Writer/director Gareth Edwards’ The Creator is a character driven sci-fi epic that delivers breathtaking action, genuine emotion, and mind-blowing visuals unlike anything else you’ll see on the big screen this year. The best original sci-fi movie for some time.

Premise: After an artificial intelligence detonates a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles in the near future, America declares war on AI, robots and ‘simulants’, who then go into hiding in the opposing superstate, New Asia. In the decade that follows, US forces mount incursions into New Asia in their hunt for the enigmatic creator of AI, while Joshua Taylor (John David Washington) has deeply personal reasons for becoming involved in the escalating war.

Review:

Every now and then, an original concept sci-fi epic comes along that reminds us that not everything has to be based on an existing novel or franchise, and that some of the most impactful stories have been original ones that came out of nowhere, with no weight of expectation, and blew us all away. The Creator is one of those movies.

The world-building that writer/director Gareth Edwards and his team have done in this movie is phenomenal – everything feels lived in and tangible, with no sense whatsoever that this was filmed in front of a greenscreen or on a soundstage. The aesthetic tone of the film – which is largely set in the future superstate of New Asia – is Apocalypse Now meets Blade Runner, combining the lush landscapes of the former with the futuristic trappings of the latter. For me, The Creator feels like the sci-fi film with the most distinct sense of place since District 9 took us to an equally grounded future version of South Africa back in 2009.

“…a character driven story told against the backdrop of the war against AI…”

This is Gareth Edwards’ first movie in seven years, following the excellent Rogue One: A Star Wars Story in 2016, and like that film, you can sense that Gareth Edwards enjoys probing the murky morality inherent in any war. Although The Creator is only rated 12A (and so doesn’t have any particularly gory scenes), it doesn’t shy away from looking at the horrors of war, with both sides arguably committing atrocities of one kind or another during the course of the film. It’s also ironic that The Creator comes out within a few months of Oppenheimer, given that the eponymous creator of AI in this film could be seen as an Oppenheimer-like character – only in this case, it’s the Americans that view the scientist as the architect of an immoral weapon of mass destruction, while the people of New Asia have been more openminded about the birth of true AI.

First and foremost, however, The Creator is a character driven personal story, told from the perspective of John David Washington‘s character Joshua. I don’t want to say too much about his character (as there are some very interesting character developments within the opening section of the movie), but the ongoing war between the American army and the AI forces is just the backdrop for Joshua’s personal story, rather than the main focus of the film. In that respect, The Creator shares a little DNA with Gareth Edwards’ 2014 version of Godzilla, which also focused on telling a personal story amidst the epic action.

“…John David Washington’s portrayal captures the character’s many complexities…”

John David Washington is (as always) fantastic in the lead role, keeping Joshua emotionally grounded and believable throughout, and never descending into action hero cliches. Interestingly (and despite what the marketing may have suggested), Joshua is a far more morally complicated – and morally compromised – character than you might have been expecting, and John David Washington’s portrayal captures the character’s many layers and complexities.

He’s surround by an amazing supporting cast, including Gemma Chan as Joshua’s wife Maya, a human raised by ‘simulants’ after her parents were killed, with the Oscar-nominated Ken Watanabe as a simulant insurgent, and the Oscar-winning Allison Janney as the US colonel leading a dangerous mission behind enemy lines. Alongside the veteran actors is seven-year-old Madeleine Yuna Voyles, making her debut as an AI child who may be the ultimate weapon of mass destruction against Mankind. I’m not normally a huge fan of child actors, especially ones as young as this – but Madeleine Yuna Voyles absolutely holds her own in the movie, in both the dramatic and the comedic moments.

“…an action-packed piece of blockbuster entertainment…”

Speaking of which, the film does have a streak of dark humour throughout, despite the serious subject matter. It’s not an action-comedy by any stretch, but there’s certainly some gallows humour in places that elicited genuine laughs from the audience that I saw this with. The moments of humour help to keep the film’s tone from becoming too heavy, and it’s fair to say that even when the movie’s examining themes like morality in war, it never loses sight of being an action-packed piece of blockbuster entertainment as well.

There will no doubt be some who bang on about how a movie about AI is very “timely” at the moment – but this film isn’t really about AI (and not to mention the fact that work on this film began many years ago, before anyone had heard of ChatGPT). There are much stronger real-world parallels in The Creator than those directly related to AI – for example, given the setting, it’s impossible not to think of Vietnam War parallels when we see better-equipped elite US forces hunting “insurgents” in the Asian jungles who are being hidden by local sympathisers from the nearby villages. Equally, AI in the movie is used more as a metaphor for intangible threats to national security (e.g. terrorists), rather than as a literal examination of the dangers of AI.

“…endlessly inventive in its world-building & design…”

Visually speaking, the film is beautifully realised in every aspect, from the excellent cinematography of Greig Fraser and Oren Soffer, to the extensive location shooting in Thailand (which gives the film an incredibly tangible quality), while the CGI work is seamless on everything from the AI robots and human-looking ‘simulants’, to the US army’s futuristic vehicles and weaponry.

Endlessly inventive in its world-building and design, The Creator delivers all of the epic sci-fi action you could want, coupled with a character driven story than examines everything from morality in wartime to what it means to be human. An original story that (ironically) displays precisely the kind of inventiveness and creativity that you would never get from an AI bot or a focus group of studio execs, it’s amazing that The Creator is as vividly realised as it is, looking better than many other films with much larger budgets.

Seven years was a long time to wait after Rogue One, but The Creator is certainly worth the wait, and I can’t wait to see what Gareth Edwards does next.