Alphie dead.

I know that’s a lot of plot, but I wrote it out because for all of that set-up, it matters little in any emotional stakes beyond the broadest, “Emotionally damaged man must protect innocent child” narrative you’ve seen before, except without any kind of specificity or bonding. Because Joshua and Alphie are on the run, the film can never settle down to let them bond in any meaningful way. Instead, Edwards and co-writer Chris Weitz opt for a bizarre strategy of backfilling every relationship with flashbacks or exposition. When Joshua needs to rely on an old friend, the story has to circle back to be like, “Uh, they had this nice moment together and that’s why they’ll help out.” Even with Maya, there’s no time to invest in the relationship that’s meant to be Joshua’s primary motivation, so instead we just get quick flashbacks of Joshua and Maya being cute together. It’s a plug-and-play relationship that’s meant to be serviceable to the plot rather than give the characters or their love any texture or shape.

A robot looks at the NOMAD space laser in The Creator | Image via 20th Century Studios

These kinds of broad strokes are what ultimately damn The Creator to its core because Edwards has consciously eschewed any kind of specificity in favor of erasing definition—presumably because it serves his ultimate goal of showing that there’s far more that connects us than separates us. That’s a nice idea, but it’s narratively frustrating and thematically infuriating. In terms of story, we’re constantly left wondering about the details of the A.I. beyond Edwards’ modest twist of, “What if robots were good instead of Terminators?” At one point, we see one of the robots taking a nap, but if they were built as a labor force as shown in the prologue, then why would they need naps? We see robots wearing Eastern religious garb, but how does A.I. religion function? Are they praying to Nirmata, or are they more devoted to the tenets of Buddhism or Hinduism or any other religion prevalent in the Eastern world? The film seeks to stress that the robots are no different than humans and simply wish to live in peace, which is a nice message, but it also feels particularly thin when every look at the robots only serves to raise more questions than it answers.

Edwards looks to take this humanist approach even further by showing how the West and East’s interactions make them all just people. In a sense, that’s absolutely true. There is more that unites us than divides us. But Edwards’ tour through Eastern culture feels somewhat callous, especially when you note the lack of Eastern voices in the major creative roles in this feature. For Edwards and Weitz, this may not seem like such a big deal since they endeavor to depict the Eastern peoples and culture in a positive light. But it’s still the Western gaze guiding the vision, which is how you get to some really cringeworthy scenes of American forces bombing the hell out of Southeast Asian villages with no real thought given to what a Vietnam War aesthetic means to different perspectives. In the hands of a storyteller who has a personal connection to the Vietnam War or any of the other horrors faced by Southeast Asian people in the 20^th century, these scenes look different. In the hands of Edwards, it’s just another action scene. It’s the kind of pan-Asian approach that jumps between hanzi and katakana in the art direction because it’s all about the aesthetic, never really acknowledging the history, culture, and conflicts between China and Japan.

It's easy to say, “We’re all the same,” if you erase all the things that make us different. Obviously, those differences aren’t worth killing each other over, but nor should they be completely discarded or absorbed into one kind of bland, cultural gruel. I like that people from different parts of the world have different experiences than I do, and the specificity of their experiences is what gives them richness and flavor. Edwards seems to believe that if he just loads up on enough sci-fi imagery, that’s where the film will get its unique atmosphere, and he almost kind of gets away with it. He has a murderer’s row of talent on this thing from cinematographers Grieg Fraser and Oren Soffer to music by Hans Zimmer to production designer James Clyne to costume designer Jeremy Hanna. It’s a marvelous bunch of creative people, but their work is all in service to shallow concepts. It’s a movie where someone thought it would be neat to put a robot in a Tibetan-style robes without any thought to what that image means. It hints at a larger world without ever having to do the legwork of exploration.

The Creator isn’t a cynical film, but it is an oblivious one that erases nuance at every turn to wipe away differences rather than work towards universal themes in any meaningful way. The relationships between its characters are purely perfunctory. The settings, while evocative, never seem particularly sure of what they wish to evoke. It’s a movie that wishes to claim we’re all the same while overlooking meaningful distinctions and ignoring its own Western gaze that still sets the terms while simply flattening Eastern societies into aesthetics and nice people. The Creator is the cinematic equivalent of a white guy with a Thai script tattoo who tells you he’s a citizen of the world, man.

Recommendations

I rewatched The Rundown a few weeks ago, and it holds up pretty well. It’s one of Dwayne Johnson’s earlier movies, and aside from looking smaller, he also gets to play more levels simply by not needing to win every fight. He gets to look silly. He gets to play more comic beats that don’t have to reinforce his toughness. It’s before Dwayne Johnson became Dwayne Johnson: The Brand, and I think the movie is the better for it. I also think it’s probably Peter Berg’s best movie behind Deepwater Horizon. Worth adding to your collection for only $6.

