For almost 40 years now, the fear of robots taking over has been increasing since James Cameron’s Terminator. But who would think so while viewing The Creator, a striking science fiction epic that is excessively sentimental by Gareth Edwards, director of Godzilla and the Rogue One episode of Star Wars? In Cameron’s movies, the nuclear bomb was used to start off the war between mankind and machines in which Los Angeles crumbled into ashes. However, sympathies are curiously changing: Just as American movies eventually got around to depicting World War II and Vietnam from the other side of the battlefield, here’s one that says, basically “Hey Robots Are Humans Too! Make peace not war with the algorithm!” Was this movie written by Skynet?
Actually, though it is credited to director Gareth Edwards and his fellow Rogue One architect Chris Weitz who co-wrote this screenplay; yet it comes across as recycled sci-fi elements put together haphazardly, but with stunning visuals. With regard to script quality The Creator falls far below.
The movie starts in the 2060s with a prologue set just seconds after its own version of Judgment Day when “the computers” drop an atomic bomb on LA without any warning or reason at all – “Hasta la vista baby.” As a result, America declares war on all artificial intelligence and sends Joshua (John David Washington), a special forces agent on an undercover mission to New Asia aimed at infiltrating a group of robot sympathizers headed by their godlike scientist leader. Joshua marries Maya (Gemma Chan), the daughter of The Creator whom he seduced for her father’s whereabouts only to fall in love with her later on. Therefore after a sneaky attack involving Maya by his superiors leading her to death through accidental blowing up Joshua quits fighting.
Years later however he is lured back into war alongside hard-ass military bigwig Howell (Allison Janney) promising him that Maya may still be somewhere in the east inside a group of soldiers. The mission is to locate and destroy a secret doomsday weapon created by the Creator which, it turns out, looks like a synthetic child (Madeleine Yuna Voyles), unaware of its role in this conflict. Like other mechanical beings on the screen, she has a hole right through her brain; we can quite literally see wheels turning inside her head.
The plot of The Creator is cobbled together from a bunch of other movies – not just Cameron’s, but also Blade Runner, A.I., Akira and more. Naturally, with its quest for an elusive messiah figure somewhere in Southeast Asia Apocalypse Now comes to mind immediately; Edwards courted this comparison by filling his film with Vietnam War imagery such as an early raid through tall grass that immediately positions Howell and her troops as amoral invaders. When Joshua finds Alfie however he leaves the war behind: he calls it when he goes AWOL with the weapon. Thus The Creator reminds us of whole genres filled with tearjerkers about hard-edged men who are humanised by their child sidekicks.
Edward, in his limited number of films, has positioned himself as the kind of director who understands the size and structure of a blockbuster film giving it that ghostly grandeur once again. It is still not clear how much exactly he directed on Rogue One, especially after Andor whose creator Tony Gilroy took over directing for some scenes in the first Star Wars story when it was shot again. However, when watching The Creator movie, it is evident that Edwards was a leading mind behind the cold journey of Rogue One to the galaxy far away; he painted another science fiction portrait of warfare and sacrifice across an enormous canvas with men (and other humanoid creatures) overwhelmed by colossal destroyers. This includes an airborne drone-warfare weapon roaming through leaving shafts of light across where one can see from far away, parts of this are dealing a miniature Death Star while others are more closely aligned to any impassive deity’s vigilant eye.
The Creator deserves to be played on the largest screen possible. Its widescreen images are often stunning, making all those cheap attractions in movies made thrice its $ 80 million budget seem so lame. Edward used to work as a special effects artist thus he knows well how digital spectacle should be integrated into the physical world. He recorded The Creator in almost a hundred different locations throughout the globe which were later combined with CGI images. These skylines and vistas make even stagecraft, the famous video wall employed by The Mandalorian look even flatter than computer screensaver programs. This article’s sci-fi design is very dense and hardly a scene passes without there being something fascinating that builds up this world – some kind – a tour around a robot factory or traveling to Blast Crater which was once Los Angeles city or even a battle sequence featuring suicide-bombing machines dashing through fog and over bridge amidst explosion.
So why isn’t this an instant classic? What makes The Creator paradoxical is enough to fry an android’s microchips: it is full of imagination in the margins yet unimaginative in general. “They are not real,” Joshua claims to him as he dismantles them. The emotional journey of his character is about recognizing that these machines have humanity too. This change in Joshua’s attitude is undramatized though Washington makes a strong effort to give it a human touch. (He has now joined up with Tenet to turn himself into the go-to person for transforming badly created sci-fi ciphers into genuine actors). It is also weak as a father-daughter surrogate relationship thus, as a story, it feels like quite an ordinary one with a sharp contrast between its generic redemption plot and its design specificity.
On this issue of intelligence, Edwards is sentimental. In conclusion, this can be regarded as soft science fiction which takes artificial intelligence’s ability to act independently and rightful existence for granted. It could be condensed down to the adorable philosophy of an infamous Angelina: “Can’t we all just get along?” Therefore, The Creator somewhat seems out of step with our current moment which features anxiety about AI and how much our institutions seem to be embracing it rapidly. But is Edward behind or ahead? Perhaps The Creator will be seen later on as preemptive propaganda for a future world governed by algorithms – an early PR victory for our robot overlords?
The creator of the infamous Godzilla and “Rogue One” Gareth Edwards has returned with a new (though somewhat clichéd) sci-fi story about a future war between humans and machines, which is told through the story of a friendship that develops between two characters: one child-sized robot and one adult man. As a pure spectacle, the Creator is often jaw-dropping in its imagery, its relatively frugal special effects, and the detailed depth of its futuristic design. It’s less successful as drama or science fiction –and tends to deviate from today’s dilemmas of an AI-dominated society by over-sentimentalizing synthetic humans simply trying to live their lives like regular humans in an age increasingly defined by artificial intelligence.
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