‘The Creator’ Review: John David Washington Gets Caught Up in AI War in Gareth Edwards’ Baggy, Sentimental Sci-Fi Epic

A big, brawny original sci-fi movie is a rare thing in the age of franchise branding, which makes you root for Gareth Edwards’ The Creator, an admirably ambitious endeavor, stuffed with imposing visuals, impressive design work and nifty tech hardware. But this future-world action thriller about a war between humankind and artificial intelligence feels like a lot of movies scrunched together, most of them familiar. A dull lead, a wishy-washy vein of ersatz spirituality, racial optics by turns uneasy and pandering and the usual chaotic plotting don’t help. Even the charm of an enigmatic robo-kid only goes so far.

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Co-scripting with Chris Weitz, one of the writers on the director’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Edwards repurposes ideas from that movie with an assortment of elements and iconography pieced together from several others, among them Blade Runner, Aliens, District 9, Akira, War of the Worlds and Apocalypse Now.

The broad-strokes story depicts America as a military-industrial complex whose aggressively interventionist foreign policies are supposedly driven by the greater good and yet, duh, ultimately proven clueless when it comes to their xenophobic lack of empathy. The demonized “other” in this case applies to all manner of advanced A.I. creations, still being produced in 2065 by a continent now known as New Asia that refuses to play by U.S.-imposed rules.

The nuking of Los Angeles a decade earlier, believed to be the work of the very same robot law enforcement agents designed for the country’s protection, triggered a war that aims to rid the planet of the A.I. menace. But an embittered ex-special forces operative, Joshua (John David Washington), has his eyes opened about who the real oppressors are and who just wants to live in peace.

Joshua’s epiphany is nudged along by his evolving rapport with a mystical child he calls Alphie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles), a superweapon with the power to remotely control technology. She’s one of many simulants in New Asia with human features and robotic innards, plus a bunch of visible rear-cranial gear. That includes cylindrical head-hole mechanisms that look disturbingly like those earlobe tunnel piercings you see on guys stacking shelves at Whole Foods.

Despite all its blustery warfare and its very elaborate tech trappings, The Creator is a movie about humanity, interspecies harmony and technological advances as a force for good, not fear. Which makes it an interesting counter-perspective to so much current thinking about the perils of A.I. But Edwards and Weitz telegraph the soulfulness and profundity with such insistence that those aspects end up feeling fabricated.

No less artificial is the goopy sentiment evident almost from the outset as Joshua and his wife, Maya (Gemma Chan), joyfully await the birth of their child in a tucked-away Asian seaside paradise. (Cue countless Hallmark-moment flashbacks throughout to the two of them on the beach in romantic bliss.)

An ill-timed U.S. raid on the area risks blowing Joshua’s special forces cover just as he’s getting close to the target, an elusive robotics architect known as “Nirmata.” This causes Maya to flee by boat with her trusted A.I. family and appear to be blitzed by America’s mightiest WMD, a laser-targeting orbital warship called Nomad.

Five years later, Joshua bluntly declines the overtures of military brass General Andrews (Ralph Ineson, doing his best American Lurch thing behind dark aviator shades) and Colonel Howell (Allison Janney, doing stuff she could do in her sleep) to draw him back into the game. New leads have surfaced concerning Nirmata’s whereabouts, and Joshua’s experience makes him uniquely qualified to go behind enemy lines in New Asia. Digital footage indicating that Maya is still alive convinces the amputee to strap on his robotic limb replacements and board a plane full of swaggering grunts led by Howell.

The state-of-the-art underground tech lab they uncover is hidden beneath humble farmland, all of which gets razed by Nomad. Whether it’s a crass allegory or just an unintended visual association, the evocation of Operation Rolling Thunder in Vietnam leaves a sour taste as we watch great swaths of pastural countryside and villages destroyed while peasant farmers scream their hatred at the American invaders.

But the movie is almost as jarring when it shifts gears to show bolt-headed lama-bots in saffron Buddhist robes, basically peddling a stereotype of transcendent Asian serenity to point up gung-ho American wrongheadedness.

Naturally, no one is more susceptible to this cultural enlightenment for dummies than Joshua, prompting him to go rogue with young Alphie in tow, just as Howell and Co. have determined that the kid is the ultimate threat with the power to break their prize toy, Nomad.

There’s an innate appeal in the cross-country flight, through rural areas and futuristic cities, of the hardened special forces agent and the preternaturally poised magical child, kind of like a sci-fi Paper Moon. But Washington continues to show minimal range and would be uninteresting company if not for the sweetness, spontaneity and calm intelligence conveyed by talented newcomer Voyles, who makes a persuasive argument for the potential humanity of robots. They weep real tears!

However, after narrowly escaping capture while hiding out with Joshua’s old military buddy Drew (Sturgill Simpson), the two fugitives get thrust into some wayward plotting in a final act that builds to heartrending sacrifice and a ridiculously cloying romantic closing image. It’s in these climactic scenes especially that Edwards’ sophisticated world-building skills run up against his weakness for movie-ish hokum, syrupy emotion and philosophical platitudes, the latter emphasized by the soaring choral passages of Hans Zimmer’s score.

Some audiences might find meaning in a simulant intoning: “They created us to be slaves, but our savior is coming. And our two species will live in peace.” Meh. I preferred the outsize tin-can bomb on spindly robot legs, sprinting into its target area — looking a bit like the animated sodas in those vintage drive-in snack bar promos.

At a time when stratospheric budgets have made studios reluctant to greenlight projects of this nature not based on heavily branded IP, Edwards is to be applauded for making a movie of this scope on a comparatively threadbare $80 million.

The director essentially worked backwards, shooting with small crews on low-cost, compact digital cameras in international locations (including Thailand, Cambodia, Nepal, Tokyo) with minimal set construction and then digitally painting in the sci-fi elements onto an assembly cut. That gives The Creator a foundation in realism, fortified by the muscular cinematography of Greig Fraser and Oren Soffer, which has a crisp naturalness too often missing in recent blockbusters.

It’s too bad the movie’s visual polish and inventiveness are applied to a hackneyed story and one-dimensional characters. That goes not just for Washington’s jaded field operative who finds his moral compass in a war zone, Joshua, but also for Chan’s Madonna with a secret, Janney’s hardass military leader and Ken Watanabe as a simulant pursuing Joshua and Alphie for the New Asian authorities, pretty much your basic wise-warrior cliché.

There are loads of cool gadgets, weapons and transport vehicles to keep the eye engaged, and vividly rendered environments, notably the very Blade Runner-esque city where Joshua reconnects with Drew. High above the traffic, an electronic billboard invites people to provide the facial element for human-robot hybrids: “Donate your likeness. Get scanned today. Support AI.”

The Creator makes its point without much subtlety that in the future, man and machine will be interconnected, all part of the same world and able to live in mutually beneficial co-existence. But this is a movie that, its many strengths notwithstanding, seems split between the desire to do something original and an imagination tethered to better movies from the past. That makes it a nostalgic patchwork, not the bold new vision it aims to be.