There’s a bold claim if ever there was one, but as the days count down to the release of The Creator – from Gareth Edwards, featuring visuals from ILM VFX – Empire Magazine takes a closer look at the film and a character that is equal parts hero and villain to the new world order of The Creator that Edwards describes as ‘The Oppenheimer of A.I‘.
Speaking exclusively to Empire for our new Dune: Part Two issue, the director compares them to a real-life scientist responsible for unleashing a groundbreaking weapon on the world – one that’s been taking over cinemas for weeks now. “They’re the Oppenheimer of AI,” Edwards says, “and there’s been this big manhunt for them for years. On one side of the world, they’re an Osama Bin Laden figure — public enemy number one. On the other [New Asia], they’re a god, a messiah, and people will fight to the death to defend them.”
Edwards has populated his A.I.-driven world with a huge variety of robots – such as the one seen in Empire’s exclusive image above, in a shot taken from a sequence filmed at Sapan Mon Bridge in Thailand, one of the filming locations used for ‘New Asia’. The director was keen to make his robots stand out from movie droids we’ve seen before, and avoid the sci-fi trope of a seemingly human character being revealed as an android all along. “I wanted to take that off the table,” he says. “In this film, it’s visually very clear who is AI and who isn’t. Even with the more humanoid ones.” Edwards took more of a Charles Darwin-inspired approach, so as to show the stages of progression in the robots’ functionality. “I wanted something like that classic ‘from-ape-to-man’ silhouette,’” he tells us. “So, you can see the evolution of the robots, from early, boxy, Sony Walkman-like ones, all the way up to the more visually sophisticated ones with human faces, which are called ‘simulants’.”
