The Creator
It’s fitting in an unexpected way that “The Creator,” a movie about the possibilities and dangers of artificial intelligence, is only superficially profound as sci-fi. Gareth Edwards’ film he directed and co-wrote with Chris Weitz is richly atmospheric but ultimately insubstantial, recycling images and ideas from many films that have had more impact than this one does. It always dazzles the eye, thanks to spectacular cinematography by Greig Fraser (“Dune,” “The Batman,” Edwards’ “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story”) and Oren Soffer. And for about an hour, it’s full of thrilling action and inspired world-building. After that, though, it gets shallow in a hurry as the story lumbers along, it never lands its emotional punches because the characters are so thinly drawn and their connections to each other even more so.
The script was written by the team behind “Rogue One,” which provided Disney+ with the setup for “Andor” so there seems to be an ambition here to blend excitement with intellectualism that doesn’t quite pan out. There’s also bad timing at play here: It’s inadvertently tone deaf for a movie to argue that maybe replacing humans with AI across various sectors isn’t such a terrible idea after all when the Writers Guild of America just spent five months on strike over exactly that notion. (SAG-AFTRA continues to fight this trend.) In this case, our future comes in the form of a sweet faced little girl nicknamed Alphie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles), who looks like she might be humanity’s savior or destroyer.
She could be Baby Yoda. She could be Ellie from “The Last of Us.” She could be John Connor. She could be the kid from Jeff Nichols’ “Midnight Special.” Stick her in a room full of stuffed animals, and she could even be E.T. And with her is the obligatory reluctant father figure who must keep her safe, played by John David Washington. An opening montage informs us that artificial intelligence has been part of our lives for decades, serving as chefs and track stars and astronauts. But in 2065, when we meet Joshua (Washington), AI has caused a nuclear bomb to go off in L.A., killing a million people including Joshua’s family and costing him an arm. The West is now anti-AI; New Asia is not far away but it might as well be on another planet, a melting pot of cultures where robots are still welcome and Joshua has found peace with his pregnant wife, Maya (Gemma Chan), in this charming beach bungalow. They snuggle to bossa nova on the turntable one of the movie’s many clever examples of mixing old and new technology while Radiohead’s eerie “Everything in Its Right Place” plays during a nighttime raid.
However, Joshua’s revery is quickly destroyed when Maya gets taken from him; half a decade later, he’s made to join a crew that hunts for an invisible weapon created by an enigmatic person called The Creator. Joshua is an undercover special forces agent who must do what the American military and its hovering airship NOMAD says, with its beams of light that scour the earth and some of the film’s most shocking moments. These guys are straight out of a James Cameron movie, led by Allison Janney being as tough as you’d expect although she also has a minute or two of quiet vulnerability amid all those banal orders. The Americans attacking this pan-Asian nation are obviously meant to evoke Vietnam War imagery it’s artful but boilerplate and not remotely subtle. Meanwhile, the cramped neon-drenched urban nightscapes could have been swiped from “Blade Runner.”
But soon after Joshua finds his target young Alphie (who we first see in one of those suspenseful moments where she’s alone in front of cartoons on TV in a cavernous room) his feeling about her start to shift. He gives her the nickname “Lil Sim” when they hit the road together, but their father daughter bond is both forced and unearned by the movie. The visual effects never stop looking slick and seamless but there isn’t much heart beneath them. Washington’s cool, detached screen persona makes sense for a while here since we’re supposed to be trying to figure out what his shattered character wants. But Joshua doesn’t have enough arc on the page for Washington to sell us on his evolution.
Edwards awkwardly tries to juggle serious ideas about what it means to be human with dazzling action spectacle as “The Creator” keeps ending and ending over again. By the time Joshua finds himself risking his life during one massive climax among many others, you might start asking yourself what exactly he’s doing here, so muddled is the movie’s logic. You might ultimately end up asking yourself what you’re doing here, too, despite its early promise.
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