The Creator – Review
133 Minutes, Rated PG-13
Written by Gareth Edwards and Chris Weitz
Directed by Gareth Edwards
**NOTE: Read Mark’s review below and read Ryan’s review HERE, then listen or watch as they discuss the movie in more depth. Remember, though, you can listen to all our discussions of this and every other movie directly over on ACAST. Stay tuned.**
Synopsis:
Against the backdrop of a war between humans and robots with artificial intelligence, a former soldier finds the secret weapon, a robot in the form of a young child.
Much ballyhooed when announced, folks have been champing at the bit to see if The Creator can live up to the hype surrounding it.
Gareth Edwards, much beloved among science fiction fans for his breakout hit Monsters, along with the 2014 Godzilla reboot and most notably, 2016’s surprising Disney Star Wars film, Rogue One, hopes to strike gold once again, this time with a film featuring a topic which is front and center in many minds right now, especially in Hollywood: Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Shall we dispense with the pleasantries and move directly into my thoughts? Of course we shall.
The Creator takes place a decade and a half after AIs detonated a nuclear device in Los Angeles. This sparked a war as the West (mostly the United States) hunted down any AI they could locate and terminate it…
…with extreme prejudice.
They hope to track down the “Nirmata,” or Creator, of the advanced AI and kill them, stopping the development of even more advanced versions.
The Asian nations did not share this fear of AI and continued to develop it , using robots and “synthetics” to help their civilization grow. The West didn’t care, often staging incursions into Asian strongholds of AIs and destroying them either with conventional (human) troops or using their ultimate weapon: The NOMAD station, which can orbit, track, target, and destroy anything on the planet.
It’s 100% nasty if you’re on the wrong end of it.
The Creator‘s protagonist, Joshua, failed while undercover to identify Nirmata, but is recalled to duty to help an elite US squad to infiltrate and destroy the discovered location…
…although he is more concerned with finding his wife, who he believed was killed 5 years earlier in a botched attack.
The world-building here is astounding. The Creator gives us a vision into a society dealing with the ethical and practical implications of creating an intelligence outside out own, then entrusting it with so much of our culture that we become dependent on it.
Humanity’s hubris taken to its extreme, playing God and believing there would be no repercussions.
It is a world in which a thousand stories might be told, developmentally on par with Blade Runner. Stunning in its depth and beauty, the world of The Creator hits all the right notes for fans of Science Fiction worlds.
But I found the narrative and characters themselves to be a bit shallow, almost one-dimensional. Almost from the jump I was reminded of films such as I, Robot and even Babylon A.D., and that’s without thinking about it too hard.
The Creator is definitely a sensory treat for audiences, but–for me, at least–it’s a Good-but-not-Great sci-fi film, which makes two recent “epic” misses for John David Washington (along with 2020’s more than disappointing Christopher Nolan effort, Tenet).
There is a great film in here, don’t get me wrong, but it got lost in the incredible world Edwards constructed to play in.
The Creator hits theaters September 29 and stars John David Washington, Madeleine Yuna Voyles, Gemma Chan, Allison Janney, Ken Watanabe, Sturgill Simpson, and Amar Chadha-Patel.
And remember, if the BEST thing you can say about a movie is that it’s “visually stunning,” then they’ve done something wrong.
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