I didn’t quite know The Creator was coming, but when I did see a trailer, I saw it was coming from writer/director Gareth Edwards. I’ve seen three of this man’s movies, and they all have this way of making giant, impossible things to look artistic, often from a human-sized perspective. That could be the Death Star or Godzilla. All I know is it’s gonna look fantastic. There are a lot of talented directors working in sci-fi, but I don’t think any of them can paint an onscreen picture quite like Edwards can.
That he was working with what looked like original material with The Creator only broadened the appeal for me.
At some point in the future, an AI weapon dropped a nuclear warhead onto Los Angeles. As a result, the United States launched a war against AI, an ubiquitous technology up to that point which had been operating on all levels of society. AI, in the form of robots and what are called “simulants,” essentially robots with realistic human faces modeled after real people, are welcome in Asian. Their mysterious creator Nirmata is there, and he may have developed a new weapon which can take down NOMAD, America’s orbital missile launcher that will allow the United States to win the war so long as nothing happens to it.
To that end, Sgt. Joshua Taylor (John David Washington) has gone deep undercover to find Nirmata. While undercover, he met and married Maya (Gemma Chan), but when his cover was blown during a raid, she left him behind to evacuate. She was also noticeably pregnant at the time, but the raid ended with, among other things, Maya’s apparent death. Fast forward five more years, and there’s word that Maya might still be alive. Joshua is recruited by the American military to find Nirmata and his superweapon Alpha-O. As Joshua has experience in that area, he goes along, but there’s a catch: Alpha-O is a simulant who looks like a young girl (played by newcomer Madeleine Yuna Voyles). That action makes Joshua freeze, and when the mission goes wrong, he and the girl that he takes to calling Alphie make a run for it. All Joshua wants, really, is to find Maya one last time while forces on both sides are after both him and Alphie. Alphie has the power to control electronics in her vicinity, and it may only be a matter of time before she can take down NOMAD. But what does Alphie want?
I said above that Edwards has a talent for finding cinematic beauty in sci-fi things, especially large things like a radioactive dinosaur or a moon-sized space station, and that holds true here: The Creator is a beautiful movie. There’s a design sense to this movie that I’m not sure I have ever seen before. I think it says something where the AI seem more human than their American adversaries. Besides, I am certain it’s not an accident how much The Creator looks like any number of Vietnam War movies. I get the impression Edwards wanted to make a Terminator movie where SkyNet might have been the good guy and some Terminators were Buddhist monks.
I will say there’s probably not much that’s all that original about the story. Sci-fi has often questioned what makes a person human, and that is the central question here. That said, it’s still an excellent movie, one that plays to Edwards’s skills as a director with fantastic special effects and great performances from the entire cast. It’s a self-contained movie, too, and having an original sci-fi story told as a one shot with this level of detail–Alphie, like a lot of kids, watches cartoons, and some appear to have been made for this movie since NOMAD is seen as a villain–is always a nice treat.
Besides, I don’t think I had Allison Janney as the face of American militarism on my 2023 bingo card, but here I am.
Grade: A-
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