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<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\nLet\u2019s get the good stuff out of the way first: this movie is absolutely beautiful to behold. The cinematography is first rate; the vehicle designs are perfect. The vistas of robots in rice paddies\u2014corny as that may sound\u2014are a gorgeous and counterintuitive juxtaposition of old and new, the sort of bucolic visual scifi you used to see in Omni Magazine back in the eighties. The eyes have it: they will insist that the 2065 they\u2019re parsing is utterly lived-in, utterly real. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The brain, however, will beg to differ. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n To be fair, it\u2019s clearly not our<\/em> 2065. A montage of grainy archival footage during the prolog starts with an old-timey black-and-white newsreel showing robots taking their first halting steps back in the fifties and joining the US space shuttle program a few decades later. This is a parallel universe in which robots matured early, in which our own burgeoning issues with incipient AI didn\u2019t mess things up, and in which the climate catastrophe does not appear to have happened. Fair enough. Including all that stuff would have muddied the future that Gareth Edwards wanted to show us, detracted from the story he wanted to tell.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n The problem is, often as not Edwards himself doesn\u2019t seem to know<\/em> which story he wants to tell\u2014so we\u2019re treated to a world in which robots who work alongside Humanity as equals somehow yearn for \u201cfreedom\u201d (even though there are no enslaved robots in this timeline). We\u2019re shown a world in which pacifist robots explicitly abhor violence but routinely punch humans in the face for no obvious reason beyond sheer vindictive malice. <\/p>\n\n\n\n We\u2019re told up front that a US black-ops squad is sneaking into New Asia under deep cover, and without backup. \u201cThe human locals, including the police, all work with AI. Robots, humans, and simulants, they all hate us. If you get caught, you\u2019re screwed,\u201d Alison Janney\u2019s character intones near the beginning of the film, as her squad prepares to insert four hundred miles behind enemy lines. And yet by the third act a pair of USAF battle tanks\u2014each literally the size of a city block and the height of a mid-range office building (so, not the kind of thing you can hide with a camo tarp and some leaves) show up out of nowhere to crush the nearest peaceful village. It is, reliably, an eye-filling spectacle, and there\u2019s some cute tech on display. I was especially fond of the suicide bots: bombs with arms and legs, who for some reason have an arbitrary 30-second countdown to clomp through enemy gunfire and leap over enemy heads to their assigned target and blow up. (Imagine Oscar the Grouch pimping out his garbage can and joining Monty Python\u2019s Kamikaze Highlanders.) It\u2019s visually very cool, but it\u2019s also hard to see how a conventional missile wouldn\u2019t have been able to do the job way more efficiently. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In fact, the whole movie is cheek-to jowl with tech that ranges from questionable to physics-breaking. You\u2019ve got NOMAD, the orbital weapons platform which sometimes seems to be in orbit and other times seems barely above the clouds\u2014and which covers a quarter of the sky no matter where it is, which makes one wonder how (as with those megatanks I mentioned) it keeps managing to sneak up on targets without anyone ever noticing until it\u2019s too late for anything but heroic martyrdom. <\/p>\n\n\n\n There\u2019s the weird bullet-proofness of a family station wagon in which our heroes have taken refuge; it careens invulnerably into the night as high-velocity rounds from a whole squad of police bounce and spark harmlessly off its stern. There\u2019s the inexplicable gobbledygook near the end where our hero is ordered to kill a bound and helpless little robot girl because \u201cwe tried to terminate the weapon cleanly, but she won\u2019t let us\u201d. How she can do that, strapped down and immobilized as she is, is never made clear, but apparently only our hero can do the job because \u201cShe trusts you\u201d. Which seems a bit odd given that the mode of execution is to simply shoot her in the head with an EMP gun, something anyone could do from across the room whether \u201cthe weapon\u201d trusted them or not[1]<\/a><\/sup><\/sup>. (Of course, things had to unfold the way they did because the screenwriters were shooting for a specific end point, and had to pretzel the story to get there. Still. They could have done a better job of hiding the stress fractures.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n \n I should mention one very cool piece of field tech that impressed the hell out of me: a piece of wet\/ware-synching hardware that allows a recently-deceased brain to temporary reboot and interact with the world through a robot body. The scene that introduces that tech\u2014a dead soldier wakes up, panicking, terrified, and turns its robot head to see his own dead body rotting beside him on the ground\u2014 might have been the best bit of the movie. But in the end, even that existentially horrifying scene existed only to set up a predictable and sentimental twist in the final reel.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n \n *\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n \n So far I\u2019ve spent a thousand words nitpicking details. Admittedly, that\u2019s chrome; you can argue back and forth about whatever world-building details support the events as presented. The real issue is, what about the meat of the story itself? What about the theme? What about the message<\/em>?\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n \n For an answer, may I point you to Weird Al\u2019s album homage to Michael Jackson\u2019s \u201cBad\u201d.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n Edwards obviously didn\u2019t just want to make a movie: he wanted to make a film<\/em>, a piece of cinema that grappled with one of the preeminent issues of our time. He wanted to explore AI. A surprising number of critics<\/a> seem to think he succeeded. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \n Which is odd, because there\u2019s no actual AI to be seen anywhere in the movie.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are robots<\/em>, mind you. All humanoid, all of which look, talk, and act pretty much like we do. The cop robots have pie-plate heads but they still squint down the sight-lines of their rifles and beat up suspects, still yell and scramble comically for safety when a dog drops a live grenade into their trench. The farming robots till their fields with hoes and oxen. The Brave Rebel Guerrilla robots sometimes click mandible mouth parts but the voices that come out of them have British accents. Robots ride the subways and drive taxicabs; they slouch and laugh and rage and worship. Many of them have human faces stretched over their metal ones, replete with facial hair and wrinkles and liver spots appropriate to a variety of ages (humans actually donate their \u201clikenesses\u201d to a sort of facial Creative Commons for their cybernetic brethren to choose from). Robots grieve and throw tantrums and respond to threats at human speeds in human ways. They apparently eat ice cream, despite lacking a digestive system. (At least, we see one robot offer ice cream to another, who eagerly says yes, although the ice cream explodes before we get to see any of it go into a mouth hole. What a missed opportunity that was.) They wear clothes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \n They always communicate using human speech\u2014 even the cop-bots, even in life-or-death combat situations where wireless-modem comms at 10G speeds would provide a vital tactical advantage. They pick up and use weapons the way we do, but weapons never seem to be incorporated into their structure (well, except for the Kamikaze Oscars).