Though it may not come from any established IP, the future of Gareth Edwards’s The Creator is a familiar place. Riffing on Westworld, Blade Runner, the work of videogame designer Hideo Kojima, and Vietnam War movies, it’s a mishmash of influences and ideas that, despite looking beautiful, never quite cohere into a compelling or believable whole. For all that it’s concerned with wars between mankind and AI and how the innate desire to nurture can transcend politics and technology, The Creator is a movie that, in its writing, worldbuilding, and performances, needs a touch more humanity.
Set in 2070, The Creator finds the world divided into two camps. The USA seeks to outlaw and destroy all AI worldwide after a rogue robot detonated a nuke in LA, while a pan-Asian alliance known as New Asia embraces AI in all its forms, granting human rights and dignities to synthetic lifeforms (in perhaps the most actually prescient touch in the whole film, Europe is too irrelevant to even be mentioned in the story). Fighting for the Americans is Sergeant Joshua Taylor (John David Washington), who is sent to New Asia to find a superweapon being developed by the AI that may be able to take down the US’s own doomsday device, a trillion dollar floating defence platform named NOMAD that can airstrike any target on Earth almost instantly.
Distracted by his own mission of finding his missing wife Maya (Gemma Chan, slipping in and out of an already ropey Australian accent), Joshua discovers that the AI weapon is, in fact, a child – a five-year-old ‘simulant’ (androids that blur the line between human and robot) with the power to remotely control any and all technology. Already emotionally wounded by the loss of his wife, Joshua can’t bring himself to destroy the kid (played by impressive newcomer Madeleine Yuna Voyles), and instead names her Alphie and makes it his mission to protect her and bring her to the semi-mythical AI creator known as ‘Nirmata’.
From here, The Creator hits the beats you’d expect, but it’s hard to really invest in the story when it’s this badly written. Characters mainly communicate through blunt exposition dumps while the conversations that strain for profundity instead just sound clunky and unnatural. It’s not helped by the fact that, the remarkable young Voyles aside, this is also a poorly acted film – Washington is perfunctory but bland, Chan is simply dreadful, and Alison Janney is a mere generic hardass as Colonel Howell, who makes it her mission to hunt down Joshua after his defection.
Ken Watanabe makes a bit more of an impression, bringing an inherent gravitas as a simulant warrior. The AI characters actually fare better as a whole, not because they’re better written, but because their design is just so cool. For all its other problems, it’s impossible to deny how exquisite The Creator looks and sounds (at least in terms of sound design, the Hans Zimmer score is instantly forgettable). At a budget of around $80 million, it cost about half, or even less, of your average superhero movie and looks more than twice as good, seamlessly marrying futuristic architecture and robot armies with gorgeous on-location cinematography.
As futuristic US tanks and planes bomb and trample the jungles of Southeast Asia, Edwards is clearly aiming at a ‘100 years later’ look at America’s imperialist destruction of Vietnam and its neighbours, and it is undeniably cathartic whenever the US war machine is thwarted. It’s in the grittiest of these fights that The Creator is at its best, the life-and-death stakes faced by locals and resistance fighters both human and robotic far more compelling than the plot at large, while Edwards manages to fit quite a lot of blood and death into his 12a rating – the remote controlled US suicide bombers are genuinely intimidating.
By the time we get to the overwrought finale, it’s hard not to wish that Edwards had drilled down deeper into what really works here – buried within The Creator’s ponderous plot and crummy characters is a pretty damn good war movie, one that favours action over words in a way that suits Edwards’s sensibilities. A genuine wizard with effects, his visuals tell thrilling stories all their own – if only his writing said anything at all.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 
Good review. Myself, I actually enjoyed the movie. Definitely wasn’t disappointed by it. However, I can see some of the points that you make, especially the latter half, which felt like a lot of scenes were trimmed down and / or cut.