Throughout the 2010s, and continuing into the 2020s, massive corporate-backed IP dominated both the domestic box office and the American journalistic conversation about cinema in general. We live in a world where journalists, when they had the opportunity to sit down with Martin Scorsese to discuss new masterpieces like The Silence or The Wolf of Wall Street, decided to ask him about Captain America and his place in Marvel. A cinematic universe. Vocal subverters of the dominant paradigm have repeatedly argued that Hollywood should devote more time and resources to new ideas. After all, why be the next Star Wars when you can be the first of something different? Where, oh where were the original sci-fi ideas?

But then, when an ambitious director tries to do something new and striking for the general cinema audience, it generally falls flat. Audiences seemed more interested in sticking to a recognizable corporate product than exploring a new mythos, new characters, or new sci-fi concepts. Movies like "Strange World" or "Gemini Man" or "Gods of Egypt" have been rejected by the audience, and even movies based on famous literature - "A Wrinkle in Time", "Mortal Engines", "Valeriana and the City of a Thousand". Planets”—crashed and burned. There's nothing crazier or weirder about those movies than what you'd see in an MCU movie, but without the IP audiences were left out.

We love original ideas, but reject them when they come. Even if some of the above films are bad, clunky, too generic, or too weird by half, their original imagery and ambitious concepts should at least be discussed and celebrated more openly. Ambitious missteps are more interesting than successful pabulum.

Among the victims of the capriciousness of the audience was Gareth Edwards' 2023 sci-fi epic The Creator. a sci-fi anime film about humanity's genocide of robots. The film was made for a relatively modest $80 million, but grossed only about $104 million. However, 15 months after its release, audiences are discovering The Creator on Prime Video.

The setup for "The Creator" is timely. By 2055, humanity will let artificial intelligence take over most aspects of its infrastructure. In doing so, however, he allowed the AI ​​to inexplicably (accidentally?) detonate a nuclear bomb in the middle of Los Angeles. In response, humanity waged a vicious, militant campaign against the AI, and several nations banded together to form a worldwide, ultra-violent, anti-robot task force to kill them all. It's now 2070, and the globe is also regularly circled by a menacing hawk-like scanning craft - the USS NOMAD - which can detect where robots may be hiding.

This is, of course, a dark ethical conundrum, as robots have become self-aware, and many of them have realistic human faces. Indeed, robots have become so sophisticated that they have formed their own cultures and religions. Killing robots is now just military genocide. The military hopes to find a being called Niramata (the Nepali word for "creator") and kill him/her, as rumors spread of Niramata's creation of a super-weapon that destroys NOMAD.

Weapons are a question, however, for Alpha-O (Madeline Yuna Voyles), a young robot child with a calm demeanor and a childlike understanding of the world. The bulk of The Creator will see the film's main character, a soldier named Sgt. Taylor (John David Washington), accompanies Alpha-O (or "Alfie") through dangerous territory as he questions his philosophy of life.

The concepts in The Creator are ambitious, and Edwards has offered some compelling concepts folded into his otherwise straightforward sci-fi story. The idea that robots have formed their own belief system is fascinating, and Edwards would be wiser to focus on that rather than stop having military skirmishes. At the end of the day, it's a pretty simple metaphor for acceptance and peace. Star Trek lite, if you will.

Of course, perhaps one of the reasons The Creator does so well on Prime Video is because of its negative talking points. It will certainly start some conversations. While Edwards' film ultimately emerges as a drama about the acceptance and horrors of xenophobic military action, it also seems to send a subtly uncomfortable message about artificial intelligence.

Some audience members may be old enough to remember movies in which AI robots were seen as a dangerous threat to humanity (see: The Terminator, Alien, many others), so it's strange to see a movie as "The Creator" in which AI is portrayed as delicate, humane and worthy of protection. It can't be a coincidence that a major studio publication, owned by the Disney Corporation, is trying to portray artificial intelligence as gentle and helpful in 2023. Could "The Creator" be corporate propaganda? Is it trying to soften the public to the idea of ​​a comprehensive and harmless AI just so real-life AI investors can continue to advance the technology for their own purposes?

/Rafael Motamayor's own film reviewed "The Creator" and said the movie was cool ... but not very good. Many critics criticized the simplicity of her ideas, and some were even completely offended. On Film Freak Central, critic Walter Chow heavily attacked Edwards for his fetishization of Asian cultures and his clumsy use of Vietnam War visuals. Too many white filmmakers, Chow wrote, use Asian bodies as fodder for Western spiritual navel-gazing.

Are people drawn to the cool visuals of The Creator? Are there deep science fiction ideas lurking? Its troubled existence as a pro-tech corporate tool? Are the images blurry? Whatever brings people, film is now being discovered more widely than ever before. Perhaps the conversation and deconstruction will continue.