The Creator is a visually spectacular film that has also stumbled into a spectacular bit of bad timing. Right now, distrust of artificial intelligence feels organically higher and more clearly rooted in real-world concerns than it has in years, maybe ever. Director-cowriter Gareth Edwards therefore manages to land on the exact moment that an extremely familiar question also manages to feel ill-fitting of our current collective psyche: What if humankind’s fear and distrust of A.I. was, in fact, a misguided prejudice built on a shaky foundation? As real-life A.I. chips away at our livelihoods, helps to spread misinformation, and justifies the paranoia that surrounds it, Edwards’ film boldly envisions the same thing that almost any thoughtful robot-centric movie has envisioned before it.
The specific dealbreaker that causes Josh (John David Washington) to reconsider his anti-A.I. sentiment is familiar, too: It’s a little robot nicknamed Alphie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles) who looks and behaves much like a human child. Josh meets Alphie when he’s assigned to track down an unfathomably powerful weapon that will give robots the edge in a long-standing war, which kicked off with an A.I.-issued bombing of Los Angeles in 2065. Now it’s 2070, and Josh has been working clean-up detail in the years following a painful undercover operation where he both met and lost his wife Maya (Gemma Chan). When Colonel Howell (Allison Janney) suggests that Maya may actually be alive, and that he might find her by seeking out the A.I.’s ultimate weapon, Josh returns to the future-fighting fray. Alphie is the sweet-natured super-weapon he discovers on his mission.
It’s hard to tell how much of a spoiler that’s supposed to be; it happens relatively early in the 133-minute movie and sets the rest of the plot in motion, but The Creator also repeatedly treats some of its most shopworn bits and pieces not as smashed-and-grabbed component parts of a genre thriller, but bespoke engineering of the highest, most mind-blowing order. Maybe the film’s target audience is composed of viewers who so desire sci-fi and fantasy without pre-existing source material that they simply wouldn’t have ever seen the robot attacks of Terminator 2; the stoic man unexpectedly shepherding a powerful youngster of The Mandalorian or Logan; the lofty ideas dumbed down of I, Robot. The Creator recalls all of those and more — it’s not every day that a sci-fi movie bothers to rip off any elements of Chappie, but it happens here in the less humanoid robot designs.
Actually, a whole lot of The Creator has Neill Blomkamp vibes; like Elysium, it’s technically impressive but oddly inert. After directing back-to-back megaproductions Godzilla and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Edwards gets back the roots of his indie sci-fi movie Monsters by fusing real locations, impressively weighty visual effects, and a semi-terrible screenplay with dialogue out of an amateurish sci-fi novel. It must be emphasized that The Creator really does look terrific. Edward shot all around the world, rather than overutilizing green screens, and his shockingly convincing robot characters, with expressive human faces and gaping holes straight through the sides of their incomplete heads, come from the Ex Machina school of techno-human hybridization. In the world of The Creator, advanced robot tech constantly shows off its facility at imitating humanity while maintaining a cruel bio-mechanical marker of otherness. It’s no wonder that humankind unites against them so readily.
Yet more often than not, there’s a void beneath the tactility of Edwards’ images, no matter what they depict. In his blockbuster worlds, that absence has made thematic sense: It’s only natural for the massiveness of Godzilla or the power of Star Wars‘ Empire to dwarf the humanity of the people underfoot. In Rogue One, there’s even something touching about the tentative, half-seen bonds between its characters, even if they’re also byproducts of harried rewrites. But every time The Creator unleashes another round of military guys falling in to trade fire with similarly anonymous robots, the world Edwards is supposedly building shrinks a little further. As striking as the robots are, they’re more design motif than character – and as likable and empathetic as John David Washington is, Josh barely gets sketched in. His relationship with Maya exists mostly in flashback fragments, his big mission doesn’t seem to actually require his particular skills (if there was any clever trick to locating Alphie, I lost it in various hails of laser-bullets) and, most debilitating, his relationship with the little girl doesn’t develop. It just materializes, because that’s how to fuel the movie’s bigger emotional swings.
The Creator isn’t devoid of emotion when the time comes, and it raises some thought-provoking ideas about the nature of religious belief and how both humanity and artificial intelligence might evolve in tandem. Much of this stays at the film’s frayed edges, while its least inspired moments sit dead center, burnished by the many movies they joylessly knock off. For a designated last great hope of original sci-fi, this is a surprisingly programmatic picture.
Director: Gareth Edwards
Writer: Gareth Edwards, Chris Weitz
Starring: John David Washington, Madeleine Yuna Voyles, Allison Janney, Ken Watanabe, Gemma Chan
Release Date: September 29, 2023
Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including Polygon, Inside Hook, Vulture, and SportsAlcohol.com, where he also has a podcast. Following @rockmarooned on Twitter is a great way to find out about what he’s watching or listening to, and which terrifying flavor of Mountain Dew he has most recently consumed.