Movie Review – The Creator

The Creator (2023)
Written by Gareth Edwards and Chris Weitz
Directed by Gareth Edwards

I can’t say I’ve ever been greatly impressed by Gareth Edwards’ films. I’ve seen all four of his directorial efforts at this point (this film, Star Wars: Rogue One, Godzilla, and Monsters), and what lingers with me is what a fantastic production designer Edwards is. Writing characters? Eh, not so much. However, the man knows how to convey a sense of scope & scale and, even more importantly, establish the vibe of a movie. The Creator is a film that continues this trend with the director. His characters are flat and one-dimensional, but damn if the world he creates isn’t one I want to explore. He establishes excellent video game settings in many ways but then tries to make movies in them. 

It’s 2070, and the Western nations are waging a war against Artificial Intelligence. The current conflict stemmed from a disaster fifteen years prior when a nuclear detonation in Los Angeles was blamed on the ubiquitous automatons that were interwoven into society. The New Asian alliance (East, South, and Southeast Asia) has not turned on their robots similarly; these mechanical beings live in peace with the humans there. The U.S. military uses the USS NOMAD (North American Orbital Mobile Aerospace Defense), which is just outside the airspace of these nations, to target and obliterate supposed robot strongholds. 

Josh Taylor (John David Washington) is an undercover U.S. Army sergeant embedded with the A.I. He’s married Maya (Gemma Chan), a woman raised by these machines & unaware of his true nature. U.S. Intelligence believes her father was Nirmata, the chief architect of the robots, and Taylor believes Maya can lead him to the man. However, things go awry when an unexpected raid on their compound goes down, and Taylor thinks he’s lost Maya. Five years later, his former superiors find Taylor working in a Los Angeles clean-up crew. They want him back because they believe Nirmata is about to unleash Alpha O, a dangerous new super weapon. A video showing Maya alive convinces Taylor to go on this mission, where he discovers that much of what he believed was true was actually lies.

While the character development and dialogue are significantly lacking, I loved the premise of this film. I liked that it is the anti-Terminator, a world where AI is another type of sentience trying to survive. Even the explanation for the nuclear detonation that comes near the end of the film makes sense and shows how the response of the States is an overreaction couched in a refusal to accept responsibility. The NOMAD fortress was another of Edwards’ wonderful large-scale creations, a design reminiscent of NASA and modern U.S. military craft with futuristic capabilities. This makes it have a continuity with the images of war we see in contemporary media.

Edwards also decided not to tell every background actor whether they were playing a human or A.I., which means every character on screen feels authentic and moves naturally. It imbues the A.I. with the needed humanity to empathize with them and highlights the cruelty of what the States are doing to these entities. There was some silly hubbub made over the film being some sort of defense of A.I., which is a typically myopic American reading of the film. Like all good science fiction, it’s a story that layers fantastical elements over themes that resonate in our time. 

The A.I. is just a metaphor for any targeted population or liberation army. What we see on screen is a movie version of the horrific campaigns of terror America has done on so many developing nations, especially during the Cold War and in the Global South. I appreciate that Edwards chooses to shoot on location and digitally insert details in post-production instead of putting all his actors in giant green screen rooms and having animators build the entire world. A film like The Creator needs to feel grounded in our own reality, and every setting feels authentic. 

The themes surrounding questions of who is or isn’t considered “human” aren’t anything you haven’t seen before in many other science fiction flicks. I think Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, while not my favorite film, touched on these ideas in a far more interesting and complex way. The ultimate appeal of The Creator is seeing the not-too-distant future world and, for me, the United States as the central villain of the picture. The cold, distant, human way NOMAD takes out its targets is not a far jump from the detached drone attacks of today. It’s pretty easy to kill, it seems when you don’t have to look the person you’re killing in the eye. 

John David Washington was wasted in this movie. While I wasn’t a fan of Tenent, he was at least really good in that role. Here, the script doesn’t ask much of him, and he certainly lives up to the bar that was set. Washington reads the script in each season with little to no emotion. I thought Alison Janney was okay, too, but also underutilized. I think she made for a good villain; I just wish they had given that character more to do than just chase after Taylor. 

In the end, The Creator’s greatest asset is its imagery. I think it’s up there with many of Denis Villenueve’s films. However, that director is great with his actors. I am finding that many contemporary Hollywood directors don’t seem comfortable in the director role and are more glorified production designers. Someone like Villeneuve or even Luca Guadagnino would have still been able to deliver powerful visuals but also given us a richer story. I don’t think it’s a waste of time to watch The Creator, but I wouldn’t blame anyone for tuning out once the novelty of the gorgeous images on the screen wears off. My expectations of a Gareth Edwards film remain unchanged; I am always interested to see the movie but never hold out hope for complex character development.