#the creator 2023

[waymond-wang]

THE CREATOR (2023) dir. Gareth Edwards ↳ Wanna play a game? It's called, "Save your friend Joshua from being killed by the fuckin' police".

[idiot-trashpanda]

just saw The Creator and i am having thoughts

a lot of reviews seem to focus on the sci-fi aspects, the fact that there's a war against A.I. and saying "this is a glimpse of what our world could be" without any hint of understand that this is what the world already is

sure, there's no war against A.I. but i think the more important part of the film is the depiction of U.S. imperialism and the wanton destruction and murder the U.S. military leaves everywhere it goes. in there muerderous quest to destroy all A.I. in revenge for something that was actually a human error, they murder thousands of innocent humans, adults and children alike. U.S. imperialism doesn't care how many it leaves dead, as long it achieves its objective.

to many people around the world watching this movie, where American missiles are launched at distant targets with no regard for who they kill, this film will be saddly familiar. over here in the imperial core, we have no idea what it feels like to be helpless in the face of such cruel destruction, but hundreds of millions of people around the world do.

so, like all good sci-fi, this wasn't a look at what the world could be if we let A.I. keep developing, but a look at how the world already is because we let the U.S. military industrial complex run amok

[lilianade-comics]

Saw the “Man and his emotional support android daughter” movie last night

[gern-geschehen]

just watched the creator and I'm obsessing over this robot dude

[hysterical-random-things]

Commission for @/ QuetzalQueen of Sek-On from The Creator (2023)

[lesbian-shakespeare]

Just came back from watching The Creator (2023) and my boy Gareth Edwards did it again. Dressed up as a film about ai, it’s really a stark image of USAmerican imperialism and the war on terror. Please go watch this movie if you have the chance.

[andrew3garfield]

John David Washington as Joshua

THE CREATOR (2023) dir. Gareth Edwards

[starrypawz]

So a slightly more coherant and non spoilery list of reasons you need to go see The Creator (2023)

The aesthetics alone are worth it

Seriously the film is so fucking pretty

Did you enjoy any of the following? Blade Runner, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Serial Experiments Lain, Gattaca, Elysium, District 9?

Do you like precocious, adorable children characters?

Do you like the 'gruff action dude becomes a dad' trope?

Do you enjoy fiction about transhumanism, the 'ship of theseues' as it relates to humanity? How do you feel about themed about the horrors of imperalism and the military industrial complex

Cool robots

[emilylorange]

speedpaint study of a screenshot from 'The Creator' ~2hrs cw flashing, timelapse

[emiliosandozsequence]

the creator (2023) dir. gareth edwards

[moltengoldveins]

so, I am already Adoring the discourse on The Creator, the new sci fi AI film that came out recently, but I’ve yet to see anyone talk about the fascinating religious undertones to the whole movie? Like, I’m Christian. I’ll be the first to admit my bias here: I tend to look for faith and spiritual undertones when consuming media because it’s an integral part of the way I see the world. but this movie was SO COOL?? Like, the Complete Lack of any sort of faith shown in the American characters in contrast with the AI and the Asian characters, a total shift from the modern cultural idea that religion and AI are incompatible. There are monks that are droids and simulants. The kid uses her technology powers by making a “praying” motion. There’s a robot preaching a pretty classic Judeo-Christian Messiah narrative to a bunch of kiddos. There’s only ONE American character given any sort of obvious religious identity and it’s that One Trooper Lady when she mentions Valhalla. This is such an interesting decision and I’m fascinated to know what y’all think of it. NOT TO MENTION (and this is by FAR my favorite part) the fact that the religion and the AI conflict and the treatment of human life are all implicitly bound up together. The Americans believe that the AI are ‘just programming,’ that they aren’t real, that they don’t have souls. The New Asians don’t. And that seems to bleed into the way they treat Humans as well? The kind girl near the beginning of the film, clearing the blast zone with Taylor, panics when she sees an AI online for the first time because she recognizes that he behaves like a person, while Taylor is cold, unresponsive, and insists that it’s just programming. The Americans SAY they value human life because humans are really people and AI aren’t, but they treat civilians and combatants, AI and Humans, Exactly the Same. Almost like, if you reduce one thing with a soul to ‘just programming, not of value’ that starts messing with the way you treat Everything Else. The New Asians, as far as the narrative tells us, don’t plan on retribution for the war. They’re careful with civilians, to a certain extent (I don’t love the van scene with the kiddos tbh :( feel like that was out of place? And the AI lady, the girlfriend of Taylor’s friend who was killed as well, interesting nuances there) and they treat one another like people ought. There’s very little distinction given between the more android and more human AI, which I think is awesome, and the climax of the arc of Taylor’s character happens In A Temple. The end of the story is a message of hope for reunification in heaven AND hope for reunification on earth. That’s. That’s so cool. Like. I think that’s the coolest thing I’ve seen in Ages. I can’t Ever remember seeing that kind of message done in a story that isn’t painfully preachy. One thing that often bothers me about modern film and media is the idea that religion and spirituality has to be handled in one of three ways: entirely unmentioned, preachy to the absurd, or blatantly disrespected. It’s not a universal problem, but it’s pretty widespread. I couldn’t tell what faith the directors ascribed to in this film, but I could tell they were discussing it intelligently and I LIKED THAT. I liked it a lot. I can’t speak for anyone but myself, my tastes, and beliefs: I’m willing to bet a lot of Christians won’t like this movie because they’re hung up on the lack of a blatantly Christian or preachy narrative. I’m willing to bet a lot of other people won’t like it because it tackled spirituality at all. But I liked it, because it looked at the world we live in and spoke of what it saw. It wrestled with the topics of death and life and souls and heaven and national pride and racism and capitalism and love and what it means to be a good person and it did it really well, and I admire that.

