Posted in: 20th Century Studios, Current News, Movies | Tagged: Fiona Bruce, leigh francis, london, Science Musuem, the creator

Gareth Edwards Introduces The UK Premiere Of The Creator (Video)

I've just got back from attending the UK Premiere of The Creator, held tonight at the Science Museum in Knightsbridge in London.

Okay, so I've just got back from the UK Premiere of The Creator, held tonight at the Science Museum in Knightsbridge, which it turns out makes a rather excellent venue for such an event, considering it has an IMAX cinema right in the middle of it. The journey from entrance to the event is thronged with Crick and Watson's model of DNA, eighteenth-century steam engines, actual moon landing modules, and Charles Babbage's Difference Engine. If AI began anywhere, it started here.

Also in attendance were comedians Malcolm MacIntyre and Leigh Francis – better known these days as Keith Lemon – who I got to chat to and recall the UK premiere of Iron Man, where I got him to pose with a steam iron for the cameras. So that was fun, but beaten by wife regarding celeb spots, with the report that she'd just been to the toilet with Fiona Bruce.

Before the film began, director Gareth Edwards introduced the movie to the audience, noted the absence of actors over the SAG-AGFRA strike, but allowed us all to wave at them. Here's a video from the back of the IMAX, which a) was the best seat in the house but b) did necessitate a relatively strong iPad zoom.

As for the film itself? Lots to talk about. As Artificial Intelligence films go, it has an awful lot of James Cameron Terminator as well as Alita to play with; Steven Spielberg's AI is central when it comes to the cute kid factor, with Neill Blomkamp's Chappie possibly the most heavy lifting, the biggest influence in the way common or garden robots are shown on the screen, as grunts doing their jobs, but perhaps doing so much more, as well as the use or lack of faces when creating characters that express life. The Creator plays with the importance an audience prescribes to a human face, something which the movie player to before upendings.

What The Creator will be most compared to, in all likelihood, will be Blade Runner over its use of AI, but that will probably be a fallacy. No robots are hiding as people here; many of the philosophical ideas that the film raised are treated as given here. AI is sentient life… and? So what? All life is just a memory with ambition… though the bomb robots provide a new wrinkle. However, The Creator does owe much to Blade Runner regarding world-building – though being more literal about the word "world." We see so much of it here, across East Asia mainly, cities, coasts, and countries, from arable to dustbowl, with robots integrated into all their lives. And the world plays a significant character; it's rare to see a film that takes in so much… location, both in space and time.

Lots of new technology is dropped into this world. Still, rather than Chekhov's Gun, we are dealing with Chekhov's Armoury here, with every device initially introduced to the audience through its use, which then goes on to play a vital plot point later in the film. Again and again and again. We also see footage from past decades of robots as part of the history of this world in a way they never were in ours. But in the present, we only get a glimpse at America, the wasteland of Los Angeles that has led to all this conflict.

Instead, we see far more of NOMAD, the global orbiting satellite machine that drops literal crosshairs worldwide, glowing in the sky as it drops its death missiles from a long, long way away. And America as the Big Bad, blaming the deaths of millions on AI and seeking a decade-and-a-half-long revenge on those whom it blames. If you thought Cameron's Avatar wasn't exactly lacking in subtlety regarding recent American colonialist interventionist policies, you haven't seen anything yet.

The Creator is on general release from Thursday, the 28th of September in the UK, and on Friday, the 29th of September in the US. Here's a look at how it went down in London tonight.

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