Film review: The Creator

Nice America you got there—shame about your Asia

I became intent on seeing The Creator as soon as I saw that it was from the man who directed Rogue One, my favorite piece of media Disney Star Wars has produced. It certainly looked intriguing; a near-future science fiction story with a good deal of action? I’m all for that. Unfortunately, the end result is somewhat uneven, but overall worth seeing.

Twenty minutes into the future, an automated system nukes Los Angeles, turning the United States government against all forms of artificial intelligence. By the time of the actual plot, the only places willing to openly host AI are various cells in the vaguely defined superstate ‘New Asia,’ which a map seems to imply is a peculiar amalgam of Japan and the stretch of Southeast Asia from Myanmar to the Philippines. The action properly kicks off with US special operative Joshua Taylor (John David Washington) being sent on a raid against one of these AI cells, where he finds a robot child (Madeleine Yuna Voyles) eventually christened Alphie, who happens to know something he desperately wants. They then go on a wild goose chase all throughout New Asia to find what they both need, all the while pursued by the US government.

The best part of this film is the relationship between the two leads. They are both conflicted, on the run, and setting out to do something they had been told time and again not to do. They have a sort of teacher-student interaction where, as the best of these stories always have, the teacher learns as much as the student. They have to see both sides of American imperial power, both abroad and later domestically.

It is the portrayal of the US, a few decades in the future, where the worldbuilding in this film really shines. The Pentagon now carries a big stick that happens to float: NOMAD, as they call it, is a hulking behemoth in the sky, going all over the world to wreak havoc on rogue artificial intelligence (it has a suitably scary way of announcing its presence). It is the ‘War on Terror’ gone digital, the logical conclusion of drone warfare, the expansion of the ‘frontier’ to the digital realm as well as to an Asia that America has ravaged before. It’s a futuristic, all-too-believable extrapolation into a future that Nikhil Pal Singh described in these terms:

Defending the launching of the global War on Terror, U.S. diplomatic historian John Gaddis gave scholarly imprimatur to the settler idiom: the borders of global civil society were menaced by non-state actors in a manner similar to the “native Americans, pirates and other marauders” that once menaced the boundaries of an expanding U.S. nation-state. Foreign affairs writer Robert Kaplan concurred: ‘The War on Terrorism was really about taming the frontier,’ as he heard U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq repeat the refrain, ‘Welcome to Injun Country.’

[...]

The history of the American frontier is one of mounting casualties and ambiguous boundaries, of lives and fortunes gained and lost. In the settler narrative, “collective security” never meant just the existential kind of safety, that is, situations where material survival and self-defense were mainly at stake. Freedom is essential to the equation, and freedom in this conception is built once again upon dreams of a blank slate—this time cheap, empty, exploitable lands and resources that must be cleared of any competing presence.

However, what pained me, as a Filipino-American on my mother’s side, was the frankly lazy portrayal of Asia. As previously described, the AI and their supporters are hiding in a superstate ‘New Asia,’ an unwieldy amalgam of disparate countries that were last unified, if one could call it that, when Japan rampaged across the region in World War II. The scenery looks Vietnamese, echoing many Vietnam War movies, but the urban areas are vaguer, filled with what appears to be Chinese writing (which could easily be Japanese). It’s a blatant hodgepodge which, to be blunt, made it seem like the filmmakers just didn’t care enough to set this in a real Asian country.

They could have easily done something like Paolo Bacigalupi’s novel The Windup Girl, unambiguously set in Thailand. I’ve read comments from Thai people saying that it’s clearly written by a Westerner, which is something I'm not sure can be avoided at all, but it at least tried to engage with the complexity of a real Asian country. This film didn’t. (Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Moon may also be relevant here).

What results from this lushly developed America and a smorgasbord Asia is a film about American empire from an American (or Western—director Gareth Edwards is British) point of view. Many have observed that these wars have barely had any effect on the day-to-day lives of Americans on the whole (veterans, refugees, and their families excepted), and it is easy to mush all American wars into ‘Asia’ or ‘the Middle East’ stereotypes. That’s what this film does: it reduces several countries to cardboard cutouts into which to smash American special forces to kill, die, and steal. It commits the grievous sin of forgetting that the targets of American guns are people, too, with agency and beliefs and histories.

