Film: The Creator - haunting tale gives an odd AI defence

If you share the general unease about just what precisely artificial intelligence has in store for all of us, you will warm to the initial AI-bashing and fear-mongering that The Creator serves up. We are not so very far in the future – and suddenly robots have stopped tamely helping out at operations and doing the washing-up. No, suddenly they’ve turned on us all, nuking Los Angeles and killing a million people.

The US of A’s response has been to declare war on the lot of the m, a glorious crusade that will shove all the robots back in their boxes and switch them off.

But it’s not long before the film becomes rather more interesting than that and considerably more nuanced. In the Far East, it seems, the robots have come to a peaceful accommodation with the humans and all is reasonably happy. Except, of course, the American are determined to come and get them and blow them to smithereens with their huge hovering spaceship-like craft.

In the middle of it all, hardened ex-special forces agent Joshua (John David Washington) has effectively gone rogue, taking his deep cover so deep that he has actually settled down and married in the Far East and is expecting a child – the point at which the US forces turn up and seemingly murder his wife and unborn baby. The US army then persuades him to hunt down and kill the Creator, apparently key to the whole conflict. Instead, he gets lumbered with a strange robot child. You can tell she is a robot. The back of her head is missing, and she’s got a huge hole going through from side to side where her ears ought to be. Initially silent, slowly the child starts to open up and with it suggestions of Joshua’s oddly vicarious paternity. Somehow, slowly the child starts to win him over to a different view of AI. Suddenly the baddies are no longer the baddies and the goodies are starting to seem rather gung-ho and nasty – all of which makes the film infinitely more intriguing, even if it does rather lose pace in the second half.

Quite why the film industry should be wanting to fight AI’s case is perhaps the biggest mystery here, but there is something beguiling about this film – however much you might want to put several thousand volts through the second half and trim an ending which really really doesn’t seem to want to end. Perhaps director Gareth Edwards needed a robot or two to help him pace his movie.

Even so, it’s the kind of film that will linger with you afterwards, and that’s definitely the best kind of film. And in amongst it all, there are some pretty good performances. John David Washington as the main man offers a picture of quiet determination. Opposite him Allison Janney gives a most un-Allison Janney like performance as the nuke-’em-all increasingly bonkers Colonel Howell, an army commander with absolutely no sense of compromise. But it’s Madeleine Yuna Voyles as Alphie who stays with you most – even though you might wonder why the film is so keen to get you on the side of the robots...