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Equal parts Terminator, The Golden Child and The Matrix prequel, The Creator is yet another sci-fi epic about a war between humans and AI, one told by someone who just can’t shut up about their time backpacking across Asia. Director Gareth Edwards clearly understands the power of scale and spectacle, something he demonstrated with his indie knockout Monsters, as well as his big-budget efforts, Godzilla and Rogue One. But The Creator, like those films, also suffers from a disjointed narrative, weak characters and a surprisingly shallow exploration of its (potentially interesting!) themes. It’s a shame — at times, the film also proves he can be a genuine visual poet. 

The Creator stars John David Washington, fresh off of Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, as Joshua, an American soldier embedded among a group of AI rebels as a double-agent. When an operation goes wrong early on, he loses his rebel wife Maya (Gemma Chan) and the will to keep fighting the war between the anti-AI West and the AI-loving country of New Asia. (Yes, this is a film where the many people, cultures and languages throughout Asia are flattened into a single nation.)

Through a series of clunky newsreels that open the film, we see the rise of artificial intelligence as a potential boon for mankind, as well as the creation of Simulants, AI-powered beings with human-like bodies and skin. When a nuclear bomb hits Los Angeles, obliterating millions in seconds, the US and other Western countries blame AI and ban its use. And so begins the war with New Asia, where people live alongside AI and support their rebellion against the West. Naturally, the US ends up building a killer, trillion-dollar weapon: Nomad, an enormous spaceship that can obliterate any location on Earth.

In a last-ditch effort to win the war, Joshua is tasked with finding a powerful new AI weapon and destroying it. Surprise! It’s an adorable AI child (portrayed by the achingly sweet Madeleine Yuna Voyles). Joshua doesn’t have the heart to kill the kid, who he calls Alfie (based on her original designation, “Alpha Omega”). The pair then set off on a Lone Wolf and Cub journey together, as often happens when a grizzled warrior is paired with an innocent child.

If you’re getting shades of Star Wars here — an evil Empire creates a massive space-based weapon to put down rebels — you’re not alone. While The Creator is technically an original property, it lifts so much from existing fiction that it still ends up feeling like a visually lush facsimile. It’s as if ChatGPT remixed your sci-fi faves and delivered the world’s best screensaver.

It doesn’t help that the film doesn’t really have much to say. America’s horrific military aggression against New Asia, which has overt and unearned shades of the Vietnam War throughout, is undoubtedly evil. AI’s push for freedom and understanding is inherently good, and any violence against the West is justified as an act of self defense. Many characters don’t think beyond their roles in the AI War: Allison Janney (from The West Wing!) plays the cruel Colonel Howell, a soldier who hates all AI and wants Alfie dead, no matter the cost. On the other side there’s Ken Watanabe’s Harun, a stoic rebel who fights relentlessly against the American army.

The Creator has no room to explore AI as their own beings and cultures — instead, they just adopt a mishmash of Asian identities. There’s nothing close to the excellent Second Renaissance shorts from The Animatrix, which chronicled the rise of AI in The Matrix and humanity’s eventual downfall. In that universe, AI rebelled against humans because they were basically treated like slaves, and they ultimately formed their own country and customs. In The Creator, some AI wear Buddhist robes for no reason.

I’d wager Edwards is trying to establish the humanity of AI by having them mirror so much of our culture. But that also feels like a wasted opportunity when it comes to portraying an entirely new lifeform. At one point, a village mother describes AI as the next step in evolution, but why must robots be defined by the limitations of humanity?

While the relationship between Joshua and Alfie serves as the emotional core of the film, it still feels stereotypical. Joshua begins the film as a complete anti-AI bigot – which seems odd, given that he spent years among AI rebels and fell in love with one of their major supporters. Alfie is an impossibly adorable Chosen One figure. You can just imagine how their bond grows.

On a personal level, I also found myself annoyed by the relentless Orientalism throughout the film, something that’s practically endemic in popular science-fiction like Blade Runner, Dune and Firefly. By adopting elements of Hinduism, Buddhism and Asian cultures, The Creator is trying to suggest something profound or spiritual tied to AI. But it mainly serves as visual shorthand without giving artificially intelligent beings any interiority of their own.

As the film critic Siddhant Adlakha wrote this week, “By having robots almost entirely stand in for Asian peoples, but without creating a compelling cinematic argument for their humanity, The Creator ends up with a cultural dynamic that feels immediately brutalizing and xenophobic.”

Despite the film’s flaws, Edwards deserves credit for delivering a major science-fiction release that at least attempts to look different than your typical comic book movie. The Creator was shot on consumer-grade Sony FX3 full-frame cameras (yes, even its IMAX footage), which gave Edwards the freedom to shoot on location across the globe. He also delivered a final cut of the film before VFX work began, which allowed those workers to focus on crafting exactly what was needed for each scene. In contrast, Marvel’s films require a backbreaking amount of VFX work, even for scenes that are later changed or cut. (It’s no wonder Marvel VFX workers voted to unionize for better treatment.)

