The Creator

AI Sir

The Creator
Directed by Gareth Edwards
USA 20th Century Fox 2023
UK cinema release print.

Gareth Edwards is one of those directors who, well... I usually tend to quite like his films but find there’s often something which disappoints and prevents them from being a great movie. I saw two very different trailers for his new film, The Creator, over the last couple of months... one was very much based on story and the plight of the central characters and the other one was more of an action movie kind of trailer. The first one disappointed me with its clichéd plot somewhat and the second one made me think... well, some of the robots look pretty cool. So I figured I’d give it a go and just not expect too much from it.

Which was probably the best attitude that I could have gone in with because, despite what some may justifiably call weaknesses in the basic DNA of the movie, for me this was the film by Edwards which is truly great. By which, perhaps I mean, it’s definitely his most accomplished and entertaining movie to date, as far as I’m concerned.

The plot follows a military character in Earth’s... relatively close... future. It’s been many years since the AI beings, such as robots, allegedly nuked Los Angeles and the US government (and various other powers... but not all) banned AI. But not in Thailand where humans and AI live in peace. So America goes to war with the AI, using their super weapon and obliterating AI and AI sympathisers. The main protagonist Joshua, played by John David Washington, who has a robot arm and leg, is undercover trying to find the enemy’s genius professor/creator and he’s been trying to do this for a number of years, by latching onto the alleged daughter of the target (played by Gemma Chan). And in that time the two have fallen in love, got married and she’s pregnant with their child. However, she and the baby inside her get killed when Joshua’s American team attack the place where they are living and wipe almost everyone out.

Five years later, after Joshua is still recovering from the psychological issues of losing her, he gets recruited in to find a new super weapon that this professor has created, which can allegedly wipe out the US superweapon and turn the tide of the war on the AI resistance. And I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say, if you’ve seen any of the trailers, that the superweapon turns out to be an AI in the form of a little girl, played by Madeleine Yuna Voyles. However, once he finds her (after most of his unit have been wiped out), Joshua goes on the run with her, trying to keep her alive (or is it the other way around?) because he belives she can lead him to his wife... who is alleged now to still be around in the land of the living and in cahoots with the enemy. At which point the film becomes a road movie as the two bond with each other and he comes to realise that maybe AI are not just machines which you can terminate and turn off but, instead, have something approximating a soul and sense of self awareness not dissimilar to human beings.

So, yeah, to be fair, it’s a movie which is, really full of story clichés and, there are a couple of ‘twist’ reveals which most audience members will see coming fairly early on in the movie (like maybe five or ten minutes in). But, that being said, this in no way spoiled my enjoyment of it because, honestly, it looks absolutely stunning, has some gritty and suspenseful moments and whizzes by at a cracking pace.

Now, the look of this world really is a potpourri of many different science fiction elements which, if you’ve read, watched or ingested it in whatever media the genre has been living in from, say, the late 1920s to the early 1970s, you’ll be very familiar with. In other words, there’s nothing really new here in terms of the film’s acquirement and refashioning of old genre concepts... but, again, it’s done so well and, the film is nothing if not eclectically post-modern in its regurgitation of this material and it does it in such a convincing and entertaining way that, I couldn’t help but fall in love with it. And, in terms of that kind of stuff, it would be true to say that the director tips his hat and says to his audience ‘look, I know you know all this stuff but go with it, it’s fun’ by using the company motto of the Tyrell Corporation from Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (reviewed by me here) quite blatantly within the first couple of minutes of the film. And, as one of my favourite critics pointed out in a podcast, the resulting world building is first class here.

One of my favourite moments was the return of the idea of walking bombs... or running bombs in this case. I’m not talking about just sentient bombs here, as in John Carpenter’s early 1970s movie Dark Star... but proper walking bombs which I don’t remember seeing, albeit in a much more expressionistic and beautiful way, since the annihilants seen in the 1940 theatrical serial Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe (reviewed here). The versions in this movie are both ‘cute’ and brutal, running through enemy lines at full pelt until they come to a stop and just explode. There’s a wonderful suspenseful scene during a battle sequence in the movie which deploys these creations and an equally wonderful visual reveal when Alfie (what Joshua has named this ultimate AI weapon in the form of a girl), steps in to lend a hand against these things. And, frankly, it’s nice to see this concept back again after so long (I guess there was probably a sidewayds variant of these in Screamers too, if I remember correctly... based on Philip K. Dick’s short story Second Variety).

Lastly, after a great last shot where the changing expression of Alfie’s face pretty much invites the viewer to bring their own baggage with them about their thoughts on AI consciousness and its nature, I waited around for some of the credits because I wanted to find out who wrote the music. I was surprised to find it was Hans Zimmer. Now, I love Hans Zimmer and always go to his concerts when I’m able to but, this is such a different score from him. It’s not as flashy or sweeping as his usual stuff for movies which are, to be fair, often inherently of that nature anyway. Instead it feels much more focussed on stepping back and allowing a more intimate musical landscape for the film, which seems like a much more appropriate choice for this kind of story. Alas, the score is not, at time of writing, available in a proper CD format so, it’s unlikely I will get to hear any of it away from the movie unless he decides to add it in on one of his future concert tour play lists, it would seem.

And that’s me pretty much done on The Creator. For me, this is Gareth Edwards best movie to date and I will certainly be looking to pick this one up on Blu Ray at some point in the, hopefully near, future. I absolutely loved it but, please, don’t anyone make a sequel.

