John David Washington | A Screenwriters Perspective: Current and Past Movies.

On Wednesday, September 13, 2023, the leaders of all the major tech companies testified to the United States Senate about their concerns to regulate and control AI technology. These leaders included the CEO of Microsoft, Tesla and Google. Some of the comments after the 3 hour meeting included, “The consequences of getting AI wrong are severe.”, from Elon Musk. Bill Gates spoke of AI’s potential to feed the hungry. Satya Nadella from Microsoft said “When it comes to AI, we shouldn’t be thinking about autopilot. You need to have copilots.” Someone always has to be overseeing AI to make sure it does not fall into the wrong hands, or go haywire.

AI has been one of the most important topics of conversation for over a year now, it is the new reality of the world. It was obvious that given the possibilties that will follow AI that tens of thousands of screenwriters around the world have started screenplays and there will be many AI movies in our future.

Unfortunately one of the first AI movies is the new movie “The Creator”. The story is basically about an ongoing war between AI-created machines and humanity. After a software error, according to the AI robots humans created a massive nuclear explosion, destroying the city of Los Angeles. The story starts from the aftermath of this nuclear accident and different battles between humans and robots, but not much else. There is nothing new in this story, other than a few well-done special effects. With something as interesting and new as AI, one would expect a much more imaginative script.

The movie stars John David Washington as the main character Joshua, who is a soldier who loses and then tries to find his wife Maya played by Gemma Chan. Joshua also befriends a young child robot Alphie played by Madeleine Yuna Voyles, a story line that seems more about chase scenes and explosions than any interesting story. The story of this film is all over the place, with many disconnected scenes, that also include lead soldier Colonel Howell, played by Allison Janney.

Unfortunately the first of what will probably be a string of AI movies that will follow, is a big miss. The Rotten Tomatoes ratings are a low 68%, with my rating 60% and a recommendation to miss this film.

A car accident involving a young couple, Beckett played by John David Washington and April, played by Alicia Vikander leads to a complex kidnapping involving dirty cops that results in Beckett running for his life for the entire movie. This is the main problem with the new Neflix movie “Beckett” because watching someone run through the hills and forests of Greece can become very old, very quickly.

One of the most interesting things about this film is trying to figure out why Alicia Vikander agreed to take a part this small and insignificant given that she recently won an Academy Award. This film starts out well enough with the relationship between April and Beckett traveling together in Greece, but then it deteriorates into a mostly on foot series of chase scenes with a very injured Beckett running from one person trying to kill him after another. The fact that Beckett is so injured from the car accident and being shot multiple times makes just about all the action scenes in this movie incomprehensible. One of the last scenes involved Beckett jumping 4 stories of a parking garage on purpose to land on a car he was chasing after being severely injured by yet another gunshot. This was probably the stupidest scene in this pretty bad movie. After Becket landed on the car, still alive, was one of those times where you just had to wonder what the director was thinking.

The Rotten Tomatoes ratings this time around of 51% are correct along with the very low 38% audience ratings. My rating is also about 50%, mainly because of the constant running scenes and the fact that no human body can be injured this badly and continue to function. I rate Beckett as a pass.