The Creator
This is either one of the most subversive medium budget Hollywood films, or its yet another one “hero escorts kid that saves the world”. I’m no exactly sure, let’s go with the bland and safe option, because the alternative is unimaginable. I kept searching for the Chinese producers but they never came. This has no CCCP money, but includes Chinese Red Army imagery.
At its core, it’s yet another kid-being-escorted film, but Denzel’s kid is not old enough to be a father figure. The world kept AI-ifying and eventually LA was nuked.
Nothing of value was lost, but The West banned Artificial Intelligence, New Asia (which conspicuously does not include China on the maps) embraced it. It took decades for a mobile NORAD to be built (standard killsat), and the rest of the American lapdogs forfeited control to some DOD dude.
Even with all that tech, boots on the ground are necessary. NATO sends an infiltrator to the AI-friendly Asians, and he fucks his way to the top, Nimrata herself. Unfortunately, he goes native, their unborn baby dies on the killsat attack.
Years later, our dude is a drunk nuclear waste cleaner, she resurfaces, there’s a new weapon in the fight against humans. It’s the kid, she can Magneto her way around any tech, but only for plot-convenient devices. They need him because he know the geography of the place, but when he goes native with the kid, his bosslady and her lieutenant quickly get on the police blotter, acquire transportation for long range missions, infiltrate cop squads, and that’s before they call in the cavalry. Makes you think why did they need him anyway…
Anyway, a lot of action scenes later our hero finds her wife in a coma in deep Nepal. Nimrata is just a moniker, like Dalai Lama, or Davy Jones. There must be always one. The Buddhist caregivers are all bots or cyborgs, so our Prince Charming is the only one that can give her what she needs: pulling the plug so she can die peacefully, and achieve Nirvana by going to Christian heaven. The evil army woman reached them anyway, but she only wants to download her brain so they can nuke the gooks effectively. This is stopped, but our hero and the kid are captured.
Even though the hero’s wife was KILLED, it’s still not the end! They are captured, but manage to escape and board a shuttle to the moon. They hijack it and move on the floating NORAD, which is now in space (most of the times it’s just hundreds of meters into the air, its size is very variable.
The NORAD controllers see this as a threat and nuke everything! All AI stuff is nuked, one by one. The kid gets to another control room (for whom, if it’s controlled from Earth?) and stops the last couple nukes.
The hero single-handledly blows up the station by rigging one of the big nukes to explode, but snags means he cannot escape, and goes down with the spaceship. He finally meets his wife as a bot with her consciousness, something they brought in a USB stick from Nepal.
Even though only a couple AI strongholds remain, the kid gets back to Earth and every New Asian is ecstatic! Little red flags flutter in the wind, our child is filmed in his best Mao pose, as if all humans were finally embraced by the borg. All it took was Lawrence of Arabia, humanity is doomed! Doomed!
I, for one, welcome our artificial overlords.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.