Over in Substacks, while I’m tired of Elon Musk, I haven’t quite tired of people dunking on Walter Isaacson’s terrible biography of Elon Musk. Dave Karpf’s takedown of the book is scathing as he points out that aside from Isaacson not understanding how to win at poker, he also struggles to craft a narrative of Musk as “Great Man of History” because his subject won’t play along. Ultimately, Isaacson’s behavior shows a key distinction between publicist and journalist. A publicist has an end goal in mind of the person they’re trying to sell. A journalist follows the truth no matter where it leads. Isaacson is a publicist.

Elon Musk and the Infinite Rebuy

What I’m Watching

Hooptober has begun! For those who don’t know, Hooptober is an annual challenge on Letterboxd that sets requirements on particular horror movies to watch. It’s named after horror director Tobe Hooper, and while I had mixed feelings on my participation last year since I frequently wanted to divert and watch other horror films, I decided to give it one more go. So far, I’ve watched Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, The Phantom Carriage, and Night of the Eagle (aka Burn, Witch, Burn). So far, so good, but I also have a pretty packed month ahead of me as I also try to finish up my Scorsese watchlist before Killers of the Flower Moon.

What I’m Reading

I finished up Station Eleven, and for the most part, I really liked it. It’s life-affirming in the way that great post-apocalyptic fiction tends to be. Last week, I mentioned a concern about the text, and thankfully that concern—the “we are all connected” trope, which I tend to find weak and contrived in fiction—didn’t play out too heavily. Instead, it fits more with how the book is about a longing for human connection and how of all the things we take for granted, it's perhaps other people we take for granted the most. That longing gives the story its melancholy beauty and helps it transcend its weaker story beats.

I’ve now moved on to reading trade paperbacks of Ultimate Spider-Man, partly as a way to indulge my anticipation for Spider-Man 2, and partly because I don’t want to start another novel or non-fiction piece before October 3^rd, when my copy of Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon arrives. I’ve been looking forward to this one since I heard that not only was Michael Lewis writing about Sam Bankman-Fried, but that Lewis had been shadowing SBF when his crypto exchange, FTX, completely imploded. I need my schadenfreude!

In other reads:

Martin Scorsese: “I Have To Find Out Who The Hell I Am.” by Zach Baron [GQ] - Scorsese is doing press in the lead-up to the release of Killers of the Flower Moon, and the first of two profiles I’m sharing has an extremely elegiac tone to it. Scorsese is 81, well aware of his own mortality, and feels like the time he has left is precious. It’s a great interview because it’s the story of a man who has accomplished so much, and still feels like there’s so much to do, but now he has to pick his battles carefully whether it’s a new movie to make or a book to read. While a lot of attention is going to his latest comments on franchise movies, I feel like that’s clickbait dross that misses the loveliness of the full piece.

Martin Scorsese Still Has Stories to Tell by Stephanie Zacharek [Time] - This piece is a little lighter, and aims to look at how Killers of the Flower Moon fits into his larger filmography. Still, well worth reading since, as both pieces imply, we don’t know how much longer this master of cinema will be with us.

Why Bill Watterson Vanished by Nic Rowan [The American Conservative] - No figure in newspaper comics looms as large as Bill Watterson. This isn’t meant as a slight to other cartoonists, but Calvin and Hobbes is something special that stands apart from its peers. Wildly creative, bitingly incisive, and a rare instance (in any medium) of a creator pushing back against licensing his material so that it wouldn’t lose what made it special. This is a good piece that examines why Watterson decided to stop drawing his iconic strip, and is well worth reading on the eve of his first book in nearly thirty years, The Mysteries.

What I’m Hearing

I’ve been making my way through You’re Wrong About’s 2020 series on the D.C. Snipers. I know I can trust YWA to avoid sensationalism (swapping it in for gallows humor), but it is fascinating to me that this is one of the biggest crime sprees of the 21^st century, and yet in a time where there’s probably more supply for True Crime narratives than there is demand, this event seems to have been memory holed. There was a 2021 docuseries, I, Sniper, but you can’t even find it anywhere. Anyway, I appreciate the insights YWA brought here and the conclusions they come to.

What I’m Playing

Over in the indie games I’m playing before Spider-Man 2 devours all my time, I rather enjoyed Unpacking and how it told a story through setting rather than characters or prose. I also admired its pixel art style and calming, simple gameplay.

I also finally played Firewatch and was a bit let down. I want to be conscious of the limitations an indie studio has in terms of how much game they can make and the story they can tell, but Firewatch sets up some pretty big emotional and plot stakes only to come to an anticlimactic and bland conclusion.

I’ve now taken up Abzû, and it’s not too bad, although the controls are driving me insane, which is surprising given the relaxing vibe of the game itself.