Welcome to the alternate future of The Creator, where robotics and artificial intelligence have developed hand in hand, resulting in a not-so-distant future of a robot race. How will humanity interact with sentient robots? Will we treat them with respect or disdain? Will they gain rights of their own or be treated like property?
These are the questions that Eve and I looked forward to diving into this month with our review of The Creator, a movie written and directed by Gareth Edwards (with Chris Weitz) and starring John David Washington, Madeleine Yuna Voyles, Ken, Watanabe, and Allison Janney. Given the late proliferation of artificial intelligence through technology, it seemed like a good choice, ripe with discussion material. To our surprise and disappointment, The Creator didn’t address these questions.
In an infrequent event, we find ourselves reviewing a movie that we not only did not like but found to be moderately offensive.
Initial Impressions
The Creator, a movie about artificially sentient robots who seek their freedom, was not the movie about artificial intelligence that we expected it to be. The philosophical questions about artificially intelligent personhood or sentience are present only in the deepest parts of the story’s background. Nearly all the characters have chosen sides, with very little ambiguity. If Eve and I want to discuss the theology involved in these topics, this movie is not the vehicle for that discussion. Perhaps we’ll revisit Bicentennial Man, or look at the Blade Runner Universe, or the Haley Joel Osment movie, A.I.
The Creator was, first and foremost, a movie that set out to make the United States Military look like a ruthless, bloodthirsty, uncaring war machine. The creative team had very little interest in impartiality. The Creator took the literary capital that science fiction has built up over the years, subtly tackling complex social issues, and wasted it on a heavy-handed attack on the United States of America.
Interestingly, quite a bit of The Creator alludes to the U.S. actions in Vietnam and other Asian theaters. And though the creative team couldn’t have known about it when they produced the movie, the messages in this movie could almost as easily have been seen as a commentary on Israeli conduct in the Israel-Hamas war that started with the Hamas atrocities of October 7th.
Overall, the movie had great production value. The score by Hans Zimmer was excellent. The action was good. The CGI was uncannily believable (for the most part). The plot was enjoyable. But all of this was nearly overshadowed by the brutal commentary on the United States Military.
Throughout the movie, the U.S. military’s primary base and threat-delivery vehicle was a high-altitude, perhaps orbital, station called the USS NOMAD. It’s seen multiple times in the movie, but the scale and altitude seem to change or some combination each time. It made it difficult to understand if it was an immense space station or a futuristic aircraft. It was confusing enough to the rather prominent geek in me that I found it distracting.
They appeared to emphasize the androgynous nature of the child, a juvenile type of the “every-man” character, showing a promising effort to embrace the subtlety of science fiction.
Ultimately, The Creator was a decent movie that both of us thought was ruined by a very anti-West attitude and portrayal—particularly anti-American.
You’re Not Supposed to Like It
Not all movies, not even MOST movies, are made to be only enjoyed. Science fiction, in particular, is a beautiful framing to make the audience walk away thinking deeply about the story. Schindler’s List and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas are two examples of outstanding (though not sci-fi) movies that did this. And while The Creator mostly wasted the opportunity to do the same, it evoked that feeling. It reminded me that we, as Christians, are not all about the good times but are called to rejoice in our trials. Through them, we focus on deep thoughts and build character:
We have also obtained access through him by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we boast in the hope of the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our afflictions, because we know that affliction produces endurance, endurance produces proven character, and proven character produces hope. (Romans 5:3–4)
The Creator is not a feel-good movie; the creative team intended to make people think. For Eve and I, that goal was overshadowed by what we both believe to be an entirely unfair portrayal of the United States Military, but not all viewers will be as sensitive to that as we were. We may even have been even more susceptible to it because of the Israeli-Hamas war.
Dehumanization
“Othering the enemy” is an age-old tactic in warfare. You’re not fighting people; you’re fighting monsters. That’s the justification for war. In this instance, the enemy are robots and the people who live peacefully with them. In Vietnam, it was the Viet Cong. In Israel today, it’s Hamas. In Ukraine, it’s Russia. Sometimes, the enemy deserves to be othered, and sometimes, it’s propaganda to promote feelings of hate and aggression so that a population will support an otherwise unpopular war. Both sides nearly always do it on some level. It can also be an essential mental health mechanism for front-line soldiers.
We even see this in the Old Testament, though God’s “othering” was integral to the holiness of His chosen people. When God gave the Israelites possession of the Holy Land, He gave unambiguous instructions on what Israel was to do:
“Tell the Israelites: When you cross the Jordan into the land of Canaan, you must drive out all the inhabitants of the land before you, destroy all their stone images and cast images, and demolish all their high places. You are to take possession of the land and settle in it because I have given you the land to possess.” (Number 33:51-53)
God even took it further than that:
However, you must not let any living thing survive among the cities of these people the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance. You must completely destroy them—the Hethite, Amorite, Canaanite, Perizzite, Hivite, and Jebusite—as the LORD your God has commanded you, so that they won’t teach you to do all the detestable acts they do for their gods, and you sin against the LORD your God. (Deuteronomy 20:16–18)
Thank God that the work of Christ has torn the veil and eliminated the separation of God from Gentiles. We are holy now through the work of the Spirit in us and are sent into the world to spread the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. God’s people are no longer to be a part of the world but in the world.
