2023, in all facets of the film industry, is likely to be remembered as ‘The Year Of AI’. Production-wise, Hollywood has seen a once-in-a-generation workers’ strike (partly) out of fears of artificial intelligence threatening the livelihood of creatives. Narratively, stories about the looming threat of replacement by machines have reached a point of relevance that, even considering sci-fi’s rich history of prescience, is still kind of bizarre to contemplate at this point in time. And on the critical side of things, it seems like every goddamn person who writes about movies has uttered some variation of “it’s as if an A.I./ChatGPT/an algorithm made/wrote this film” as a go-to criticism for films that feel assembly-line or generic. Yes, I resorted to this very thing during the year-end lists for 2022, but the extent to which it has since mushroomed into a genuine cliché is… getting kind of irritating.
At any rate, alongside films like Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part 1, The Creator feels like one of those emblematic releases that help define a year as a pop culture moment. That it’s one of a shrinking minority of tentpole sci-fi flicks that aren’t based on pre-existing material (directly, at least, but we’ll get to that…) adds to that battlefront mentality. What can I say, this is the kind of metanarrative shit I crave in media.
