I want to thank everyone who happened upon this site… either by accident or on purpose. I appreciate you taking the time to read the thoughts of a “mindless” movie reviewer and his mindless thoughts. I’ve been watching and talking about movies for years, so I’m excited to start capturing my thoughts in this style of media. Hopefully, you become a faithful reader and I will see you back here multiple times. What better way to start my movie review site than by reviewing a movie named “The Creator”. Before I dig into my review, just a note that it will contain spoilers. So, if you haven’t seen the movie yet, please don’t read this and let the AI win… this is your first official spoiler warning here at 1guysmindlessmoviereviews.com.
The Creator takes place in the (not so) distant future, 2065 to be exact, although most of it does take place in 2070. John David Washington (who was great in the underrated Tenet) does a great job playing a character named Joshua who has had a rough time since his wife Maya (played by Gemma Chan) supposedly died in the war between humans and artificial intelligence (AI). He’s clearly been out of the military for a bit and wants nothing to do with whatever they have planned until they pull him back in to help them on a mission to find and destroy a new ultimate weapon that the A.I. is building. But then he decides to help based solely on some footage he saw of his former love Maya who is now supposedly alive. He’s had a rough time since her death and wants nothing more than to see her again.
From here, the movie shifts a bit to following Joshua as he meets up with Colonel Howell (Allison Janney) and her team as they try to locate the weapon. Joshua is the one who finds it and is shocked to learn that they have created a little kid (Madeleine Yuna Voyles) with the power to control technology. Joshua ends up leaving with it and doesn’t want to give it to the team he was working with. At this point, it becomes a game of chase as Howell and one of her soldiers McBride (Marc Menchaca) try to track down Joshua and the weapon that ultimately leads to many of the main characters’ demise and leads Joshua to an old ally Harun (Ken Watanabe) who is also an AI, the love of his life who is barely hanging on to her own life and the truth that the war was being fought under false pretenses. Everyone in America thought that AI caused the bomb to drop on L.A., but apparently, it was the humans who did it. Joshua and the weapon… whom he now calls Alphie… must try to save the day by boarding the ship that’s been destroying the A.I. settlements in New Asia and shut it down.
In the end, Joshua and Alphie are able to work together to stop the ship from destroying thousands of lives by bringing it down, but Joshua pays the ultimate price by sacrificing himself to save Alphie and hopefully end the war. It’s quite a touching moment as you see how much Alphie is sad about what Joshua is doing knowing he is leaving for good.
You’ll find that I will not be your typical movie review, I tend to look at things through a different lens than someone with a film background or a classically trained movie critic. So, if you don’t agree with my thoughts, that is great and it’s what makes us all humans (or AI) right?
With that being said, I really enjoyed this movie. I went to the theater to watch it with my teenage son and he enjoyed it as well. There were some brilliant performances by Watanabe, Howell, Voyles, and Washington along with a great supporting cast of characters like Omni (Amar Chadha-Patel), Gen. Andrews (Ralph Ineson), plus a few of the others that I mentioned above. The story was well thought out and put on the screen in a good way. It was a different twist on the whole humans vs. A.I. that we’ve seen in the past where the humans that lived in New Asia loved the A.I., but the humans in the United States were against them because they thought they dropped a nuke in Los Angeles.
I definitely recommend seeing this on the big screen since it plays so well with some of the glide-over shots of the countryside and cities. I am a fan of sci-fi movies, so maybe I rank it higher than others will, but this is my initial reaction to it and I can’t wait to watch it again to see if I missed anything.
I give this a solid 8 out of 10. (Yeah…starting with a bang!)