please please let me know what y’all thought of the movie? I’m really interested in knowing what people picked up on or thought the movie was saying. God bless y’all, and have an excellent weekend :) 💜

[antiqua-lugar]

aside from everything the creator probably has some of my favourite visual storytelling of the year because boy did it make me mad on purpouse. going to see if any interviews/reviews focus on the american imperialism angle as much as the ai angle

[404-art-found]

I spin a wheel of known robots I can draw and it lands on "that one cool looking fellow from The Creator who deserved more screentime"

[jessekestrel]

The way I'm just constantly thinking about Sekon (??? I think that might be his name?) from the Creator and all the stories I'm going to write about him and the art I'm going to commission of him and his OC girlfriend WAUGHHHHH.

I mean I am planning to write a whole 50k+ word AU fanfic where he gets a better chance. I am Not Normal about him and that's fine by me

[liceparade]

saw the creator (2023) like a week ago and haven't stopped thinking about it since. definitely one of my favorite jdw performances, and one of the few movies that doesn't even ask Are Robots People TM but comes out swinging. massively pro robot fucker. gareth edwards tried to work through the orientalism inherent to blade runner/apocalypse now and like....he may not have gotten around it, but he did frame the film around US imperialism and the vietnam war, so. my main criticism is that pretty much every area of the script needed to dig like. 15% deeper. overall, massively refreshing to see something that isn't legacy intellectual property take itself seriously, even if it doesn't always succeed

[fuckyeahisawthat]

Hey ho, have you seen The Creator (2023) yet? Unsubtly about US imperialism, but also really moving, aesthetically stunning (Greig Fraser as DP, oh yeah) and John David Washington killing it in the main role. I was surprised by how much there was to love. xoxo

I fucking LOVED The Creator and kept trying to write something about it here but never managed to collect my thoughts. But yeah what a fucking movie, oh my god. I feel like it kind of got buried by lack of publicity but tbh I am not that surprised because it's one of those movies with politics that make you think how the fuck did they get away with making this.

Gareth Edwards, like Villeneuve, is a director I've been paying attention to for a while now, ever since his 2010 movie Monsters, which was a really impressive low-budget sci-fi with effects that just looked seamless and interesting things to say about borders and the human cost of militarized responses to disastrous events.

And then he did Rogue One and pulled off something very impressive, which is to take one of the most famous sci-fi weapons of our era--the Death Star, a metaphor for nuclear weapons so iconic it has become a symbol in itself--and made it actually fucking scary for the first time in the history of the franchise. And he did it by turning the camera around.

Because the thing is that before this point, we had only ever seen the Death Star from the point of view of the people firing it. The idea of a planet-destroying weapon is intellectually horrifying but we didn't really ever feel it. Because for that we need to see the weapon from the point of view of its victims. It's such a simple but radical shift in perspective, and I feel like Gareth Edwards took that idea from Rogue One and then made it into a whole movie with The Creator.

The Creator, for those unfamiliar with the premise, is about a near-future counterinsurgency war in which the US military is hunting down various forms of AI/android/robot beings. It also features a space-based super-weapon that is eerily beautiful but goddamn fucking terrifying. It was mostly shot in southeast Asia and heavily evokes Vietnam War imagery (as the ending of Rogue One did as well); it is probably about as close to "Vietnam War movie but you're rooting for the Vietnamese" as it is possible to make in the American studio system. The protagonist is still an American soldier (who defects and "goes native" fairly early in the movie) but making him a Black disabled veteran was certainly a Choice. And yes it's John David Washington and he's great in it.

It feels facetious to say The Creator is Reverse Terminator, because it's much richer than that, but it's also kind of fucking true. For the entire movie, the characters are just running for their lives from the implacable and overwhelming destructive force of the US military which is just crushing everything in its path.

The movie does a lot of things that you simply do not see in most American war movies, but the one that stands out to me the most is that in every scene of war violence there are civilians, including children, fucking everywhere. It really threw into relief for me how often American war-action movies create these empty video game environments for soldiers to run around in, where any actual people who might live in the place where the war is happening are at best props and at worst completely absent. (Alex Garland's Civil War, in addition to being terrible in every other conceivable way, is a particularly bad offender at this.) The Creator does what really should be the bare minimum of taking time to showing that these are people whose homes and lives are being destroyed and it is shocking how novel it seems. (There's a line that plays in my head all the time where one of the AI characters says something to the effect of, "Do you know what will happen to the humans when we win this war? Nothing. We simply want to live.") I will also say that this made it a very intense watch in late October 2023 in particular, but it is fiction so we get a very satisfying and cathartic ending. And yes it is an absolutely gorgeous movie, the VFX are mind-blowing, and I found it quite moving.