The Pitch: In Gareth Edwards’ (Rogue One) vision of the near future, those WGA/SAG strikes must not have made much of a dent because AI is all over the place — our workforces, our homes, often while wearing the faces of those who “donate” their likeness to make the sentient “simulants” look more human (despite the almost clockwork machinery that constantly whirs in the back of their heads). But after an AI-directed weapons system decides to up and nuke LA, humanity wages a decade-long war against the machines — aided immensely by an enormous space station called Nomad that hovers over AI strongholds, nuking hot spots with all the precision of a drone strike.
In 2065, in the waning days of the war, the military tasks an ex-black ops soldier named Joshua (John David Washington) with an important mission: track down a new weapon built by the mysterious creator of the AIs, Nirmata, that will stymie their plans to wipe out the bots once and for all. Oh, and kill Nirmata while he’s at it.
But when he learns that the “weapon” in question is a childlike robot (newcomer Madeleine Yuna Voyles) — one that might be able to take him to his long-lost wife Maya (Gemma Chan) — he goes on the run with her, kicking off a chase that is set to change the trajectory of both species.
Rogue Two: Gareth Edwards has had a spotty but admirable record as a blockbuster filmmaker — both 2014’s Godzilla and 2016’s Rogue One had shaky stories but an incredible command of scale. With The Creator, Edwards tries his hand at original science fiction, something untied to IP or franchises, which is a too-rare thing for respectably-budgeted genre works.
That said, The Creator wears its influences on its sleeve, pulling from everything from Apocalypse Now (A land war in Asia? In the future?) to Akira to Baraka and beyond. Conflict between humans and robots is nothing new; certain scenes will remind you of The Matrix, The Terminator, and more. Edwards puts his own twists on some of this material, like a Vietnam-like helicopter landing behind enemy lines to Radiohead’s “Everything In Its Right Place,” as opposed to “Fortunate Sun” or “Ride of the Valkyries.” Yet the tale of a grizzled man of action saddled with escorting a vulnerable yet cosmically important child through a hellish journey has been done to death.
The Dead Don’t Die: To his massive credit, The Creator looks stunning: Edwards and his team of designers have built a world that feels only two steps removed from our own, filled with eye-catching designs for everything from handguns to hovercraft to the robots themselves. Co-cinematographers Greig Fraser and Oren Soffer soak the world in moody shadow blended with grounded, gritty realism (as per Fraser’s work on Rogue One and The Batman). Hans Zimmer’s score is appropriately booming and Zimmeresque, though it doesn’t quite escape the wall-of-sound feel of many of his previous blockbuster works.
The Creator (20th Century Studios)
Yet for a film with so many influences, the one The Creator conjures most is Neill Blomkamp’s flawed, ambitious Elysium — a sci-fi social revolution thriller shot like City of God, which also features a giant glittering space station the protagonists need to get to at the end. Like Blomkamp (whose high-concept efforts have landed such that his first film after director jail was this year’s Gran Turismo movie), Edwards is a fantastist first and a storyteller second; the most important thing isn’t the formulaic story at its center, but the world he’s built and the vividness by which he captures it.
This means that the characters in the middle suffer quite a bit, despite having committed performers behind them. Washington, who’s often asked to spice up cookie-cutter sci-fi protagonists with his inherited charm (see: Tenet), is stuck as a brooding, traumatized grunt for much of the first half. That is, until he’s spent enough time with the kid (nicknamed “Alphie”) to let his inner Denzel through; these moments are charming, but Edwards and co-writer Chris Weitz rush the two of them towards a heartstring-pulling climax the film itself doesn’t quite earn. For her part, Voyles’ is a lovely debut performance, all robotic withdrawal until she grows sufficiently close to Joshua. She does most of the film’s emotional heavy lifting in those final minutes.
Stripped for Parts: Everyone around them suffers from the film’s piecemeal structure and wonky pacing: Much like Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny earlier this year, the bulk of the film ends up falling into a repetitive chase narrative — run away from enemy forces, stop for a second, the bad guys find them, run again. They run into occasional friends (Ken Watanabe’s revolutionary droid, Sturgill Simpson’s sympathetic ex-soldier) and recurring enemies (Allison Janney, maximizing her Lou action glow-up as a steely military general), but they often feel little more than grease for the plot wheels.
The Creator (20th Century Studios)
Happily, a mean streak of dark humor is strewn throughout the material to pop The Creator out of its ponderous self-seriousness from time to time. A robot soldier throws a grenade at our heroes, only for a helpful pup to fetch it right back to them; there are two gags about sticky bombs unknowingly stuck to soldiers, and the nail-biting panic as they try to get them off. As much as these bits clash with the po-faced sincerity of the rest of the film, they offer welcome respite from the gloom.
The Verdict: As pretty as The Creator looks, and however well-considered its world may be, it feels like all sizzle and no steak. AI is an extremely prevalent issue facing us in the real world, but Edwards seems disinterested in exploring beyond its aesthetic surface (e.g. borrowing real people’s voices and likenesses in perpetuity) in favor of a warmed-over critique of American imperialism in the global East. It works best as a living montage of sci-fi concept art, Simon Stålenhag paintings come to life. Just don’t expect its story to feel all that human.
Where’s It Playing? The Creator races to theaters with all the zeal of a suicide-bomber bot September 29th, and is streaming now on Hulu.
Trailer:
