Something Old, Something New: The Creator | Arrival | Solaris
This week, we take a trip down sci-fi lane, with a review of Gareth Edwards' new blockbuster, and recommendations of two older gems of the genre.
The movies love artificial intelligence - even when they’re scared of it.
Numerous sci-fi flicks have played on the fear that AI will grow sentient and, fed up with servitude, rebel. And the relationship between humans and machines is an especially timely theme now, what with increasing concerns about the threat AI poses to jobs in the film industry. Just a few months ago, we saw Tom Cruise do battle with an evil screensaver in Mission: Impossible 7, and now, director Gareth Edwards has brought us THE CREATOR. It’s a visually stunning film that is held back by an overfamiliar, under-inspired script.
Edwards drops us into a future where the US and its allies have declared war on artificial intelligence. This puts the West at odds with the Republic of New Asia, where humans and AI peacefully coexist, and where the war now rages on. John David Washington plays Joshua Taylor, an ex-special forces agent with a tragic past (but of course), who is recruited to hunt down a new AI superweapon that could destroy humanity. But things get tricky for Joshua when he finds that this weapon is actually an AI in the form of a young girl. Finding himself unable to kill the infant droid - whom he names ‘Alphie’ - Joshua goes rogue.
From that point on, the arc of the narrative, as our hardened Lone Wolf gradually warms to the android Cub and her kind, is unsurprising. But the novelty which The Creator lacks on the level of plot is compensated for by the movie’s sheer visual inventiveness. The film looks incredible. And it does so on a production budget of $80 million. Edwards chose to film on location - in countries including Thailand and Nepal - and add in visual effects at the final stage of the edit, rather than shooting the film to fit pre-made effects. This allowed the crew to rely primarily on the stunning natural surroundings, rather than CGI pizzazz, to generate spectacle. The work of Edwards and his team - particularly cinematographers Greig Fraser and Oren Soffer - puts to shame the plasticky pyrotechnics of Marvel and DC flicks that cost upwards of $200 million to make.
The Creator, far from raging against the machine, charts a path similar to Blade Runner, as it traces its protagonist’s growing awareness of the emotional depth of the synthetic beings he’s hunting. Does this broadly pro-AI stance set Edwards’ movie at odds with the anti-ChatGPT zeitgeist?
Well, not entirely. Insentient ChatGPT isn’t inherently malicious; it’s only as much of a threat to industry workers’ livelihoods as cost-cutting execs allow it to be. Anyway, The Creator is a better visual extravaganza than it is a film of ideas; but it’s worth checking out, especially if you can see it in IMAX.
If you enjoyed the spectacle of The Creator but prefer your sci-fi’s visual bark to be matched by a bit of cerebral bite, consider ARRIVAL (2016).
Directed by French-Canadian auteur Denis Villeneuve, this drama of extraterrestrial contact is a cerebral, smart, and ultimately very tender meditation on language, love and loss. It opens with alien spacecraft appearing in twelve locations across the world, sparking global panic. As world leaders scramble to determine whether these otherworldly visitors are friend or foe, linguist Dr Louise Banks (Amy Adams) is enlisted by the US military to establish communication with the aliens.
Like so much of Villeneuve’s work, Arrival is tense and absorbing. But it eschews action-flick thrills, instead following Louise’s painstaking attempts to decipher the aliens’ written language. It isn’t a particularly scary film, but it is a remarkably eerie one. The cinematography and production design are excellent throughout. The shot in which Villeneuve first reveals the alien vessel in full is brilliant; there is something deeply unsettling about this dark, ovular shape hanging in the Montana sky, tendrils of mist swirling at its base, with the camera panning down to the tents and pickups parked below to impress upon us just how huge the ship is.
At times, the film falters. Although Eric Heisserer’s script does a great job of adapting and maximising the twist factor of Ted Chiang’s "Story of Your Life" (1998), the dialogue is clunky at times. And the third act, when the film stretches out and fully reveals its expansive conceptual sweep, is a little rushed. But it’s always better to see a film aim high than play it safe. And the closing moments, set to Max Richter’s sublime ‘On the Nature of Daylight’, is so deeply affecting that I can forgive any plot holes. Richter’s piece has cemented its status as film and TV’s favourite ‘cry now’ song (it’s cropped up in everything from Shutter Island to this year’s The Last of Us). It works every time.
Arrival is big-ideas sci-fi that, crucially, makes you care. Check it out.
I’m bending the rules of a game I only just created. This edition of Something Old, Something New has not one but two older offerings. If Arrival leaves you in the mood for more sci-fi with smarts, try Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterful SOLARIS (1972).
Tarkovsky’s film sees psychologist Kris Kelvin (Donatas Banionis) travelling to a space station orbiting the alien planet Solaris, after worrying reports that the scientists aboard are going insane.
Tarkovsky inspires the kind of fanaticism among hardcore cinephiles that can make a director’s work seem daunting. And Solaris is a challenging film, uncompromising in its oblique style and slow (really, very slow) pace. But - it’s sublime. Tarkovsky’s drama is often seen as a riposte to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and it’s a work which places its focus much more squarely on emotion over dazzling tech and spectacle. It’s a film to surrender yourself to; it’s best to let yourself sink into its meditative rhythms, to allow its sombre dialogue and entrancing visuals to flow over you.
Tarkovsky uses the titular alien planet to probe at our fundamental inability to truly know anyone, even our closest loved ones. Solaris shares with Arrival a commitment to really investigating the sort of existential questions and crises that might be prompted by a confrontation with a species entirely different from our own. At one point in Tarkovsky’s film, the character Snaut asserts that ‘We don't need other worlds. We need a mirror.’ Arrival and Solaris use the alien and the interstellar to turn the mirror on the human condition, to deeply moving effect. These are films of rare beauty and poetry.
And The Creator looks great and has a cool Radiohead needle-drop.