The Creator (2023) takes a different tack when it comes to the Artificial Intelligence / Robot trope.
Rather than menacing killers or benevolent overlords, it makes the arguably more likely assumption that AI robots will suffer the same travails as do we humans, from the various physical ills and injuries that afflict tangible creatures, to the delicate problems of intelligence and emotion, to, on the other end of the spectrum, those philosophical questions that plague intelligent creatures, including Why am I hear? What should I be doing? Why is this happening?
Los Angeles has been substantially destroyed by a nuclear bomb, planted and triggered by the artificial intelligence community. The response of the Americans is to begin hunting down the robots, who live in mixed communities large and small in the Far East.
We meet infiltration agent Sergeant Joshua Taylor in New Asia. He has met and married a local named Maya, who is pregnant; an extraction team, detecting the possible presence of Nirmata, the leader of the AI robots, forcibly removes Taylor before U. S. S. NOMAD hits the area with a missile. Taylor survives.
But with his wife gone, he is broken, and that makes him easy prey for a fake wife – or so his team believes. When he disappears into New Asia, they pursue, almost frantically.
But Taylor finds Nirmata, who is a five year old boy robot, and the real chase is on. Full of action sequences, this is a rare movie in which philosophy is successfully mixed in with action.
I shan’t spoil this any more, but it’s worth the time to watch if you want your mind and emotions stretched. I don’t know how I missed this when it first came out, but it’s well done, both as a story and a production. It may have a trifle of commercial slickness, but Strongly Recommended.
