The Creator: Movie Review

Cast: John David Washington, Gemma Chan, Ken Watanabe, Allison Janney, Madeleine Yuna Voyles, Ralph Ineson
Director: Gareth Edwards

If The Creator has one thing to offer amongst its painfully obvious Vietnam and Free Tibet aesthetics and its very familiar storytelling edge, it's that Gareth Edwards is a visionary when it comes to world-building.

It's just a shame that the story elements that inhabit that world don't quite do enough to paper through the cracks of what transpires.

Set in the year 2070 against a backdrop of the west declaring war on AI robots after they wiped out millions in a nuclear attack, Washington's ex-soldier Joshua is recruited to try and find a weapon the Americans believe the simulant robots have created to end the war.

Joshua is damaged, having lost his wife (Chan) and unborn child in a missile strike by the USS Nomad, a skulking ship that haunts the skies and rains down death on suspected AI havens in New Asia where simulants and humans live side by side.

Pulled back into the war against his will, Joshua finds his allegiances questioned once he discovers the weapon - a young girl (Voyles)...

The Creator has much going for it.

Its sci-fi visuals are utterly stunning, a masterclass of blending the future with the near present in a way not really glimpsed since Neill Blomkamp's District 9. Its mix of robots looking like Alex Garland's Ex Machina, along with Blade Runner-esque environments mark it out as a creative high, especially when considering the lower end of the budget the filmmakers have had to work with.

From a newsreel in its opening which sets the scene to the FX-work, The Creator is a game-changer.

Unfortunately not all of that game-changing ethos permeates much of a familiar narrative, complete with colonisation edges and ham-fisted allegories to US invasions of Vietnam and a desire globally to destroy parts of Tibet. Rice fields and their inhabitants are blasted and napalmed by the US, simulants wearing Kasaya Robes are wiped out with nary a moment's consideration - the message is delivered in a none-too-subtle approach that marks out The Creator's flaws.

Equally, most of the characters within are not richly drawn out. Washington has only a limited sense of range here and most of that is confined to surrogate dad out of his depth moments with the young girl as well as a few comedic moments peppered throughout. Janney's military leader could have been ripped off the pages of Avatar and thrust into any jigsaw of the narrative - and Chan is reduced to a somewhat ethereal role throughout, confined to flashbacks of the Hallmark nature.

And yet as Edwards tries clumsily to mix both the spiritual and the human, he fumbles some of the character arcs, and too often in proceedings situations are simply defused by blowing up the obstacle in the way - it's lazy and begins to grate after two hours.

The Creator wants desperately to have something vital to say about what it means to be human, what tolerance is and how we can all live as one, but unfortunately, much like the simulants in the film, it's only an approximation of some very familiar sci-fi tropes and trappings.

That's not to say The Creator is a disaster by any stretch of the imagination; its world-building is rich, its visual story-telling is impressively and thrillingly shot - this rich vision of the future may lack some of the parts needed, but it's almost more of the sum of its own parts.