Gareth Edwards shot his directorial debut Monsters (2010), a love story terrorised in its margins by aliens, for less than $500,000. In Hollywood, that’s considered pocket change. So, when the film became an unexpected hit, the franchise machine was quick to descend. First came Godzilla (2014), then Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016). He blessed both with a sense of visceral, ground-level chaos – the feeling of total insignificance in the face of a mountainous, monstrous kaiju lumbering out of the fog.
However, Hollywood, in turn, ignored their own investment, as well as the economic ingenuity Edwards had shown with Monsters. He was tossed into the centre of these bloated productions and, in the case of Rogue One, then had said production wrested from his hands for even more expensive reshoots. Now, he’s returned with The Creator, a sci-fi epic about a war against AI waged in Southeast Asia by American-led, western forces. Written alongside Rogue One’s Chris Weitz, and shot for a modest $86m, it’s both Edwards’s “personal film” and a challenge to the industry status quo – with all your money, The Creator asks, why can’t you make your films look as good as this?
