I Just Saw

I just saw an early screening of The Creator and it was surprisingly good. When I saw the trailer I thought that it was going to be an extremely generic and sentimental American action film about a lantern-jawed man protecting his family at all costs. But it’s actually a somewhat subtle and thoughtful genre mashup in the tradition of such middlebrow, socially satirical sci-fi fare as District 9 (2009) and Elysium (2013).

The story is that Joshua (John David Washington) is a military vet and undercover agent who in the distant future infiltrates an underground network of AI droids and their human sympathisers. The government is trying to extinguish them all post a nuclear catastrophe that wiped out Los Angeles, for which the droids are supposedly responsible. A widowed and bitter Joshua agrees to return to duty when it seems that his wife (Gemma Chan), an AI sympathiser whom he was tasked with seducing but fell in love with, in fact survived. A fanatical military leader (Allison Janney) wants him to assist with finding and destroying Nirmata, the AI godhead, but he ends up on the run with Alphie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles), a child android with game-changing capabilities, designed as the ultimate weapon.

Filmed largely among the rice fields and farming communities of Asian countries, with a significantly Asian cast including Ken Watanabe as an AI rebel fighter, The Creator is in large part an allegory for the wars that America fought in East and Southeast Asia in the latter half of the 20th century. The Vietcong versus the superficially better equipped but less acclimatised American GI is here represented by the androids as they hide in tunnels below rural villages, and NOMAD, a US airborne facility that seeks out rebel bases to destroy, firing missiles as futuristic tanks demolish shanty towns. This imagery, sans its sci-fi trappings, is familiar from such war movies as Apocalypse Now (1979) and Platoon (1986), as well as the whole Vietnam subgenre.

The Creator arguably works better as a war film than it does a meditation on what AI might look like in the future. Its plot is a throwback to mystical, religious sci-fi, where heady technological concepts are mixed with ancient spiritual themes. But its most effective material is on the military side. Janney’s Colonel Howell is an engaging antagonist, fearsome and cruel but not entirely unsympathetic. Director/co-writer Gareth Edwards is essentially using the same template that James Cameron did for both of his Avatar movies (2009, 2022) in characterising his most prominent hero and villain, but allows them a lot more nuance and humanity than Cameron’s grunting stick figures.

Which isn’t to say that his characters are even all that great overall. Joshua is interesting in the movie’s first half and to a certain extent carried it for me, as his true loyalties are slightly unclear and therefore intriguing to consider. Gemma Chan, however, is a cipher with little persona outside her function in the plot, as is little Alphie. The emotional moments between Joshua and Alphie failed to move me because Alphie just isn’t a very believable or intriguing character.

The Creator is ultimately a very middlebrow affair, but within that niche, it passes the time and has rewatchability value.

Rating: 3/4