'The Creator' Has Little New to Say, But It Says It Beautifully

By Seth Freilich | Film | September 30, 2023 |

By Seth Freilich | Film | September 30, 2023 |

Good science fiction uses the form of hard science and/or futuristic concepts to break down something about humanity or society today. It uses the form to get to the substance. The Creator, Gareth Edwards’ (Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Monsters) latest science fiction film, sadly, breaks that formula by merely being form over substance. It’s mostly gorgeous to watch but has little new to add to the conversation.

Broken up into four main chapters (one of the many things that feel like a purposeless homage to previous science fiction films), The Creator takes place (mostly) in the year 2070, a future where AI has led to advanced robots and “simulants,” robots who appear completely human but for the giant hole running through their head ear-to-ear. About fifteen years ago, the AI declared war on humanity by nuking Los Angeles, resulting in the Western World’s destruction and banning of AI. The US Army is now working to expunge the remaining robots and simulants, who are being “harbored” by and throughout the New Republic of Asia.

After that basic table setting, we meet Joshua (John David Washington), who has gone deep undercover in an AI community to find someone called Nirmata, the original creator of the AI. After his pregnant wife Maya (Gemma Chan) is killed/fridged, Joshua quits but is eventually re-enlisted by the US Army to try to find a secret weapon Nirmata has built to take down NOMAD. The USS NOMAD is a terrifying military ship that rains brutal missile devastation on the robot and simulant communities, along with the humans harboring them. When the military unit instead finds a simulant child, Joshua takes the child on the run for plot reasons, now himself being pursued by the US as a traitor while being distrusted by the AI community because of his prior treachery (i.e., the whole undercover business).

The first two-thirds of the film follows this setup and the resulting movements through New Asia, and the world-building is visually fantastic. While the film never explains the purpose or function of the simulant head-hole, it looks cool, as do many of the robots, even if they look similar to robots we’ve seen before (including a few that have more than a passing resemblance to Wall-E and Johnny Five). NOMAD is sufficiently terrifying in its scope and scale when seen from the perspective of those on the ground (it’s far less interesting when we later get to see what it is like on the giant ship). And as Joshue and the child (who he amusingly refers to as “lil’ sim” before settling on the name Alphie) move along on their Lone Wolf and Cub trope journey, Edwards’ keen eye for setting and atmosphere is on full display. He introduces several lovely sci-fi settings, whether a city deeply steeped in modern technology or a village set in a gorgeous landscape with just bits and hints of futuristic technology (beyond the robots and simulants).

However, this is also where we find one of the major cracks in the film, which is a lack of exploration of what we’re seeing. For example, some robots and sims seem to have formed into Buddhist-esque communities. Is this mere cultural appropriation or something more profound? Edwards and co-writer Chris Weitz (credited for the screenplay, with a “story by” credit for Edwards) don’t seem to care too much to explore this. Similarly, the dialogue throughout is thin, lacking any exploration of any number of ramifications of the AI premise. Except for Alphie, who the film tells us is special for reasons that are both later explained and painfully obvious from the beginning, there’s no honest exploration of whether the robots and simulants have feelings and emotions. Some empty dialogue is thrown one way or the other- they’re as real as us, it’s just coding, etc. - but there ain’t no meat on those bones.

When you give us a film with dialogue that clunks, you better give us performers that can elevate it. Here, the film also hits and misses. Chan (The Eternals and, funny enough, as a robot in Humans) is excellent though underutilized. The same goes for the always welcome Ken Watanabe as one of the simulant leaders (maybe? Again, the film doesn’t seem interested in digging into the structure of any of the AI communities or their society at large). On the other side of the coin, as much as this pains me to say, Allison Janney is woefully miscast as Colonel Howell, one of our US Army bad guys, who is given mostly preposterous lines of antagonism with a fifteen-second back story of motivation. And then there’s poor Amar Chadha-Patel (who was almost radiant in the so-so Willow series) who, as a simulant cop, is given so little to work with that I’m not sure anyone could have done anything with those scenes.

Of course, a Lone Wolf and Cub story relies on those two leads, and the sole performance standout of the film is from newcomer Madeleine Yuna Voyeles as Alphie, with a thoroughly engaging and grounded performance. This is all the more impressive given that virtually every scene of hers is performed with Washington. This is not to say that Washington is bad. Instead, he suffers from sounding like his father (Denzel) without having the same chops. He’s a fine performer, but here, as in most of his prior roles, it feels like he’s performing.

The final disappointment of the film comes with the third act. In the first two-thirds of the film, even with some clunky dialogue and a lack of depth, it was a world I didn’t mind observing, and Joshua and Alphie’s journey was one I mostly enjoyed being along for. But then the film inexplicably pivots off the rails, turning into a run-of-the-mill “we gotta blow something up while the clock is ticking against us” extended set piece. Earlier action in the film is shot well and propulsive.* Where one expects that type of action to at least ratchet up the pace as we march towards the film’s conclusion, the third act action instead grounds the film to a halt. It suddenly made the over-two-hour runtime feel too long, particularly given that the film’s finale does not pack the emotional punch Edwards was going for.

*One scene, in particular, has the most emotional beat of the entire film. That emotion, for the record, is pure terror, as in “Jesus Christ, that guerilla warfare, self-exploding running trash can robot is going to give me nightmares.”

The Creator is ultimately a pastiche of many science fiction films and stories that have come before it. There is nothing wrong with taking bits and bobs from Phillip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ted Chiang, etc., and the films based on their and others’ work. That’s fine and not remotely uncommon in this genre. But in doing so, it’s incumbent on the storyteller/filmmaker to employ the improvisational adage of “yes and.” Yes, here are these science fiction elements you know so well, and here’s something new I’m going to do with them. Particularly given the last AI-focused year, even though this film was written before we knew what a ChatGPT was, there was a real opportunity for this film to be exploratory and prescient. Instead, well, at least it looks fantastic.