Hacker Cinema
The Creator
2023 · Film · 134 min
Directed by Gareth Edwards
Science FictionActionAdventure
Amid a future war between the human race and the forces of artificial intelligence, a hardened ex-special forces agent grieving the disappearance of his wife, is recruited to hunt down and kill the Creator, the elusive architect of advanced AI who has developed a mysterious weapon with the power to end the war—and mankind itself.
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13 comments on Hacker News
Let's see if I can connect the dots as well as I think I can.
Just putting it here for posterity.
Like those movies before them, The Creator will be a cult classic in a few years.
The acting was okay, the story was okay.The vfx were great.
The premise is prophetic.
America and China will go to war over AI.
America will try and contain it for themselves. China will keep on trying to keep it accessible.
After endless negotiations between the two superpowers, there is no more room left for talking.
The free (not as in beer) AI models were always seemingly slightly worse than the proprietary American models. A barely noticeable difference on most tasks, but a difference nonetheless.
The breakthrough came when people, companies and governments began chaining and pooling models and infrastructure together,because they were free to do so, thereby creating behemoths that America could not outclass, outsmart or outspend.
And when you stake your whole future on that one thing, it's winner take all.
So for that reason they all had had to die.
And so the war began...
Trouble is there is no "we", you might be able to convince a whole nation to have a pause on advancing the tech, but that only encourages rivals to step in.
See also, the film "The Creator"
I'm already seeing screen-free summer camps in my area. There's going to be a subset of the population that does not want to play along with calling hallucinations and deepfakes "progress," kids will be homeschooled more as parents lose their jobs and traditional classroom instruction loses effectiveness.
I thought the movie "the Creator" was pretty neat, it envisions a future where AI gets blamed for accidentally nuking Los Angeles so America bans it and reignites a kind of cold war with Asia which has embraced GAI and transcended the need for central governance. Really it's a film about war and how it can be started with a lie but continue out of real existential fear.
It's so interesting that much of this is playing out like that movie Creator where New Asia embraces AI and robotics and the western world doesn't.
Here we are, a couple of years later, truly musing about sectors of the world embracing AI and others not.
That sort of piecemeal adoption was predictable but not that we are here to have this debate this soon!
Some that I've enjoyed recently (or rewatched):
Good One (2024) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt30319516/
Strange Darling (2023) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt22375054/
The Creator (2023) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11858890/
The Night House (2020) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9731534/
The Empty Man (2020) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5867314/
Possessor (2020) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5918982/
Booksmart (2019) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1489887/
Volition (2019) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6385952/
Welcome the Stranger (2018) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5716280/
Time Trap (2018) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4815122/
Wind River (2017) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5362988/
A Dark Song (2016) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4805316/
I Am Not a Serial Killer (2016) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4303340/
Midnight Special (2016) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2649554/
The Devil's Candy (2015) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4935372/
Mr. Holmes (2015) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3168230/
The Witch (2015) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4263482/
A Most Wanted Man (2014) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1972571/
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1340800/
Tucker and Dale vs Evil (2010) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1465522/
Pandorum (2009) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1188729/
The Fall (2006) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0460791/
In a Savage Land (1999) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151047/
Office Space (1999) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/
The Double Life of Véronique (1991) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101765/
Don't have Netflix so not sure what's available there, and several might not be wife-friendly. Also I enjoy weird, so YMMV.
Glad to see human ingenuity at work here! Pictures in TFA remind me of scenes from the movie The Creator.
The Creator was pretty awesome. Sony FX3, a $300 Kowa 75mm anamorphic, a Ninja monitor/recorder ($800?), a Ronin RS2 stabilizer arm ($300). Plus some cheese plates, batteries, audio interface. But the $3k camera was probably the bulk of their cost for the rig. https://www.visuals.co.uk/blog/news-ep358/
Theres been a ton of press about this, because, yeah, it is hella rare. And yeah usually there's some dude pulling focus on a $20k+ monitor (the brightness these things need to work in even shaded daylight is absurd).