I wanted to like The Creator more than I did, and in many ways it is a fine movie. The action is exciting, the American characters get good development, and the future is believable technology-wise. It falls, however, in portraying American wars as solely American experiences, which is both its greatest failure and, inadvertently, its most potent element of commentary.

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Highlights: great action, great futuristic aesthetic when it isn't being orientalist

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Yasuke celebrates African heritage at the expense of Japan's

Even a mythical reimagining should make an attempt at making sense

First, the facts:

In 1582, Japan was going through a violent process of unification. After defeating almost every other local leader and conquering their provinces, warlord Oda Nobunaga had secured control over almost all of Japan when one of his generals, Akechi Mitsuhide, betrayed him by launching a surprise attack on his castle and causing him to commit seppuku. One of Oda's most loyal soldiers, an African man he had originally bought as a servant from Portuguese traders who had kidnapped him probably in Mozambique, has entered the history books as the first foreigner to ever receive the rank of samurai, but after the fall of the Oda clan, nothing more is recorded about him. We don't know his original name. The Japanese called him Yasuke.

Now, the fiction:

The new Netflix animated series Yasuke imagines the Black samurai twenty years later as a retired old warrior struggling with his inner demons but suddenly called again to battle when a magical girl becomes the target of a weird Christian cult that wants to exploit her powers. The plot gives much more attention to the girl's development as a character, with Yasuke relegated to a glorified bodyguard. In essence, this show has the character of Yasuke, but doesn't cover what he did in life, doesn't explore the significance of his achievements, doesn't give him much of a personality, doesn't rely on what actually made him historically interesting, and isn't even about him.

To make matters worse, the show just isn't very engaging. The animation is flawless, and I have nothing but praise for how the show looks, but the story is bland, generic, painfully predictable, and peppered with unoriginal one-liners that the writers had to have known were not going to impress anyone.

The writers' room of Yasuke has three African Americans (LeSean Thomas, Steven Ellison, Nick Jones Jr.) and one white Canadian (Alex Larsen). Not a single Japanese voice was involved in writing the story. The production used the services of a Japanese animation company, but the credits make no mention of any cultural advisor, sensitivity reader, or anyone who could have provided input to correct the Orientalist stereotypes and historical distortions in the script. By distortions I don't mean flying robots and sorcery. By distortions I mean things like the portrayal of Oda Nobunaga as an enlightened reformer who planned to expand civil freedoms and who was deposed by traditionalists primarily because he dared to knight a Black man. This is not only a blatant butchering of how military rivalries worked in early modern Japan; it's a clumsy attempt to transplant 21st-century preoccupations onto a setting where they don't make sense.

The story does reflect African values nicely through its titular protagonist (for example, the principle that everyone in the community is responsible for every child's safety), but when it comes to representing Japanese culture, all we get are tired clichés like the fixation with honor, as if Japanese society didn't have any other values. In the end, we don't get any tangible hint of who Yasuke was as a person (or even who the writers wanted to say he was) beyond a set of formulaic platitudes.

Yasuke does a grave disservice to a fascinating historical figure to tell a paint-by-numbers escort quest plot that doesn't illuminate his character and wastes the narrative possibilities of a crucial period in Japanese history. It's a real pity.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 6/10.

Bonuses: +1 for beautiful landscapes and expertly fluid animation, +1 for the uniquely bold kind of worldbuilding that allows for a samurai, a sorcerer, a robot and a werebear to exist in the same story.

Penalties: −3 for using almost every Orientalist trope in the box.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Microreview [book]: Desert God, by Wilbur Smith

Argh!

 Obviously Stephen King has only ever read a single historical novelist...

Smith, Wilbur. Desert God. William Morris: 2014.

Don't buy it, but if you must, do it here.

Ever been tempted to write a series about a smug, all-knowing Renaissance Man? Don't. Just...don't. I can't think of many less appealing topics, but the indomitable octogenarian Wilbur Smith doesn't seem capable of letting his demigod-like Taita go quietly into the night. In Desert God, the world's least appealing polymath is up to his usual laughably improbable tricks, and it's worse than ever.