Life Equivalency?
The AI of The Creator is far, far more advanced than that of real-life—thus the science fiction tag. In reality, we consider Artificial Intelligence a learning algorithm with access to the totality of the information on the internet. I’d asked that we review The Creator because I thought it would address how a moral person would treat sentient artificial organisms. Sadly, it left that discussion primarily unaddressed. The movie muddied the question even further with this odd background flavor in the “free” spaces to “donate your likeness” to simulants, as if they could not create realistic randomizations of human visages—something that most home computers today can do on demand. Humans were literally making simulants in our image:
Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness. (Genesis 1:26)
In The Creator, it was a plot device that allowed the protagonist to see his estranged wife nearly everywhere since she had (presumably) donated her likeness. Her face was now on thousands and thousands of simulants. But such a thing would have been utterly unneeded.
The question does need to be considered, though: If/when it does happen, and AI does feign human levels of interaction and intelligence, what are our responsibilities toward them? We must remember that God has tasked humanity with stewardship of the earth:
God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it. Rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and every creature that crawls on the earth.” (Genesis 1:28)
Americans tend to consider “having dominion” a nearly authoritarian rule, but we might better understand it as “being responsible for.”
God has given humanity a responsibility over creation:
When I observe your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you set in place, what is a human being that you remember him, a son of man that you look after him? You made him little less than God and crowned him with glory and honor. You made him ruler over the works of your hands; you put everything under his feet: all the sheep and oxen, as well as the animals in the wild, the birds of the sky, and the fish of the sea that pass through the currents of the seas. (Psalm 8:3–8)
God is sovereign. If artificial intelligence achieves true sentience or reaches a level of complex programming where sentience is convincingly emulated, or if extraterrestrials did exist, then I believe we are called Christians to treat them as we should strangers and foreigners.
“Do not oppress a hired worker who is poor and needy, whether one of your Israelite brothers or one of the resident aliens in a town in your land. You are to pay him his wages each day before the sun sets, because he is poor and depends on them. Otherwise he will cry out to the LORD against you, and you will be held guilty. (Deuteronomy 24:14–15)
Hospitality is a critical calling for God’s people, and I think that erring on the side of Christian love cannot be wrong.
Another element was an undercurrent in The Creator: several references to human children raised by simulants. The antagonist, Maya, was reared by simulants and considered them family. The Creator states that the simulants are created with a robust nurturing tendency. It was reminiscent of the 2019 Netflix movie I Am Mother.
The Biblical vs. the Evolutionary Language
The Creator features quotes directly from the Genesis account in the Bible about the creation of woman in contrast to several comments about evolution. Weirdly, both seemed out of place.
Despite the title, creation is not a prominent theme in this movie, and acts of creation (the invention of the intelligent robots and their improvements) are called evolution, which makes absolutely no sense of what is essentially a hypothesis centered around biological heredity, which even the most advanced simulants in the movie don’t do.
The titular creator is a woman, which fits the narrative of progenation for a culture that has become more and more feminist (i.e., women create and men destroy). It also arises from the classic myth of the Mother Goddess and Mother Earth.
Despite explicit references to a Biblical narrative, like “the child” being named Alphie—short for Alpha-Omega, The Creator isn’t just a secular movie; it is both pagan and anti-biblical. The robots in the film are all Buddhist. This may be because the “free land” is a sort of super-Asia, which is the majority religion in that part of the world. The robots have been primed to see Alphie as a savior, created by the creator to reconcile robots and people in peace. It’s a very pagan spin on the messianic myth. The innocent child made as a sacrifice for robotkind (though she neither saved robotkind nor sacrificed herself.) It is almost a sort of backhanded positive note that the movie seems to imply that holding religious beliefs is an indication of sentience rather than the more familiar trope portraying religion as the opioid for the barbaric masses.
Misinformation vs. Critical Thinking
The opening exposition of The Creator informs the audience that the war started when A.I. launched a nuclear attack against Los Angeles. (We learn about 2/3rds of the way through that the nuclear explosion was, in reality, a human coding error.) But the military machine latched onto the lie that the A.I. launched a nuclear attack.
Propaganda is a much-used tool, and the people who accept what the media tell them without any critical thinking lay themselves on the altar to be sacrificed for the “greater good” as defined by those in power. During World War II, “propaganda” was used two times for every 1,000 words in print. Propaganda is part and parcel of politics, no matter what side of the aisle you walk on.
The Creator does show how evil people can drive perfectly sane people into horrific acts of violence through the careful application of misinformation (that’s a new term for an ancient concept).
Propaganda and misinformation should have no place in anyone’s life but have absolutely no place in a Christian’s life.
The LORD hates six things; in fact, seven are detestable to him: arrogant eyes, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that plots wicked schemes, feet eager to run to evil, a lying witness who gives false testimony, and one who stirs up trouble among brothers. (Proverbs 12:22)
The one who says, “I have come to know him,” and yet doesn’t keep his commands, is a liar, and the truth is not in him. (1 John 2:4)
Don’t despise prophecies, but test all things. Hold on to what is good. (1 Thessalonians 5:20–21)
God commands us to value truth and fact, which means we must do all we can to critically consider what we hear and read, ever aware of bias.
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