Jonah Naplan   September 29, 2023

Gareth Edwards’ “The Creator,” as you’re prone to hear from most other film critics on online platforms, feels especially relevant to the here and now, a day and age that hasn’t been more dominated by the threat of artificial intelligence hitherto. Particularly amidst the closure of a writers’ strike that had partially to do with the advances of A.I. taking over the jobs of screenwriters in the near future, “The Creator” is often in and out of its right place all at the same time. It praises A.I. and the opportunities that it brings, while still viewing it as a threat to humanity, and also posing that not all artificially intelligent beings are “bad.” In the same way that the names “Alexa” or “Siri” have been affixed to our convenient devices, “The Creator” seems to apply heart and soul to a bunch of androids that would otherwise speak in monotone and droll on about how they are “not human” and cannot feel emotion or pain. 

As demonstrated by other filmmakers and novelists in the past, the A.I. and technology we allow into our homes and lives does not merely do its remedial duty, but sprouts a brain of its own and inexorably takes over. As anyone with an intellectual compass for like-minded sheets of intelligent metal (or who has read Ray Bradbury’s short story The Veldt) knows, our creations do not often behave as we expect, and they instead, to paraphrase Miles Morales, “do their own thing.” “The Creator” imagines a futuristic version of our very own planet in which A.I. beings have settled into societal niches as if they’ve always existed. Their array of occupations run the gamut from politicians, to athletes, to, yes, probably screenwriters. And it’s quite fitting because the most soulless portions of “The Creator” feel as though they were written by A.I., while the strongest sections stand out as some of the most original sci-fi content of this decade.

As both a film and a moviegoing experience, “The Creator” is one of the biggest and most puzzling mixed bags of the year. It features some excellent ideas with the potential to evolve into the next genre classic, but still manages to sidestep our expectations by finding a way to be simultaneously too rushed and too long for its own good. It sets up one great idea before scampering away with that concept, marrying it to a similar one, and drifting into mayhem as all of its collected intrigue gets jumbled up. It often feels as if a studio exec was walking down a hallway with a stack of neatly organized notecards and then slipped on a banana peel, the cards went flying, and he ended up writing a screenplay based around the random order in which he picked his ideas back up.

There is some intrigue, however, to be had in the premise alone; “The Creator” takes place in an idyllic 2065, and the world is split between whether or not to accept robots as members of society or to shun them out. America has done the latter—after A.I. are to blame for the detonation of a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles, killing a million people in the act, robots are viewed as adversaries, following a familiar notion of “we’re always scared of what we don’t understand.” But on the other side of the globe, in a region known as New Asia, robots and humans live in harmony, which is where we first meet our protagonist Joshua (John David Washington) who has found refuge in a little beach bungalow with his pregnant wife Maya (Gemma Chan). After a nighttime raid on their abode, Joshua and Maya get abruptly separated from one another, handing much of Chan’s screentime over to melancholy flashbacks that prove overly prevalent in the film’s first half. Five years later, the determined Joshua is coerced into an operation led by a no-nonsense general (Allison Janney) searching for a hidden weapon manufactured by a mysterious figure known as The Creator.

This weapon turns out to be none other than Baby Groot, or Grogu, or X-23 from “Logan.” She’s a young simulant child, whom Joshua nicknames “Alphie” (Madeleine Yuna Voyles), with expressive eyes, wisdom beyond her years, and insatiable curiosity. “The Creator” forces a father-daughter dynamic between the two as they hit the road, running from bad people who want to capture the “Lil Sim,” and also narrowly avoiding detection from the American military’s hovering airship NOMAD, a real weapon of mass destruction that’s prone to shooting nuclear warheads down to the mainland.

For the most part, the duo’s relationship is charming enough to buy into. Joshua is an interesting character, and Washington always brings a respectable screen presence to whatever he’s in. And a number of the caricatures they meet along their journey are more than one-note—characters played by Ken Watanabe and Sturgill Simpson are some of the biggest standouts, while Voyles brings a quiet but heart-wrenching charisma to her role, that secures a bright future for her acting career. “The Creator” is also a staggeringly rendered movie; city landscapes recall “Blade Runner” and “Ghost in the Shell,” while futuristic technologies mirror the “Star Wars” and “Star Trek” franchises. Its mystery of authority reminds me of “The Hunger Games” and the usage of psychedelic beings shouts the range from Spielberg’s “A.I.,” to Edwards’ previous flick “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” to “The Matrix,” and even “Battlefield Earth.” The cinematography was done by Grieg Fraser, and the incredible score was written by Hans Zimmer, both of whom worked on Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune,” making these two movies sit on parallel tracks.

Yet with all this sensory marrow packed into its bones, “The Creator” is so ambitious that it forgets its priorities. Most of its great ideas are heavily rushed, merely assuming that the viewer is paying well enough attention to absorb it all as intended. This is a movie that may have been better off as a miniseries, which would have given it more time to percolate and explore its existential questions. It’s not just that Gareth Edwards has unfortunately put style over substance, it’s that his movie has assumed the audience will be bored if it leans more towards “slow-burn” territory, so it instead focuses on action instead of character growth.

As a result, the movie faces innumerous consequences as it enters the third act, streamlining tragedy, twist reveals, and lots and lots of forced pathos into a finale that goes on way too long, sacrificing the emotional wallop it aspires to attain. Most importantly of all, “The Creator” is never direct in what it’s trying to say nor which side it stands for and viewers should identify with. It doesn’t exactly not endorse A.I., and sometimes even looks at the form from a savior point of view. We’ve seen the repercussions of letting artificial intelligence take the wheel in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” and in modern-day masterpieces such as the criminally underlooked “The Artifice Girl” from earlier this year, but while “The Creator” seems to want to join the ranks of those genre giants (and understandably so), it suffers the double misfortune of being its own worst enemy by putting far more thought into what it wants to say, and far less into how it says it.

In the decades that follow, “The Creator” will surely hold up as a visual masterclass of filmmaking in the same way that “Blade Runner 2049” has ascended to a second life among the film-bro community, but not an amalgamation of the life and times of A.I. I thoroughly admire the originality of “The Creator,” but if only its boldness were applied to a project with far better execution, we’d have a new genre classic on our hands.

Now playing in theaters.