In the nearly four decades since James Cameron offered a grim vision of the technological future with The Terminator, fears surrounding the rise of artificial intelligence have only increased. But you wouldn't guess as much watching The Creator, a striking, mushy new science fiction epic from the director of Godzilla and the Star Wars spinoff Rogue One. As in Cameron's movies, the war between man and the machines begins with a launched nuke that turns Los Angeles into a smoldering crater. The sympathies, however, have curiously shifted: Just as American movies eventually got around to depicting World War II and Vietnam from the other side of the battlefield, here's one that says, essentially, “Hey, robots are people too! Make peace, not war, with the algorithm!” Did Skynet write this movie?
In actuality, the screenplay is credited to director Gareth Edwards and his fellow Rogue One architect Chris Weitz. It’s by far the weakest aspect of this hodgepodge of secondhand sci-fi ideas, which also happens to be among the most visually astonishing blockbusters of the last few years. Script aside, The Creator is beautifully designed from top to bottom.
A prologue situates us in the 2060s, and in the aftermath of the film's version of Judgement Day, when the computers – without warning or apparent provocation – hit the City of Angels with a nuclear "Hasta la vista, baby." The American government, declaring war on all artificial intelligence in response, sends special-forces agent Joshua (John David Washington) to "New Asia" on an undercover mission to infiltrate a collective of robot sympathizers and root out their eponymous leader, a godlike scientist. To find the titular Creator, Joshua seduces and marries his daughter, Maya (Gemma Chan), only to develop real feelings for her. So when Maya is accidentally blown up in a sneak attack by his superiors, Joshua abandons the fight.
He's pulled back into it years later, when hard-ass military bigwig Howell (Allison Janney) convinces him to accompany a team of operatives back east, dangling the intel that Maya may actually still be alive. The mission: find and destroy a secret doomsday device developed by The Creator – a powerful weapon that, as it’s quickly revealed, takes the form of a synthetic child (Madeleine Yuna Voyles) oblivious to her role in the struggle. Like the other mechanical characters on screen, she has a hole straight through her noggin; we can rather literally see the wheels in her head turn.
The plot of The Creator patches together a lot of other movies – not just Cameron's, but also Blade Runner, A.I., Akira, and a few more. The search for a mysterious, messianic figure across Southeast Asia naturally brings to mind Apocalypse Now, and Edwards courts that comparison, packing the movie with imagery meant to evoke the Vietnam War, including an early raid through tall grass that immediately positions Howell and her troops as amoral invaders. Once Joshua goes AWOL with the weapon, who he dubs Alfie, The Creator begins to recall a whole cross-genre library of tearjerkers about hard-edged men softened by the innocence of a child companion.
Across just a handful of movies, Edwards has established himself as the rare blockbuster orchestrator with a genuine sense of scale and poetry, restoring some spooky majesty to big-budget event cinema. Just how much of Rogue One he actually shot remains a matter of speculation – especially in the aftermath of Andor, whose creator, Tony Gilroy, sat behind the camera for some reshoots of the first “Star Wars Story.” But watching The Creator, it seems obvious that Edwards was a driving visionary of Rogue One's unusually bleak trip to the galaxy far, far away; he's painted another sci-fi portrait of combat and sacrifice across a giant canvas, with humans (and humanoids) dwarfed by titanic forces of destruction. Here that includes an airborne, roving drone-warfare weapon that casts shafts of light across the landscape; it's one part miniature Death Star, two parts vigilant eye of an uncaring manmade god.
The Creator begs to be projected as large as possible. Its widescreen imagery is often glorious, putting to shame the gimcrack attractions of movies made for three times its $80-million budget. Edwards, a former special effects artist, keenly understands how to integrate digital spectacle into a physical world. He shot The Creator across nearly 100 locations worldwide, then augmented the footage with CGI. The resulting skylines and vistas make the backdrop wonders of StageCraft, the famed video wall deployed by The Mandalorian, look even more screensaver-flat. There's an impressive density of sci-fi design here; barely a scene passes without some amazing bit of world-building – a tour of a robot factory, a visit to the blast crater where L.A. once stood, a battle scene that sends suicide-bombing machines sprinting through the fog and across a bridge to dutiful explosion.
So why isn't this an instant classic? The paradox of The Creator could fry an android's logic circuits: It's bursting with imagination on the margins, weirdly unimaginative in the big picture. "They're not real," Joshua insists of the robots he dismantles. The emotional arc of his journey is learning to see the humanity in the machines. Yet that change of heart is under-dramatized, try though Washington valiantly does to pump it with feeling. (Between this and Tenet, he's quickly becoming a go-to guy for making underwritten sci-fi ciphers look like real characters.) The surrogate father-daughter dynamic is similarly thin: As a piece of storytelling, it's rather workmanlike; there's a sharp contrast between its generic redemption tale and the specificity of its design.
As to the question of sentience, Edwards is sentimental. This is ultimately rather soft science fiction, treating the artificial intelligence's autonomy and right to exist as a given. The cuddly philosophy here could be summed up in the words of a famous Angeleno: “Can we all get along?” That makes The Creator feel rather out of step with a current moment colored by anxiety about AI and the extent to which our institutions appear to be rapidly embracing it. But is Edwards behind the times, or actually ahead of it? Maybe we'll look back on The Creator and its soulful automatons as preemptive propaganda for the algorithmic world to come – an early PR victory for our robot overlords.
