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*/**** starring John David Washington, Gemma Chan, Ken Watanabe, Allison Janney screenplay by Gareth Edwards and Chris Weitz directed by Gareth Edwards
by Walter Chaw Fifty-three minutes into Gareth Edwards’s The Creator, there is a “What is Heaven?” talk between a hardened American soldier broken by grief and regret and a little Asian kid who happens to be a potentially world-destroying cyborg. The cyborg asks the question, and the G.I. says it’s where people go when they’re turned off, then clarifies that he won’t be going there because only good people get into Heaven. The A.I. then observes they have something in common, as it, too, will be denied entrance to Heaven as a non-person and, it goes without saying, non-Christian. I think this is maybe a critique of Christianity, which believes that the 69% of people on this planet who do not share their beliefs will literally burn for an eternity in a lake of fire. Or perhaps it’s a critique of American exceptionalism that believes we have the corner on morality, even as the country’s engaged in vicious dynastic colonialism and has been since its conception. Mostly, and accidentally, it’s a meta-critique of how whenever white creators seek to get all dewy-eyed about trans-humanism (see: Cloud Atlas), they tend to use Asian bodies as the battleground for their philosophical evolution, thus exposing a bias that should probably be examined with the help of non-white creators involved in the decision-making process. Why is it, they might ask these science-fictional advisors and creators, that when you talk about spiritual thought-leaders who transcend this mortal plane, the first thing you think of is a magical, mystical Oriental? Think hard.
One of the many ways Blade Runner is better than The Creator is that its mad scientist is a billionaire weirdo in silk pyjamas who gets his eyes poked out by his Aryan robot son. It’s like Hugh Hefner being murdered by the bunny logo. Compare how that 41-year-old film fetishizes Japanese culture against how The Creator fetishizes Asian culture. One reflects the collapse of American industrial hegemony in a world dominated by Japanese corporations; the other sees Asians as robots and robot-lovers in need of humanization in the eyes of not only the warlike Americans but also the no-doubt liberal progressives who consider the casting of a little Asian girl as an all-powerful being a “really super good thing” for Asians. I thought back to “Do They Know It’s Christmas,” the song that good-intentions supergroup Band Aid recorded to address Ethiopian famine in 1984, and wondered if the 36% of Muslims in that country would need to convert in order to receive the charity. One of the reasons Get Out is a masterpiece of political cinema is because it identifies wealthy white liberals as the most destructive force for representative equality on the planet. It’s not the hate that will kill us, it’s the totemic admiration. The Madonna/Whore syndrome doesn’t just apply to women.
Anyway, there are a lot of dead Asian people in The Creator and more shots of women and children crying over torn Asian bodies than a Vietnam War movie–Vietnam War movies just one of many emotional touchstones for this film to underscore the conviction that America is bad and Asia is Heaven, even though 87.4% of Asians will not be allowed in once they’re exterminated by America’s good love for Asian culture and optimism for Asian people. In The Creator‘s futureworld, America has banned A.I. entirely after A.I. is accused of detonating a nuclear weapon in Los Angeles, but New Asia (thus mashing together all the distinct cultures of Asia into one easy-to-idolize “TheyAllLookAlikesia”) continues to evolve and accept A.I. as equals in their still surprisingly-agrarian society. Edwards favours long, searching shots of monkeys running through the villages with their families to punctuate how “natural” New Asians are in their environment or some shit, I don’t know. Why does a white filmmaker shooting in Asia use monkeys to establish place? Are rice paddies and simians in Asia the Western equivalent of showing the Thames to denote London, or the Eiffel Tower to denote Paris? Take a second to think hard about that, too.