Autopsy

Weightless
Autopsy
Turvy

Autopsy
by Patricia Cornwell
Harper Collins
ISBN: 9780008467258

Warning: Some ‘how the characters have moved on’ spoilers included.

I’m so happy to finally, after a good few years, be able to return to what has been my annual Christmas ritual for some years now... starting the first chapter or so of the latest of Patricia Cornwell’s Dr. Kay Scarpetta hardbacks. Autopsy sees Scarpetta, one of my favourite contemporary characters, returning to her old stomping ground of Virginia, taking over as the chief. However, it’s not an appointment which everybody is happy with and, as she tries to get a handle on what can only be described as ‘adverse interpersonal working conditions’ (yeah, had enough of those in my time), she becomes embroiled in a number incidents which are all connected although, at least from how I understood it, not all connected in the same way.

So Cornwell weaves a tale of a woman found with her head bashed in and her hands removed... a neighbour of her regular character Marino. Marino has both followed Scarpetta and her husband Benton to Virginia and also, it would seem, married Scarpetta’s sister (aka Lucy’s mother). Also added to the mix are a poisoning which Scarpetta has to deal with up close and personal, not to mention what looks like a double murder in space, where Scarpetta has to remotely instruct from a video link as two astronauts try to work a crime scene with her help. And it’s all gripping stuff.

Also like a fair few of her Scarpetta mysteries of recent decades, the time frame in which all the events take place is a small one. Not as small as some of them but certainly this one takes place over no more than a few days, in the December run up to Christmas. Also fitting her usual pattern, the solution to the whole mystery... or in this case, set of mysteries, is left until the last minute. It rarely seems rushed but it’s quite an effective sprint to the finishing line, as it always is. Happily enough, I didn’t arrive at a solution before the main protagonist did (and I don’t think I was armed enough to be able to, in all honesty) but I did get myself believing I would this time due to my concentrating on two specific clues which, while not red herrings, were not going to be all that workable to the reader, I would say (and that’s not always a bad thing if you don’t want to tip off your audience too quickly).

And it’s the usual, intriguing tale told from Scarpetta’s regular first person world view of things but, it has to be said, it’s also quite scary. Not scary because of the various murders and so on which come to light but, scary because I completely trust this author, due to her various life experiences and thorough research, to know what she’s talking about in some of the more, up to the minute stuff. Unlike some creators have been doing, this story is firmly set up in the real world and in real time... so the characters tend to move on with their lives between books. In this one, my favourite supporting character Lucy Farinelli (who Cornwell’s legion of fans have all read about as she grew up in the books) is staying on the same property as the good doctor herself. The reason being that this book is set firmly in a post-outbreak world. The pandemic is still, as it is, thriving and Lucy’s young girlfriend and their small child have both been to London, caught Covid and died between books. I read with worry as Cornwell describes just how truly bad the Coronavirus is in London, with mass burials etc and, as I noticed the information spinning much more ‘on the nose’ than we are getting on our own news over here in the UK... I was reminded once again how badly off we are now in this pandemic. Because if there’s one thing I trust more than the news being reported at the moment, it’s Cornwell’s research into what’s really going on.

So that element is quire scary and, indeed, so is the way Lucy has chosen to deal with the death of her lover. She basically talks to her all the time as an AI version on her computer... one who is almost impossible to tell from the real life model in terms of behaviour, responses, look and resourcefulness. Almost like having the real person, now deceased, standing in the same room as you. I’ve no doubt, as Scarpetta worries about how commonplace it will soon be for this technology to be commercially available that Cornwell probably knows it’s already here and it won’t take all that long to trickle down into the public domain. I’m used to her dealing with cutting edge technology a year or two before we realise it’s already here. Stuff which seems like pure science fiction when she first published it has turned out to be hard science ‘already with us’ on more than one occasion. So, yeah, this is an interesting and perhaps worrying thing to be reading about but... I do appreciate the heads up, for sure.

Interestingly, at a high level, presidential meeting where Scarpetta works a crime scene in space, remotely, I found it similarly interesting that the people in power are not ruling out the idea that the problem they are facing in space might be extra-terrestrial. Also a scary but not unexpected attitude given various little nuggets of information being let slip to a ‘Covid distracted’ public of late.

Of course, with Scarpetta now moving in these circles, one has to wonder how long it will be before she comes face to face with Captain Calli Chase, the lead in protagonist from Cornwell’s other main series of books at the moment (reviewed by me here and here). I thought it might even happen in this very novel but, for the time being, the two are not quite inhabiting each other’s personal universe as yet (although I suspect this is only a matter of time now).

I look forward to the day when that crossover comes but, for the time being, Cornwell does just like her main protagonist does in Autopsy, peeling back layers of story with her writer’s scalpel (okay, you know, pen or keyboard) until she cuts back to reveal the truth of the fiction. It’s amazing stuff and, as a bonus to me, when I googled a word to find what I thought was a bad typo, I was happy to also learn a new word... so I won’t be looking for a splash in every plash now, that’s for sure. If you like Cornwell’s Scarpetta books, which surely must have a built in audience by now, then you’re sure to love her latest taut, tension filled procedural thriller. I hope she manages to get the next one out for November so my once and future Christmas ritual can kick in again next year.