Artificial intelligence, the new big bad of American cinema? From Mission Impossible 7 to The Creator, AI is everywhere on our screens

Warning – The article below contains minor spoilers for “The Creator” as it discusses elements of its plot. So please go ahead if you haven’t seen it yet.

The complex relationship between the worlds of cinema and TV series and artificial intelligence is not new. HAL 9000 and Ash had major roles in the failed 2001 missions, A Space Odyssey and Alien, respectively. Skynet and Matrix experiments gone wrong. And it only took Ultron seconds to escape his creators Tony Stark and Bruce Banner in Avengers 2.

But Blade Runner’s replicants are full of humanity. AI and Chappie revisit the Pinocchio myth with a futuristic look. And it’s very hard not to melt in front of Wall-E. Therefore, this theme has been embedded in pop culture in various ways over the decades. But it has never been more like 2023. in front of and behind the camera.

Oh, a robot?

In June, Disney and Marvel clashed over the credits of the Secret Invasion series, which was created using artificial intelligence. In August, technology was at the center of a war between intelligence agencies in Netflix’s Agent Stone, as the cast recently joined the writers in their strike. Fighting, among other things, such as the use of artificial intelligence that compromises their work, in scripting, such as the use of faces and voices.

And it is in this turbulent context, to say the least, that two blockbusters revolve around artificial intelligence: Mission Impossible 7 and The Creator. Movies that suggest AI has become the new big bad of American cinema. If they do reflect global concerns, the reality is much more complex than that.

MISSION IMPOSSIBLE 7: AI, the enemy of cinema?

Tom Cruise loves to tell his stories through his movies. And this is even more true in the Mission: Impossible saga, which leads to several key moments in his career. The first episode, in which he oversees the franchise behind and in front of the camera, echoes his baptism of fire as a producer.

The third movie in which Ethan Hunt is about to get married is just a cinematic continuation of his affair with Kate Holmes, which he makes the centerpiece of every media release, even if it means clicking the sofa springs. Oprah Winfrey.

And every opus since Ghost Protocol, which marked his big comeback after Paramount banned the previous film’s disappointing figures (and his media appearances) in Hollywood, has featured a hero regularly letting his hierarchy down, forced to physically outdo himself. The help of a few people who can still trust.

Embarrassed by the Covid pandemic, which has split filming into several parts and pushed back the release date numerous times, Mission: Impossible 7 pits the hero against a dual enemy: a powerful assassin from his past who is none other than his armed arm. entity, an artificial intelligence capable of predicting its actions.

“You are playing a four-dimensional chess game with an algorithm”, Luther (Ving Rhames) tells Ethan in a dialogue that contains one of the keys to reading the film. After the success of Top Gun: Maverick, named by Steven Spielberg as the “bread savior of Hollywood”, Tom Cruise is fighting not so much to save the world as cinema.

Metaphorically speaking, if the second part of the story does not reveal that the CEOs of the streaming platforms have also created a face. But while filming on 8 was halted due to a writers’ and actors’ strike, in part because of the AI ​​problem, Tom Cruise is faced with an AI that can change faces and voices and write its own script.

This is what the remaining attackers are currently fighting against. A visual story? Yes, in the sense that post-production was already well advanced when the movement began. But the latest Mission: Impossible movies are movies that write and record themselves as they shoot. and there is no doubt that the context and repeated pauses influenced the great badness of this opus.

Through a face-to-face encounter between Ethan Hunt and the Entity, Dead Reckoning tells the story of the struggle between man and machine, between analog and digital. A contradiction that is particularly pronounced in Tom Cruise’s desire to perform his own stunts and limit the use of computer-generated images as much as possible.

Coincidentally, Mission: Impossible 7 came out a few weeks after Fast & Furious X, which also offers a chase through the streets of Rome, but with more digital tricks to show. and supports the message of Christopher McQuarrie’s film. Even if it has some ambivalence, besides, its score is lower than the expectations at the box office.

You play a four-dimensional chess game with an algorithm

Even if he openly contradicts it, feature films cannot fully survive without digital. For example, turning a jump ramp into a rock shard. Just as it refers to algorithms, but one must respect the codes of the saga, even if it is slightly programmatic.

