Gareth Edwards is back and he is tackling the topic of AI. This ambitious project, with a micro-budget, is looking to upend the typical Hollywood formula of success, but does it hold up in the end? Check out our spoiler-free review below.
As a future war between the human race and artificial intelligence rages on, ex-special forces agent Joshua is recruited to hunt down and kill the Creator, the elusive architect of advanced AI. The Creator has developed a mysterious weapon that has the power to end the war and all of mankind.
Review
Gareth Edwards returns 6 years after his last film, The Last Jedi, and 7 after one of his best Rogue One. The Creator is an original sci-fi story that covers some very heavy topics about morals, the proliferation of AI, the use of biometric data, and the idea of humanity as more than good or evil. This is of course timely for many reasons but most notably in the areas of AI and your data. The story finds us in the midst of a post-disaster era world where the West is fighting against the embracing of AI, while the East fully embraces it.
The start studded cast is led by Madeleine Yuna Voyles (“Alfie”), John David Washington (“Joshua”), Gemma Chan (“Maya”), Allison Janney (“Howell”) and Ken Watanabe (“Harun”). Voyles does a stand-out performance as the young simulant who is learning as much about humanity as they are learning about her throughout the film. At times, you forget that she isn’t human and that in itself is one of the messages the film brings out. As Joshua comes to grips with the truth of all of it, he also finds himself chasing ghosts of his past.
One of the prevalent themes is the hate towards AI and the use of your biometric data. Firstly, after an event that leads to massive distrust between humanity and AI, the West outlaws AI and actively seeks to destroy it wherever it may be in the world. This mimics much of the distrust that is starting to form in our lives today with the advent of more advanced AI technologies that are coming into our digital spaces. In several scenes, you see advertisements stating “Donate Your Likeness”. These are there because simulants use the likeness of other humans to create their forms.
While this aids the story in the sense that Joshua struggles to find the person he most wants to find, it’s also a double tap towards the current WQA/SAG-AFTRA strikes and the privacy concerns surrounding the use of our biometric data in day-to-day life. Among the biggest issues for actors with the strike is the studios wanting to scan the likeness of background actors pay them once, and reuse their likenesses as much as they want in future projects. While this isn’t creating AI-based physical robots, the parallel there is hard to ignore. I cannot say for certain that Edwards put that in there specifically as a knock on Hollywood, but it feels too timely not to have been.
The Creator isn’t immune to some of the typical sci-fi tropes you see either. Whether it is the evil military who thinks they can parade around the world doing what they want unimpeded, or the convenient moments that found themselves set up just too easily, those moments are far less present in this film than most recent sci-fi blockbusters. The biggest issue was the pacing in the third act. It seems clear at 2 hours and 13 min, the film was running long and they had to cut some things to fit into the time. This sloppy editing in the final act derailed some of the momentum the rest of the film spent time building up for the audience. I would be shocked if there isn’t a director cut with more meat in that third act to better flesh it out.
The Creator’s story may be original but it borrows from many ideas that sci-fi films have dipped into over the years, most especially Blade Runner and Ghost In The Shell. The grounding piece for The Creator is the closer-to-present time frame of the story and the overall landscape of the world itself. Still, with just an $80 million budget, this film may prove to Hollywood yet again, that good sci-fi blockbusters don’t need $300 million budgets to be successful or good movies. Part of this was due to a less expensive camera used to shoot the film. Having gone to over 80 physical locations to shoot the film instead of building a greenscreen or stage set, VFX was layered onto the real shot locations after the final edits of the film were shot.
It was a treat to finally have some classic sci-fi back on the big screen that wasn’t simply a VFX buffet of greenscreen and sound stages, backed by an original story that didn’t shy away from tipping its hat at the sci-fi classical influences it drew from. Edwards may have another hit on his hands once audiences get to sink their minds into The Creator. I know myself personally; I left the theatres thinking about several of the larger plot points for a while, and wondering whether what happened in the end was a happy ending or the beginning of something worse.
The Creator hits theaters Friday September 29th.
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