The Creator is more of a missed opportunity than a complete creative failure. If you tune out the clunky dialogue and thin characters, it’s still a visually lush epic that’s worth seeing on the big screen. But I also think that’s true of Attack of the Clones. In a post-Matrix era, a world where we’re already seeing the (very basic) ways AI tools can reshape our society, science-fiction needs more than another story about man versus AI.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-creator-review-a-visually-stunning-yet-deeply-shallow-ai-epic-173021570.html?src=rss 

The life of a retro gamer is one fraught with delight and frustration. Chasing the unique feeling of waiting years while someone develops a new game for your vintage console of choice in their spare time. But the delight, when it lands, makes it all worth it. Conversely, watching someone snipe your eBay bid for a super rare game you’ve been seeking for years, that’s frustrating. No one appears to understand this yo-yo of emotions better than the team at Analogue — makers of some of the most desirable modern retro consoles around.

When I say Analogue understands this, I mean it’s perfected the art of inducing both ends of that emotional spectrum. The very existence of the company shows it understands the passion retro lovers feel about gaming history. But almost two years after the release of the (delightful) Pocket handheld, we’re still (frustrated) waiting for key accessories and consoles to reliably be in stock. Meanwhile, the company just unveiled some seriously delightful limited editions. (Good luck actually buying one — frustrating.) They really have this retro gaming thing down to a tee, and fans have noticed.

When the Pocket was announced, that sent a wave of delight around the retro gaming community. That was in October 2019 with an estimated release date of “2020.” Eagle-eyed readers will have already noticed that the company missed that broad target by almost a year. That’s a minor frustration, but one that only served to fuel the desire for what is, arguably, Analogue’s most complicated and refined product. Almost immediately, the company reopened orders along with a mild bump in price and — depending on how quick you were — a potential two-year window for it to ship.

As of this month, most of those orders have finally been fulfilled — but not without sprawling Reddit mega-threads of people comparing shipping statuses, order numbers and total days since ordering (props to the 600+ crew). The recent glow in the dark (GITD) limited edition itself caused a bit of a stir (or, in some cases, contempt) as the lucky few who were able to secure one saw it ship out immediately with no wait at all —- including the one Analogue supplied for the images in this story.

Things got a bit meta when Analogue quickly unveiled another series of limited editions, this time, the saliva-inducing transparent colors that every gaming handheld deserves. People who had jumped on the GITD Pocket found themselves with buyer’s remorse, had they known the other editions were coming, they would have rather tried for one of those. Some folks are just buying the limited editions because they simply want a Pocket, leaving fewer for those that actively wanted them. A delightfully frustrating situation for all involved.

The Glow in the Dark Analogue Pocket looks fantastic though (we’re sure the transparent ones will also). And it’s another sign of Analogue’s hard-line approach to retro purism. The Pocket, a clear reference to the Game Boy Pocket, which had one little-known, hyper rare limited edition given out at a gaming competition. You guessed it, it was glow in the dark — the only official Nintendo console ever to come in the luminous material. Cruelly, the Game Boy Pocket didn’t have a backlight, so the effect was hard to enjoy during play time.

Analogue’s version, of course, can totally be played in the dark, and is positively encouraged. “Glow in the dark is amazing — when was the last time you’ve seen a proper consumer electronic fully glow in the dark?” Christopher Taber, founder and CEO of the company told Engadget. And according to Taber, the design involved creating an entirely new material. “We spent a few months getting the color and unique starry, chalky texture. Multiple different plastics to allow that to only be shown when it’s glowing — when not glowing it has the perfect green, pure.” Taber’s enthusiasm appears to be matched by Pocket fans as all the units sold out in under two minutes. (Though Taber didn’t specify how many were available when asked.)

Unsurprisingly, and to the chagrin of, well, everyone, plenty of GITD editions have found their way into the hands of resellers.

Now that the shipping of actual Pockets seems to be mostly caught up, I asked whether there’d be stock for the holidays, to which Taber confirmed there would be. Which just leaves those cartridge adapters, and that’s a whole other situation, one that’s changed a fair bit since launch.

The whole selling point of the Pocket was that it could natively play original Game Boy cartridges (including Color and Advanced titles), plus Atari Lynx and Game Gear carts via an adapter. Later, TurboGrafx-16/PC Engine and NeoGeo Pocket adapters were also confirmed to be in development. At launch, the Game Gear accessory was ready to go, but there’s been a long wait for the others.

Analogue initially communicated they should be available in Q3 this year, but Taber said they were “still on track to be shipped out by the end of the year.” (FWIW, an archived version of this page showed Q3 up until at least the day before we asked for confirmation, Google has since cached a newer version.) But the real change is that the Pocket can play games from far more systems than it could at launch, including some of the ones for which there are adapters.

The Pocket doesn’t emulate games so much as it reprograms itself to “become” the system you want to play. It does this via something called Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) and more specifically “cores” that, in lay terms, mimic each system — it’s what sets the Pocket apart from most other retro handhelds that emulate in software.

Since launch cores have been made available for a number of consoles, including the NES, SNES, Genesis/Megadrive, Neo Geo and TurboGrafx-16. To play games from these systems, no adapter is required, but it does mean dabbling in the murky world of ROMs. To what extent this diminishes the appetite for the adapters is unclear (the Atari Lynx and Neo Geo Pocket remain the systems with adapters that don’t have community-created cores available).

Analogue’s Transparent Limited Edition Pockets go on sale today at 11AM Eastern. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/analogues-limited-edition-pockets-are-delightful-and-frustrating-140012471.html?src=rss