Except when he manages to overcome this trap, in Venice, when the dramatic event announced earlier takes place and fills the story with inevitability. Because it relies on people, which seems to be the key to winning for Ethan Hunt, who we can hardly imagine not seeing win. Even if it means sacrificing yourself to end your path of the cross by saving the world (and cinema with it?) from this AI?

Creator: AI, the enemy of man?

Over the course of three films, Gareth Edwards has shown us a distinct taste for the apocalypse. Whether it’s caused by creatures (monsters, Godzilla) or an intergalactic empire’s latest weapon of mass destruction (Rogue One). his new feature film, The creatorEchoing its Star Wars spin-off is no exception.

It’s also about armed conflict (between humans and machines), and the fact that most of the story takes place in Asia is more reminiscent of George Lucas’ first opus, both in its influence and its status as a metaphor. from Vietnam. War like Rogue One.

Perhaps because the latter was heavily reworked by Tony Gilroy in post-production, leaving Gareth Edwards with a taste of unfinished business as he prepares to make his mark on the saga that inspired his childhood dreams and indirectly brought him back. camera. Thus, the creator would be his second attempt at creating Star Wars.

And he’s hiding nothing from our mic about how George Lucas’ legacy came into play in this futuristic tale of the Earth being turned upside down. “An artificial intelligence designed to keep us safe dropped a nuclear warhead in Los Angeles”As the trailer says. A line that moves the film into the category of stories where a creature escapes its creator.

But this is only the beginning, as the rumor of a powerful weapon created by artificial intelligence raises the threat of the East winning over the West in a conflict between them. and forced American soldier Joshua (John David Washington) to return to Asia, where his wife Maya (Gemma Chan) and the child she was carrying were killed in an attack while he was undercover.

used to be hostile to artificial intelligence (“These are just programs”, he told his companion, who was protecting them), the hero somewhat revised his position. And for good reason: he now has a robotic arm and leg. The film then slides into the writings of Isaac Asimov (and we think of Will Smith’s character I, Robot, who was in the same situation), and then. Blade Runner.

Because the weapon in question has… the looks of a child (played by the amazing Madeleine Yuna Voyles). A machine that, despite its impressive capabilities, is more human than some of the men and women who hunt it. Already shaken, our conviction is further strengthened when we realize that the real villain of the story is not AI, but what humanity does with it.

An unexpected echo of the current situation in Hollywood, where screenwriters have just won their case while actors are still rising up against, among other things, studio executives’ use of the technology. “Right now it’s easy to blame AI for the problems we feel are coming”– says Gareth Edwards in an interview on this topic.

“It’s like blaming a computer for what someone writes on the Internet. Or an airplane for 9/11. There’s always someone who misuses that technology. I’m less afraid of artificial intelligence than what humans can do. So that an entire class is punished for one unruly student.” Because you can’t hold back these incredible tools that can help people all over the world because only one person can do evil with it.

I fear AI less than what humans might do with it

“We have to be careful. And there will be problems. But I often think of this picture: If I told you, ‘We can have artificial intelligence, but it’s going to kill 40,000 people a year in the United States,’ you’d say no. But cars kill a lot of people in the country every year, and We keep them because they have so many advantages. Nobody wants to give up a car.”

“Intelligence can also have powerful benefits, and I don’t know how bad things would have to be for us to want to stop it. But it’s an interesting question, and I don’t know if anyone knows the answer.” Like him, no one can determine whether AI is friend or foe.

But Hollywood’s preoccupation with him is more at the center of debates and stories, making him an adversary or the bad guys’ ultimate weapon. However, and not as clearly as in Creator, this idea that humans are the key to our future and that the place of artificial intelligence in our lives is up to us.

Expected to hit our cinemas on October 25th, Pod Generation will go in that direction, as well as welcome in the footsteps of Gattaca, with the story of a pod-engineered baby to make pregnancy more equal. And we can’t wait to see how their clashes, which Hollywood experienced this year, will play out on the small and big screens.

Comments by Gareth Edwards, collected by Maximilien Pierret in Paris on 21 September 2023