I think it's worth assessing what impacts the look and feel versus what is for production sake; there's a lot of ways to spend more but more to help production than to affect look. A talented camera operator probably could hold focus themselves on many scenes without the focus operator (especially with modern autofocus) and get similar output. But if you're making a $100m+ movie, heck yeah you rent gear & hire the focus puller, way less risk (although the autofocus probably is more precise & reliable in many ways now!), way less need to make sure you pick the right expert operator. Ditto for a lot of this stuff; just rent the most badass stabilizers and camera mounts, for that little extra edge of stability. Having good/expensive synced time-codes, having better position tracking; they speed production, not necessarily super improve it's output.
It's pretty awesome seeing the Netflix approved pipelines keep getting more in reach. There's really good options now. Even a $1000 lens can be super impressive. There's really good budget cine lens sets now. But yeah the rest of production stuff is never cheap. Lighting is the key thing that keeps coming to mind for me, where light budget can easily get to camera budget and then some, and boy does that make a huge difference; improve the output of the scene that your camera is set to input.
Think more about the backgrounds used in shows like Mandalorian. Think about the size of the stage/studio/set that Mandalorian filmed on. It's going to get smaller, and the backgrounds and other details used in music videos, tv shows, commercials and films will be far more virtual than even today.
All the components will still be needed, but the levels and origins of them all will change.
If you go back and look at how the median productions have changed at 5 year intervals (going in the past), it'd be a poor choice to commit $800M to something that's probably going to remain exceedingly fluid for a while.
The SFX industry is probably the most prepared to shift, as it's already screens, pixels, and servers. The days of green dots are already (mostly) over (see the ILM SFX reel for The Creator -- wholesale human detail replacements without tracking dots).
The change will affect everyone else more.
Look, a lot of these sci-fi movies make no sense in space. Especially with the scale of things, and how they could structurally hold together.
For example I recently watched the movie "the Creator" and the space-based defense system "NOMAD" was clearly visible from the earth, as if it was maybe 1-3000 feet above. But no, it's in space! Yes, you heard right, it's in space, and you can see its scale in the movie, yet somehow instead of being a tiny dot, it's visible to everyone as it "hovers" over an area. So, they don't even try to make it realistic for people who think scientifically:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hp3P31ap4No
Yeah I don't disagree that if the AI can get it spot on which I think it will be able to do eventually it will take over. It will take over even if it's not spot on, because the bottom line is all that matters to the major studios now.
> Why would they? Very few people can notice and appreciate the level of detail you are describing
People might not consciously appreciate the detail but I think almost everyone subconsciously appreciates the overall vibe. Everyone can watch that The Good, The Bad and The Ugly clip and see there's something special about that location.
The reason I feel like the execs should be able to see it is that they're cutting off their nose to spite their face. If you watch a movie and come out seeing like you've seen something breathtaking, you're going to tell your friends and ticket sales are going to go up, not just for that movie, but for future movies as well. Whereas if film after film after film is a dud, which seems to be more common for me than not nowadays, you stop watching films and spending your money on films. For me this has already happened - when I was younger I used to go to the cinema once every week or two. The state of cinema is so bad now I might only go once a quarter.
So the execs take these cost cutting measures, but they have the overall effect of losing them money in the long term. The film may end up pulling in 200% over production compared to 100% if they'd have used practical effects. But that "missing profit" isn't missing - they're instead spending it on raising their overall brand value and reputation by offering up a higher quality product.
Like the last film I watched at the cinema was Gareth Edwards The Creator. He'd built up a little bit of brand value with the original Monsters and Rogue One, but The Creator was so monumentally, insultingly bad I don't think I will ever go watch a film he's made again.
Apple doesn't build sensors. Sony builds the sensors for Apple. https://twitter.com/tim_cook/status/1602516736145858561
And it turns out, Sony already has significantly better sensors in their cinema cameras than what they sell to Apple, which is why almost half of Oscar and Emmy nominations are filmed on Sony Venice. Even the low end of their camera line is extremely capable, e.g. the FX3 which shot The Creator.
Apple is far away from actually competing in that market.
Checkout the movie The Creator for a dystopian (or at least disturbing) use of that technology
This topic is somehow explored in the movie The Creator
There’s a lot of wholes in the plot, but the overall premise and scenario seem eerily plausible