The Creator director says to watch his movie before we’re “enslaved” by AI

Gareth Edwards, director of forthcoming sci-fi movie The Creator, says recent real-world events have mirrored moments in his script. While in reference to the progress of AI, he advises audiences “go see it before November, because that’s when we’re going to be enslaved.”

The Creator is a new movie from the mind of Gareth Edwards, director of Monsters, Godzilla, and Rogue One. Here’s the official synopsis for the film, as per 20th Century Studios:

“Amidst a future war between the human race and the forces of artificial intelligence, Joshua, a hardened ex-special forces agent grieving the disappearance of his wife, is recruited to hunt down and kill the Creator, the elusive architect of advanced AI who has developed a mysterious weapon with the power to end the war… and mankind itself. Joshua and his team of elite operatives journey across enemy lines, into the dark heart of AI-occupied territory, only to discover the world-ending weapon he’s been instructed to destroy is an AI in the form of a young child.”

John David Washington, Gemma Chan, Allison Janney, Ken Wattanabe, and newcomer Madeleine Voyles star. While at a preview event last night, the film’s writer-director discussed the making of the movie.

The Creator director says to watch his movie before we’re “enslaved” by AI

Speaking at an IMAX screening of footage from The Creator, Gareth Edwards said that he’s been surprised by the speed at which AI has progressed, saying his film – which is set in 2070 – should be set in 2023.

As per The Hollywood Reporter‘s coverage, Edwards elaborated: “When we first pitched the movie to the studio, this idea of a war with AI, everyone wants to know the backstory like, ‘Hang on, why would we be at war with AI?’ ‘Well, they’ve been banned because it kind of went wrong.’ ‘But why would you ban AI? It’s going to be great,’ and blah, blah blah.

“It was all these sort of ideas that you have to set up that maybe humanity would reject this thing and not be that cool about it. And the way it’s played out, the setup of our movie is pretty much the last few months, it’s kind of strange. Go see it before November, because that’s when we’re going to be enslaved!”

The importance of AI in Gareth Edwards’ movie

Edwards wrote The Creator in 2018, when AI felt more like a fantasy than reality. “It did feel back then like this was 30 years away,” Edwards says in the same report. “It really wasn’t on my radar back then in terms of being a reality.”

Edwards continues: “When this film began, I obviously didn’t know AI was going to do what it ended up doing this last year, so in the fairy tale of this story, AI was like the other; people who are different to us that we kind of want to get rid of or naturally have conflicts with.

“But the second you make them AI, all kinds of fascinating things started to happen as you wrote that script where you start to think, are they real? How would you know? If you didn’t like what they were doing, could you turn them off? What if they didn’t want to be turned off? And all of this stuff started to play out which became as strong as the premise and that’s what I’m most proud of in the film, that we hung onto that.”

The Creator his screens on September 29, 2023, while to find out why Gareth Edwards is calling one of this characters “the Oppenheimer of AI,” click here.