The Creator review
Balancing big-budget world building, grief, and familial themes, Gareth Edwards’ ambitious sci-fi is primarily an action movie built from the bones of other, more original stories. And yet Edwards’ remarkable visual sensibility and a sense of gleeful homage keep this exciting endeavour mostly on track. The Creator reminders us that Edwards’ greatest strength is injecting common blockbuster tropes with a fresh sense of scale and weight.
Oh, and I love scale and weight. It’s what makes a good science-fiction movies so fun – the idea that what I’m watching is really that big. It’s the often underrated reason you believe Godzilla is really in front of you, the reason the most inexplicable things in real life make cinematic sense in the moment.
A slow first act tells us Artificial Intelligence is the reason for The Creator’s intercontinental war, but surprisingly the humanoid A.I machines (here called Simulants) are the side desperate for peace. In a subversion of the plot of The Terminator and The Matrix, the simulants here are more empathetic beings than humans, all of them seemingly desperate for a quiet, simple life of honest labor. Our hero Taylor (John David Washington) is a human solider for the Americans, a continent that has banned A.I and fights an aggressive air and ground war against New Asia, a continent where A.I is still legal.
Early the film puts to bed the question of whether A.I. is comparable to real people – by introducing us to an adorable young robot child, Alphie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles), who is indistinguishable from a human child, with the exception of the rotating metal cylinders insider her ears. In an very Akira-inspired plot point, this child’s hidden abilities may be the answer to ending the war once and for all. The wonderful Allison Janney gets to flex her military might as Howell, a U.S. Army colonel with a vigilant hatred of A.I. She spends most of her time chasing down Alphie, with the goal of killing her and any hope the machines have of surviving the onslaught of the humans’ greatest weapon, the USS NOMAD, an impressively scaled space station capable of launching WMDs from high altitude.
There’s a good bit of Avatar in The Creator, which is funny because Avatar itself is a very broad, recognizable story. And the tracks are obvious. Edward’s script deftly avoids any complexity with stimulants – their design is visually segregated so we always know who is human and who is not. The lines between good and bad are thickly drawn outside of our hero, himself caught in the middle like one Jake Sully. Also similar to Avatar is the script’s keen want to criticize the over-funded, misguided military might of the West. For much of the second act, you’ll be watching enormous U.S supertanks plough through trees and fire into Thai villages, where the residing simulants represent a Navi-like guerilla force with limited weaponry and one last hope in their young child savior.
And yes, whilst it all sounds sorely trodden ground, the fact is the package that is being sold to you is still quite shiny. Edwards visual sensibility has never been better. For an $80 million dollar movie, The Creator looks like it cost twice that, thanks to Edwards’ strategy of filming real locations as backdrops for his special effects. The result is a film that looks entirely shot on location, each panoramic establishing shot a stunning blend of practical location work and CGI. So often you’ll see our hero framed in the foreground as a colossal object enters frame – and this conscious sense of scale, of shooting the gigantic from the feet of the people on the ground serves the film so well it’s often joyous to enjoy the view.
But I don’t want to just limit the enjoyment to ascetics. By the final act Edwards’ squeezes out the drama between father and daughter as they fight for the lives of those they’ve grown to care about. Even John David Washington, an actor I’ve felt largely distant to, gets to spring some of his most expressive emotions by the final minutes. To often his clear talent is limited to his Tenet persona of sleep-walking through stories, but The Creator somewhat reminds you of his potential. But as a leading man? I’m still not so sure.
The real star of Edwards’ movie is Madeleine Yuna Voyles, who at the time of filming was only 6 years old. An incredible age, as so often her key emotions are the driving force of the plot. When she’s upset, so are we. I suspect in many years when we think of The Creator, it will be this young lady’s welting eyes we remember.
