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.