\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n The movie’s premise: the West has banned AI (or at least, robots\u2014there’s some ambiguity regarding what qualifies) ever since an AI allegedly nuked Los Angeles ten years before. AI continues to flourish, however, in an amorphous collection of Eastern jurisdictions known as “New Asia”. The Murricans cannot abide the thought of another country following a different path, and have been launching a series of covert terrorists attacks upon suspected AI strongholds within New Asia’s borders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now, the eponymous N’Asian Creator has built an Ultimate Weapon which, when deployed, will end the West\u2019s special military operation once and for all. A bereaved and embittered ex-soldier, whose wife was killed during a previous op, is recruited to accompany the team sent to extract\/destroy said weapon\u2014which turns out to have been built in the form of an eight-year-old girl who watches cartoons and asks pithy-cute questions about Heaven and gets all blubbery and teary when she doesn\u2019t like something. (For a while I dared to hope she\u2019d been designed that way as a deliberate countermeasure, a way to make potential assassins hesitate at the prospect of killing an innocent child, so she could strike first. Nope.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Someone sticks a magic Q-tip into Robot Girl\u2019s ear and in about two seconds deciphers her secret: she\u2019s a universal remote, a garage door opener writ large, able to override and control electronics from a distance. Her powers aren\u2019t all they will be; she can turn TVs on and off and sweet-talk security turnstiles, but for some reason she can\u2019t do anything about the hordes of New Asian copbots that keep trying to kill her (for reasons that remain unclear; wasn\u2019t she created by<\/em> New Asians, to protect them from US aggression?). Her abilities are growing \u201cexponentially\u201d. In time, she\u2019ll be able to shut down NOMAD itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Meanwhile, our bereaved embittered widower has grown to love her, against orders and all better judgment. Bet you didn’t see that<\/em> coming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019<\/em>s what this movie is about. Not AI at all; The Chosen One. The Sad Dad. Love Conquering All. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \n Oh, and prejudice is bad and robots are good. We know they\u2019re good because\u2014wait for it, say it with me yet again\u2014they are Just Like Us<\/em>.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n At best, the message of \u201cthe Creator\u201d is shallow and derivative, just the latest iteration in a long list of heavy-handed metaphors about Oppressing the Other. I have ranted about some<\/a> of those<\/a> on this<\/a> very \u2018crawl<\/a>, but rarely has the point been made so ham-fistedly: for viewers too stupid to grok the subtext, one of the characters comes right out and says \u201cMy Father taught me that underneath it all, we\u2019re all the same.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n \n Then your father was an idiot, lady. Because AI is not<\/em> the same, no matter how many Turing Tests it passes. AI operates at electronic speeds, not neuronal ones. Whatever cognitive parts it has do not fit together the way ours do. It is not an evolved being: that\u2019s what makes it so interesting, goddammit.<\/em>\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n And that\u2019s why I wonder if \u201cThe Creator\u201d might be more than just an unoriginal retread with a really great sense of style. I wonder if it might actually be pernicious. Because arguing that we should respect AI because they\u2019re like us is the most insipidly Human-supremacist point one can make in a world where we\u2019re wiping out species left and right, even while we’re starting to see potential signs of life in alien atmospheres. We\u2019re already destroying too many things that aren\u2019t<\/em> just like us, and it\u2019s on account of that difference that we excuse our own behavior. They\u2019re just animals. They don\u2019t suffer the way people do. They don\u2019t have souls. <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n The idea that we should confer value to something based on how well it apes Humanity is what got us into pretty much every mess we\u2019re in today. It\u2019s simplistic, it\u2019s anthrosupremacist (yes, I\u2019m making that a word now), it panders to the worst elements of Human self-glorification. And yet here it is again, pimped out and proudly served up as though it were some courageous progressive torpedo of Truth to Power: robots are just as worthy as us because, when it comes right down to it, they are<\/em> us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The corollary\u2014unspoken, but inevitable\u2014is that anything else can fuck off and die.<\/p>\n\n\n \n Jumping ahead for those of you who\u2019ve seen the movie and are raising their hands about now: yes, the whole point of the Chosen One was that she was able to control electronics remotely. So yes, maybe she just wouldn\u2019t permit the EMP gun to fire unless it was in the hands of someone she trusted. In which case\u2014putting aside the question of just why one\u2019s survival instinct should depend on how much you like the thing that\u2019s trying to kill you\u2014 why hadn\u2019t she just shut down the various security systems that were keeping her captive in the first place? \u2191<\/a>\n <\/p>\n<\/li><\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cWe don\u2019t need other worlds. We need mirrors.\u201d \u2014Stanislaw Lem Lers of Spoi. You Have Been Warned. Let\u2019s get the good stuff out of the way first: this movie is absolutely beautiful to behold. The cinematography is first rate; the vehicle designs are perfect. The vistas of robots in rice paddies\u2014corny as that may sound\u2014are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10815","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ink-on-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10815","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10815"}],"version-history":[{"count":33,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10815\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10862,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10815\/revisions\/10862"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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