I honestly can't remember the last time I started reading a book but gave up due to lack of interest (or indeed for any other reason!) before the end. But then I encountered Wilbur Smith's books, and I've now gone 2/2. I want you all to know that I invested tremendous effort in my multiple attempts to read this entire book, and even went back and took a look at the first book in the series, River God, to see whether Smith used to be great but has just fallen on hard times (the answer to that is a resounding 'no'), but no matter how many times I gritted my teeth and tried to just power through it, subconsciously my mind kept leaping at the slightest distraction to get me doing something, anything, else. This deadly one-two combination of River God and Desert God temporarily drained the act of reading itself from all its joy, sucking the life out of every word.

Reading either of these books is like sawing off your own arm: possible, with a supreme effort of will, but be prepared to faint out of horror and disgust countless times in the process.

How you'll look if you keep reading Desert God.

What is so bad about Desert God, you might be wondering? The answer? Everything. The writing is contrived and terrible, the characters shockingly uninteresting and entirely undeveloped (Smith uses his characters like a diarrhetic uses toilet paper), and the 'historicity' of the ridiculous plot makes me quiver with rage. 16th century BC Egyptians using "cavalry lances" to run down Bedouin bandits they've cornered after following their tracks—in the friggin' desert?!? (Caveat emptor: there are dozens more anachronisms and willful falsifications in this "well-researched" book.) The good guys get to run down 'the natives' and teach them what for...I guess 'Egyptian-colored' skin is the new white!

And the utterly charisma-less character of Taita was a terrible idea, even for an author like Smith. Taita can do everything better than anyone else in the history of mankind, speaks all languages in the world or can learn any new ones in five minutes, he's like a billion years old but still agelessly beautiful, can apparently call in Horus/other supernatural forces at will (i.e., a deus ex machina whenever the plot demands), histrionically claims in the first-person narration that he's humble and would never boast and yet goes on and on about how wonderful/clever/etc. he is on practically every page, and is supposedly smarter than everyone else in the universe, but when the plot demands, he makes the most jaw-droppingly terrible decisions imaginable. This poop-fest is as bad as (check that: even worse than) Orientalist drivel like Shogun or other Clavell novels!

And speaking of Orientalism and Clavell, Smith, it seems, is another card-carrying Orientalist dreaming longingly of the halcyon days when the "civilized" (=white) people man bestrode the world like a colossus. But wait! How can that be, since this is ostensibly an 'Egyptian' story? Yeah—it isn't. For all you wondering if the subaltern can ever really speak/get out from under the thumb of their former colonial oppressors, all I can say is, if Smith is writing for you, not bloody likely! This entire "Egyptian" story has the cloying stink of European high medieval fantasy epic all over it. People freakin' bowing, spouting chivalric nonsense all over the place--at least Smith should have had the decency to set this tale where it belongs, in medieval Europe, and not slapped the highly suspect fig leaf of 'ancient Egypt' over it! Worst of all, the millions (that's right, millions) of people who read this nonsense come away thinking, "Now I know all about Ancient Egypt! Golly, what a romantic time it was—never a dull moment, what?" This is all enough to make me want to cry. Of course, negative reviews can't affect either Smith himself or his gazillions of fans, meaning that book sales won't suffer because of my visceral dislike. (I dislike this book so hard I was clenching my teeth like nobody's business while reading it, and by the time I gave up, I needed the psychological equivalent of the Jaws of Life just to pry the splintered ruin of my teeth apart.)

So in conclusion, if you've never read any of Wilbur Smith's Ancient Egypt train-wreck of a series, congratulations. You dodged an elephant-sized bullet. And if you just love Wilbur Smith and can't understand how I could be so mean and isn't Taita just so wonderful after all, please consult the following checklist: are you a 1) white? 2) man? Since you answered yes to both 1) and 2), quod erat demonstrandum. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200, just go straight to jail—I hope all they give you to read there is Desert God :)

The Math:

Objective assessment: 3/10

Bonuses: +1 for the off-chance that the second half of the book is better than the abysmal first

Penalties: -1 for awful writing, -1 for awful characters, and -1 for an astonishingly awful story

Nerd coefficient: 1/10 "Yowsers—run for the hills!"

[NB on scoring: we give out 1/10 very sparingly on this site, which should demonstrate yet again the level of stinkitude here.]

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