The best kind of science-fiction comes with dirt underneath the fingernails. In our sanitized blockbuster landscape, we’ve lost sight of the rust that keeps the machine honest, and films like The Creator serve as vital reminders of why we keep excavating the dark side of the moon for fantastical stories that remind us so much more of the world we’re in than we expect.
Gareth Edwards’ latest project hems close to the garment of sci-fi’s past, chopping up elements of stories you’ve heard before and visuals that have struck your imagination in the past. The filmmaker openly cited masterworks like Apocalypse Now and Blade Runner in forging his latest epic, and it’s very evident throughout how direct those homages are.
Is it to the point of being defeating? Not necessarily. Genre films continually build on the remnants of the past, as you can’t enter The Matrix without Ghost in the Shell and you don’t soar with Star Wars without the works of Akira Kurosawa and Forbidden Planet. The Creator‘s cybernetic gumbo covers ideas that have been contemplated from sci-fi minds ranging from Isaac Asimov to Steven Spielberg. However, Edwards’ uncanny sense of scope, dedication to his crafted world and ability to ring genuine emotion from the well-worn tropes the plot is built on help buoy the familiarity.
If anything, Edwards’ latest film establishes him as the true heir apparent to James Cameron. While Edwards’ hasn’t quite made a film yet that rival some of Cameron’s stone-cold classics, this film feels like its in dialogue with Cameron’s Terminator movies, his Avatar franchise and Aliens.
The usual suspects are the same: a gruff military presence rooted in American exceptionalism, an enemy we can’t quite understand until we’re embedded with their POV, a war raging for the future of humankind for some reason or another. If you throw in Blade Runner‘s seedy backdrop of futuristic robots intermingling with cyberpunk cityscapes and the amoral jungles of Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam, you’ll kind of get what Edwards is going for here. Again, it’s a film very indebted to what inspires it, at times to narrative fault.
Where The Creator ultimately finds its footing is with the hyper-relevance of artificial intelligence, with the supposed opposition humanity faces here a plethora of rouge machines powered by an A.I. system designed for our benefit. Being that this is a modern twist on the Vietnam movie, you can probably guess where Edwards’ commentary goes with on the supposed dangers of A.I. and the uniquely Western sensibility to rush in with insurgency into a foreign landscape we can’t quite understand past our basic fears and crass preconceptions. The Creator is a really good movie, but it’s not particularly subtle one.
John David Washington is starting to be the go-to guy to lead an original sci-fi blockbuster after anchoring Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, probably due to his ability to maneuver through a surreal atmosphere with quick wit and a very sincere appreciation for his character’s emotional scars. He’s not quite the ferocious presence his dad Denzel is, but that almost heightens the little nuances of his reserved manner. He’s a little more of a calculated presence on screen, and that fits exceptionally well for genre films like this.
While Edwards and Chris Weitz’s screenplay indeed feels the weight of so much informing its universe and storytelling, you cannot deny the fact that Edwards is one of our great studio filmmakers when it comes to making the audience feel very small in his heavenly catastrophes of robots and monsters.
Only matched by perhaps Cameron, Nolan, Spielberg and Denis Villeneuve for working directors who make big movies with overwhelming senses of scale, The Creator finds Edwards building on the grand tragedy of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, the shocking terror of Godzilla and the intimate world-flip of Monsters. He almost combines all of those elements into a Cameron-esque extravaganza, and he does so on a reasonable $80 million budget that would make most superhero epics blush.
Finding ways to be economic and still knock your audience out of their seat with breathtaking visuals is hard to do, and Edwards absolutely stuns with his visual landscapes. It helps to have a virtuoso behind the camera like Dune‘s Greig Fraser, who understands how to capture the genre like few can. Like Nolan, Edwards’ films are made for IMAX.
In a day-and-age where meta-narrative has swallowed up so much of the tentpole filmmaking we enjoy, it’s nice to get a movie like The Creator. It takes everything about it seriously, and it does so with real soul. You can forgive a little déjà vu, if only because what we recall is what we so often long for with transportive experiences like this. He’s picking up where Neill Blomkamp left off with his dusty, desperate sociopolitical trilogy of District 9, Elysium and Chappie. We miss quality films like that, ones that take us into not-so-abstract futures with not-so-uncommon sci-fi templates.
While The Creator can’t fully shake not-so-distant memories of sci-fi’s past, Edwards is just too talented a filmmaker, too in-tune with uncompromising story decisions and genuine, painful catharsis, to botch an assignment like this. By film’s end, you’re as rapt with this fight for freedom as you are watching the Na’vi of Pandora protect their homeland from greedy corporate interests. If Edwards is the best chance we’ve got to continue Cameron’s legacy of heady sci-fi and firm tugs at the heartstrings, then we’ll absolutely take it. This creation, while imperfect, is still something special to behold.
