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The Creator: A Vivid Work of Unintelligent Design


If Gareth Edwards has a singular strength as a director, it is his gift for conveying scale. It was the dominant quality of his Godzilla as well as Rogue One. He knows how to make his worlds striking, his visuals imposing. And The Creator, his first original film in thirteen years, is a test of how far that can go when not supported by the iconography of a popular franchise. It is of course a risky move not often taken by studios anymore to make a science-fiction movie not based in an existing intellectual property. That Edwards managed to get it done and looking so good off of a comparatively mid-sized budget for a movie these days is impressive. But The Creator also shows that beyond his visual tenacity, he’s not all that compelling a storyteller.
It is unfortunate timing that The Creator, a movie that digs into that old sci-fi staple of artificial intelligence and the notions of transhumanism surrounding it, should come out at a time when A.I. is at the forefront of this industry’s mind and not in a positive light. A.I. in these sorts of stories has always been a metaphor (and we’ll get into the weeds of that metaphor here), but I doubt a lot of Edwards’ industry friends or even supporters of that industry are much open to the idea right now of treating A.I. like thinking, feeling humans.
Be that as it may, this isn’t a movie that breaks any new ground on that particular theme. It is set in an alternate present (that may as well be the future for how recently the timeline branches off), where artificial intelligence has been developed to the point of cognizance, and though reduced to a mere workforce are gradually being integrated into greater society. That is until a mass A.I. powered nuclear weapon goes off in the U.S., prompting an attempt by western allies to eradicate A.I., and a subsequent war with a collective South Asian superpower -dubbed “New Asia”- that support it. John David Washington’s Joshua Taylor is a U.S. operative who joins a strike team sent to capture an A.I. weapon with supposedly the potential to destroy humanity, only to discover it is an A.I. child. Believing she could lead him to his lost lover who was seemingly killed in the last attack, Taylor goes rogue and protects the child as the U.S. military targets him as well.
So in spite of this deep backstory, it’s a very simple premise that has been a genre staple for decades now about a man protecting a powerful child from endangerment or exploitation by the powers that rule his world. Edwards found a good kid for the part in Madeleine Yuna Voyles, who manages to do good work even next to Washington’s fairly generic performance as her protector. Though her character, called Alphie, isn’t particularly strongly conceived either -and that statement could apply to much of the movie’s details. Edwards has a strong imagination for visuals, but it is lacking in terms of story. His conflict between the humans and A.I. is very one-note, dimensionless beyond the mere desire for freedom, and virtually all of his characters are archetypes: Ken Watanabe as the committed rebel leader awaiting a Messiah, Alison Janney as the cruel and militant antagonist -and Taylor himself is the hero working with the oppressor who joins the side of the oppressed. Gemma Chan, who appears as his deceased lover mostly in flashback, is perhaps the most compelling character of the piece, but vastly underutilized. She’s not the only one; this movie has a bad habit of killing off its interesting side characters shortly after they are introduced.
The script itself (co-written with Chris Weitz) doesn’t give anyone a lot to work with either -when not recycling clichés, the dialogue can feel strained and unnatural. It’s as though the writing is trying to balance both a sense of high-concept gravity with the standard action movie expectations as to rhythm and relief. And so you get the occasional quip or ironic observation alongside moments of intense sincerity. And it can come at the cost of the movie’s theming. As is usual with this genre, the A.I. are meant to be sympathetic underdogs to the humans who would subjugate and dehumanize them. Edwards leans very heavily into this dichotomy throughout the movie, and yet he still plays for laughs or a sardonic beat the deaths of several of these A.I. -typically the ones who don’t yet have human faces but are otherwise just as conscious. He has particular fun with one scene where the grenade they threw at the human strike team is returned to them -their George Lucas-style bodies being torn apart by the fun explosion.
Even Edwards’ world-building, which he clearly put a lot of effort into, isn’t all that unique -its core tenets borrowed from I, Robot, Blade Runner, Aliens, while occasionally slipping in a more inspired reference like Gladiator or Kundun. But the principal influence, present through a lot of the setting and aesthetics, is the Vietnam war movie genre. In fact, Edwards’ desire to make this a sci-fi Vietnam movie is so intense that it fails to consider what those aesthetics, imagery, and casting choices imply when re-appropriated to an invented context. The bulk of this movie is set in Asia, but an Asia divorced from the entity that we recognize it as -a conglomerate of highly distinct regions and cultures whittled to a base simplified image; and one derived more from media depiction than real life. Despite the movie never going near Japan, it still imports Japanese cyberpunk aesthetics for the sequence set in a city there. And of course there’s the fact that all of the A.I. in the movie who have faces are Asian, and that apart from Chan’s character I can’t remember a single Asian human being depicted in the movie. Edwards makes this choice purely for aesthetic purposes -to tap into something like Apocalypse Now- without understanding exactly what it means to represent A.I. as Asian or Asians as A.I. -again with no distinctions of individual cultures within that overarching sphere. And it does so without any kind of After Yang-style comment on cultural fetishization. Even as the movie endeavours to humanize A.I., it does so by unconsciously dehumanizing the group of people it chooses to exclusively stand in for them.
All of this considered, I’m still in awe of this movie’s masterful visuals -as good a demonstration as any that the more conventional blockbusters don’t need to spend exorbitant amounts of money on visual effects that can be rendered brilliantly for far less. In particular, the giant U.S.S. NOMAD that hovers up in the sky and scans for A.I. across great distances is a really stunning effect. And the creativity of Edwards and his artists should be commended on the advanced A.I. design, which is a mixture of genuinely fairly inventive and believable both in appearance and potentiality. The film makes great use of its location shooting too -whatever the issues behind the aesthetics, Edwards captures these landscapes in their deserved glory.
But The Creator comes up short of being a truly interesting work of grand-scale original science-fiction. There are moments dotted throughout that I quite like and that showcase Edwards’ capacity for imagination and a strong grasp of his technique. However, so much of the movie languishes in its derivative themes, its inconsistent script, and its troublingly ill-conceived metaphors; buoyed only by that series of isolated moments and the strength of its visual ambitions. A cool-looking movie is not enough, and I’m sure Edwards would agree.

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