John David Washington, Madeleine Yuna Voyles, and Gemma Chan star in an action-filled science-fiction film, directed by Gareth Edwards.
A film of great power and daring imagination, The Creator never forgets to wrap itself around its own tender humanity.
Harkening back to his directorial debut, Monsters (2010), Gareth Edwards paints on a large canvas. As he has demonstrated in his subsequent features, Godzilla (2014) and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Edwards has a grand visual sense of stories that are best told big.
Whereas Monsters was a small story that grew much bigger with Edwards’ use of space, shadows, and clouds, The Creator is a big story that Edwards examines from the other side of a telescope, seeking to explore the root human causes of an impending A.I. apocalypse. His canvas remains quite large, and is best appreciated on an IMAX screen; the difference is that now, all the spaces are filled in, sumptuously.
In The Creator, he returns to an original science-fiction story, scripted in collaboration with Chris Weitz, one of the credited writers on Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. The film is set in a future in which humanity is waging a battle against A.I., as represented by military forces in the U.S. who invade Southeast Asia, which has capitulated to A.I.-powered robots, who look like humans, except for the giant hollow tube in their heads.
The early scenes introduce Joshua (John David Washington) and Maya (Gemma Chan), who are happily anticipating the birth of their first child together. Then scientist Maya learns that Joshua has been lying to her: in reality, he’s an undercover agent for the U.S. military, which is seeking to destroy the work that Maya is doing to expand the capabilities of A.I. and the multitude of robots and other machines that they power worldwide. An invasion occurs, Maya and their baby are blown up, and Joshua retires from the military in despair.
Years later, Joshua rejoins the service when he’s shown video footage of May, apparently very much alive and walking around a secret camp, where the military believes the ‘secret weapon’ she was developing is now being harbored. Under the direction of the hard-nosed Colonel Howell (Allison Janney), the U.S. military invades the formerly secret camp and begins re-enacting the most egregious behavior reported of the U.S. military during the Vietnam War, killing unarmed villagers. and threatening women and children.
True, some of these villagers are robots, but still. The murderous threats turn up an entrance to an underground lair, which is the true location of the so-called secret camp, and there Joshua discovers the secret weapon: a robot in the form of a young girl, who eventually comes to be known as Alphie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles).
Joshua, who has remained suspicious of the U.S. military’s motives, takes the girl robot on the run in search of the missing Maya, who may possess the key to bring the war to a permanent end.
Filled with red herrings — nearly every known associate that Joshua calls upon for help ends up heroically dead — the narrative’s propulsive nature easily carries it over large holes in the plot and, indeed, in simple logic. The movement is the thing and, not that it should matter, but the majority of the dead bodies are robots.
Joshua explains death to Alphie as ‘turning the switch off,’ with the robot no longer feeling anything. In truth, it becomes hard to track which characters are humans and which are robots; in both cases, some can be brought back from death, at least temporarily, while others cannot.
Young Alphie shows little evident reactions to the chaos continually exploding around her, and few other characters last long on screen, so it’s up to Joshua to carry the story. As Joshua, John David Washington gives a fine performance. We can easily believe he’s still haunted by the death of his beloved Maya and ready to cross heaven and hell in pursuit of the possibility that she might yet remain alive.
It’s easy to believe as well that Joshua’s paternal instincts might be raised up by Alphie, even though he can clearly see the gaping hole in her head and the motors that are whirling around inside. Even if logic dictates otherwise, love conquers all.
The film opens Friday, September 29, 2023, via 20th Century Studios, throughout Dallas/Fort Worth. For more information about the film, visit the official site.
Dallas Film Now. 