The Creator
**This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn’t exist.
Watching “The Creator,” I couldn’t help but feel as though Gareth Edwards’s voice is more on display in “Rogue One” than one thinks, given that it’s part of a mega franchise, and Tony Gilroy famously helped get the film over the finish line in post-production. When one considers his work in that film, his 2014 “Godzilla,” and “The Creator,” we see a filmmaker intrigued by the moral questions of war and destruction in a way that eludes a lot of filmmakers. For much of Hollywood’s history, the nature of war was very black-and-white, good guys vs. bad guys. As the discussion has become less about binary notions of good and evil in the world and more wondering whether war is ever, truly inevitable, a filmmaker like Edwards bringing that to genre films is exciting, and all three of these films do a great job of building a world torn apart by war, sometimes to the point that its moral compass is lost.
“The Creator” is one of the most striking and unique science-fiction worlds created in the past four decades. Artificial Intelligence has become so advanced that it is often indistinguishable from humanity, save for the way AI beings have their robotics exposed on the back of their heads. Those are called Simulants. Ten years prior to the initial events in Edwards’s film, AI allegedly set off a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles. The Western world implements a ban on AI, but the countries of New Asia are a safe haven for AI, and their creator, an elusive scientist who has continued to evolve AI beings. The West has created a massive weapon, a space station called NOMAD, with the intention of wiping out AI for good, but first, they need to find the Creator. Joshua (John David Washington) is living with his wife, Maya (Gemma Chan), off the coast of New Asia when western forces attack, and she disappears. Five years later, he is recruited by the military to search, once again, for the Creator, and a weapon that could wipe out NOMAD.
That Edwards would make a film like “The Creator” is not surprising. In his “Godzilla,” he adapted the 1954 original’s thematic connections to the nuclear destruction Japan faced when America dropped the bombs in WWII to a modern exploration of how our militaristic nature blows back on us when we are attacked. And “Rogue One” builds off of the ways George Lucas infused the original “Star Wars” with his own feelings on American intervention in Vietnam as his rag tag team tries to turn the tide away from authoritarianism with the hope of victory. “The Creator” is very much cut from the same cloth, with a bit of “Avatar” thrown in. As much as American audiences want to believe we can do no wrong as a militaristic force, the fact is our intervention around the world is not always a positive for the world. Like Cameron with his stories of Pandora, Edwards and his co-writer, Chris Weitz, are distrustful of the motives of the West when it comes to how we view others as needing conquered rather than worked with. “The Creator” is building off of another well-worn science fiction idea, however, which is humanity’s inherent distrust of a technology it created to serve its own interests, but- seeing how it evolves past the point where it can be truly controlled- views it as a threat to our own survival. What happens, however, when it wants to just be left alone to live? That’s the quandary Edwards adds to his film, and its one of the driving forces of the film.
The beginning sets up the universe with a newsreel that feels somewhat familiar if you remember “The Animatrix’s” “The Second Renaissance” origin of how the world of “The Matrix” came to be. Immediately, this film’s visual landscape immerses us. Shot by Greig Fraser and Oren Soffer, the depth and detail of each shot is refreshing in how each moment builds another piece of the world. This is a very tactile world that Edwards has created, and one that allows us to genuinely see how the world could develop, as we know it now, into the world Edwards imagines. Not as much would change as we think it would have, and the film’s production design- by James Clyne- reflects that. Visually, this might be one of the richest, large-scale science fiction films in recent memory, right down to the fantastic sound design, including a score by Hans Zimmer that harkens back to the Asian motifs from some of his best, early scores in the ’80s and ’90s. I only wish the film held up as much narratively.
I was talking with other critics after the film, and something that was said was about the internal logic of this war- with a weapon like NOMAD, couldn’t the West just wipe everything out and be done with it once they knew the locations? Certainly, that is a possibility, but there’s also a degree of suspension of disbelief that goes into any type of narrative storytelling. They made a good point, but then you defuse the personal story you’re trying to build. In this case, it is between Joshua, who is trying to find the weapon, and he seemingly finds it in an AI child that goes by Alphie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles). A lot of the film is Joshua and Alphie together, and Washington and Voyles work beautifully as a pair in this journey. The rest of the characters are well-worn tropes- albeit played by great actors like Allison Janney, Ken Watanabe, Chan and others- but when the film centers on Washington and Voyles, it engaged me, even if the third act leaves behind the film’s unique narrative for a very predictable action climax. At least it knew when to end after that- some blockbusters don’t. Edwards always seems to get that.