The star of The Creator is the special effects…is what I would say if I were that kind of asshole. But I’m the kind of asshole who says the star is John David Washington, now in his eighth shot at socially relevant cinema when he should have stopped with Spike Lee and BlacKkKlansman (2018). Washington plays Joshua, a soldier who has lost his Asian wife, whom he married while undercover and searching for super-weapon Alphie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles). He’s come to believe that Alphie will somehow help reunite him with his wife, Maya (Gemma Chan), who wasn’t killed during the prologue, just driven deeper into hiding as head of the Resistance. Resistance against what, you might ask, seeing as they’re living in a place that has accepted A.I.; I don’t know. You lose track. We glimpse Maya in flashbacks to Joshua listening with very serious listening concentration and empathizing with carefully rehearsed empathizing techniques. “She loved me, we were going to be a family,” he reminisces over shots of the couple strolling along a beach at magic hour. Unless you’re Terrence Malick, this is a recipe for a douche commercial.
There are some futuristic shootouts in The Creator as Joshua takes on the role of caretaker for the mystical Asian kid. Soon, the crust of sad around him starts to crack, letting some of that Oriental-child-A.I.-saviour-love shine into his dark places, causing him to question his lifelong beliefs in the face of big questions like, “What if robots were people?” I know, right? That’s some deep shit. What if Asians were people, too? What if The Creator is The Golden Child meets Short Circuit meets The Jewel of the Nile meets A.I. Artificial Intelligence meets Full Metal Jacket? That is to say, the perfect cocktail of Kubrick and pop racism to make a new film bro, if you were thinking of growing one in a tube instead of during a frat-night screening of The Boondock Saints. The A.I.-giving-birth thing was done with poetry and gravity in Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2046 and the weird oriento-philia was done better in Seven Years in Tibet. You know what I really like? How whenever Alphie wants to use her superpowers to turn off technology, she puts her hands together in a prayer gesture that is specifically Tibetan (or Christian) but not necessarily Buddhist, begging the question of whether much thought was put into this or the direction was, “Just act like you’re praying–no, like this.” It seems like there are issues germane to this creative decision that were never discussed, but what do I know? I’m not the one making thousands spending millions.
In Michael Ritchie’s The Golden Child, irreverent social worker Chandler (Eddie Murphy) is enlisted by a beautiful Asian woman, Kee (Charlotte Lewis), to find the mystical Golden Child (J.K. Reate, another little girl), who has the power to save or destroy the world. He learns not to be such a jackass through many hilarious misadventures and making fun of Asian cultures and eventually adopts the Golden Child to live as an American. We know this because the last we see of the Golden Child, she’s wearing a baseball cap and going to a Los Angeles park with Chandler and Kee. I liked this film very much when I was 13 and am pleased to report upon revisiting it that it is a movie a 13-year-old would like. It has as an advantage over The Creator, however: a scene where Kee is allowed to be a capable martial artist (because Asian) before she’s neutered into a traditional wife/mother role–rather than, as she would have been in The Creator, two dead mothers more useful as fetishes than as human beings (because Asian). Forty years on, The Creator is actually less progressive than The Golden Child.
If you’re here for confirmation that the special-effects work on this picture is exceptional and not at all updated versions of things you’ve seen before but in Asia and you haven’t watched much anime, you’ve come to the right place. If you want me to say words like “heartwarming” and “visionary,” well, now I have. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t laugh every single time Joshua screams “Alphie!,” imagining a cut to young Michael Caine wondering how the fuck he got ported into this, of all possible fucking futures. Are you curious to know whether there’s a Yub Nub thing at the end celebrating the collapse of the Empire? Well, that would be stupid as hell. But yes, there is. Also, in the end, there’s a thing with a door that won’t open, and Joshua yells at the miracle girl to “PUSH” (I did wonder why she didn’t just use her prayer magic to yank that fucker open)–but then we wouldn’t have the Wrath of Khan “I have always been your friend” sequence with Joshua saying he’s going to Heaven and will meet Alphie there. Alphie, the A.I. who isn’t going to Heaven because it is of another faith and even told him it wasn’t allowed to go. Remember, you callow Evangelical fucknut? Amen.
