It took a while, and a rather bumpy false start with the Star Wars franchise (his Rogue One was plagued by rumours of studio interference and extensive reshoots), but with The Creator, the British director Gareth Edwards finally gets to make the sci-fi spectacular he was always destined to tackle. And with this ambitious, ideas-driven, expectation-subverting, man-versus-machines showdown, he has co-written and directed one of the finest original science-fiction films of recent years.
It can be a little misleading, that word “original”, when it comes to science fiction. At its most basic, it just refers to any picture that isn’t part of an existing franchise or culled from a recognisable IP – be it a book, video game or television series. But very occasionally the word is fully earned, by a film so distinctive in its world-building, its aesthetic and its unexpected approach to well-worn themes that it becomes a definitive example of the genre. Films such as Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 (which shares an element of basic circuitry with this picture) or Alfonso Cuarón’s dystopian masterpiece Children of Men: both went on to become benchmarks by which subsequent science fiction was judged.
If The Creator is not quite in the same league – it’s let down by a few issues in a rushed final act – it’s pretty close. The immersive, elaborately detailed backdrop has its own unique visual and conceptual palette, and the seemingly familiar story teases and twists our perceptions, causing the audience to question assumptions and allegiances. It’s exceptionally impressive film-making.
In the central role, playing former soldier Joshua, is John David Washington, an actor who has previously struggled to strike a balance between excessively reined-in restraint (Tenet, Amsterdam) and extravagantly shouty excess (Malcolm & Marie). Either way, there has been a degree of artificiality, the discernible trace evidence of the acting decisions that have gone into each performance. Here, in contrast, it feels as though Washington has fully disappeared into the character. He is wholly persuasive as a trickily ambiguous man who both is and isn’t what he initially seems.
A slick, scene-setting montage explains the root of the human-AI hostilities: a journey that starts with sunny, faux-1950s adverts for robot helpmates and ends with radiation-baked footage of an AI-triggered nuclear attack on Los Angeles. But when we first meet Joshua, he seems removed from all this. He’s a loving husband with a heavily pregnant wife, Maya (Gemma Chan). However, their home, a rustic seafront shack in an isolated corner of “New Asia” (the location scenes were predominantly shot in Thailand), is imminently under threat, caught in what seems to be the crossfire of an American attack. Missiles are dropped from an ominous hovering genocidal battle craft known as the USS Nomad (kudos to the sound-design team for creating the most chilling apocalyptic rumble since the alien invasion klaxon in Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds).
But when Joshua pleads with a wounded US marine to call off the attack, it becomes clear, both to us and to his devastated wife, that he knows more than he had let on about the US military operation and mission to locate the Nirmata – the mysterious creator of a generation of advanced AI. A bomb strikes a boat on which Maya is escaping, leaving Joshua alone with his grief and his guilt.
While the Nirmata’s AI entities – varying from robots to bioengineered humanoid androids – coexist peacefully with humans in New Asia, the US has declared war on all forms of AI, with shades of Blade Runner’s human-robot caste system taken to destructive extremes. Five years after the fateful attack, Joshua is approached by the US forces to help with a mission to end all missions: to take out a newly created AI super-weapon capable of destroying America’s first line of attack: the Nomad. But he finds himself tested in ways he couldn’t have anticipated when he discovers that the weapon is in fact a child, nicknamed Alphie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles).
Edwards’s 2010 debut film, Monsters, contained a haunting moment in which his characters are struck by the eerie beauty of the alien invaders. His solid 2014 addition to the Godzilla stable is notable for its awed appreciation of the giant city-stomping lizard. And this unusually empathic attitude towards the enemies of humanity is evident once again in his approach to the theme of AI. While the accepted narrative around AI is firmly entrenched in a negative perception, Edwards makes a case that perhaps we’re the bad guys here – a mirror-image reversal of the Terminator scenario.
Does it all work? Not entirely – in particular, a frantic action climax that sacrifices clarity and a degree of credibility in service of an effects-laden onslaught. Still, minor quibbles aside, this is a remarkable achievement, and a persuasive argument in favour of carte blanche creative freedom for Edwards in whatever he chooses to do next.
