FANTASTIC FEST: ‘The Creator” Is An Ambitious Sci-Fi Epic

Sci-fi, as a genre, allows writers and creatives to explore war in a much more siloed space. Switching out real-life identities with aliens or using technology as a detached shorthand for cultural diversity, sci-fi is a space that is rife with attempts to capture the hardships of war with stories of uprising. Only, more often than not, the genre lacks teeth. The Creator is the latest in the genre to attempt this feat of showcasing the brutality of war and the ways in which the United States specifically claims moral superiority while acting with an oppressing lack of empathy, bigotry, and a thirst for power that embraces hypocrisy.

Directed by Gareth Edwards, The Creator is written by Edwards and Chris Weitz and stars John David Washington, Madeleine Yuna Voyles, Gemma Chan, Allison Janney, Ken Watanabe, Sturgill Simpson, Amar Chadha-Patel, and Marc Menchaca. The film is set amidst a future war between the human race (though it’s really just about Americans) and the forces of artificial intelligence protected in New Asia. After a nuclear bomb destroys Los Angeles, blamed on malicious AI, the U.S. leads the charge to eradicate AI from the Western world before turning its eyes to New Asia, where AI and humans have lived in harmony.

In this world, Joshua (John David Washington), a hardened ex-special forces agent grieving the disappearance of his wife (Gemma Chan), is recruited to hunt down and kill Nirmata (The Creator), the elusive architect of advanced AI who has developed a mysterious weapon with the power to end the war in favor of the AI. Joshua and his team of elite operatives journey across enemy lines only to discover the world-ending weapon he’s been instructed to destroy is an AI in the form of a young child whom he names Alphie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles).

Over the course of the film, Joshua grapples with his past, his love, and how he’s been taught to see AI. Joshua sees firsthand that AI, from the ones that look like robots to the Simulants who are this world’s androids, are more human than humanity. They’re filled with empathy and a singular want to be free, and Joshua has to make a choice between keeping down the path he was taught or changing his perspective based on the intimate relationships he experiences along the way.

Visually, The Creator is showstopping. Whether it’s the execution of the broad and explosive effects or the interesting and thoughtful character design for the AI, everything feels grand. While the former is a spectacle, it’s the intimacy with which the AI is thoughtfully brought to life in The Creator that is its largest success. The hollow space behind the AI’s heads offers a beautiful and elegant detail to the character designs of the Simulants, marking them as something other than human. However, the way each of the AI is dressed and proportioned also offers insight into creating them as full characters and closer to human than anything else.

Whether it’s the proportions of the clothing, the ways the AI walks—like people who lived and whose bodies show wear and tear—or the moments of humanity shown for others, the AI are some of the best elements of the film. So much so that I would rather have spent more time with them and seen the war from their perspective throughout the film.

The largest issue for the film is its narrative simplicity against large sweeping, and brutal visuals. While it’s easy to split the world in two, despite The Creator’s excessive use of Japanese writing and nods to classic tropes from Japanese cinema, the movie actually takes place in South East Asia. Merely splitting the world into the United States and New Asia condenses the very diverse cultures of Asia into one monolith that misses the cultural complexities, languages, and identities of each culture on the continent.

While it’s an obvious attempt to tell his own anti-war story by combining elements of Vietnam and the Iraq War, the way that Edwards captures New Asia is elementary at best, leading to more issues in his narrative. Visually, is it interesting? Yes. The Creator is hands down one of the most beautiful films of the year, with some of the best effects work coming to fruition in both epic battles and intimate moments. At the same time, distilling all of Asia into one monolithic area of land and culture for aesthetics only rings hollow when the story itself aims to swing for the anti-war fences.

In fact, that simplicity seems more like a box that the narrative is being shoved into than an active attempt to reach the most audiences. There are moments of the film that hit toward more nuances or detailed discussions, especially where LA’s Ground Zero and its cause are concerned. But they’re mentioned as one-off lines and stop just before the narrative punch connects to the audience. It feels like Edwards had more to say but instead chose spectacle over substance.

That said, The Creator isn’t all bad when it comes to story. Primarily, the way Edwards tackles AI, a common boogeyman in many sci-fi stories across the decades takes the standard “AI causes humanity’s extinction” in a different direction. The story prioritizes the ways those in power cling to it, as well as the hypocrisy and brutality that is used to keep it all. If anything, the simplicity of the narrative and the defining factors of evil and good allow the film to avoid exposition dump pitfalls and instead, prioritize building emotional connections between the audience and the Simulants.

The performances from John David Washington, Madeliene Yuna Voyles, and Allison Janney carry the film. For Washington and Voyles as Joshua and Alphie, the audience sees the emotional core of the film and grows with them. Its paternal back and forth gives a fresh (even if it isn’t new) take on the Lone Wolf and Cub archetype. The duo are unabashedly honest with each other, allowing them to foster a connection that feels earned, as much as it’s necessary for the narrative. Washington and Voyles are each striking presences on-screen on their own, carrying the narrative in their steps.

While Washington and Voyles are a beautiful pair whose connection feels authentic, Janney’s performance as a manipulative and brutal general embodies everything wrong with the individualism of the American military. It disregards the clear racism of it as well. And no, I don’t mean just the ways in which she both does and instructs others to kill humans indiscriminately in a way that doesn’t hide the fact that they’re Asian is a factor in that. As the poster woman for the war machine, Janney is so excellent that I hated her after her first monologue, and that was the point.

For all of its faults, The Creator adds much-needed diversity to the constricting sci-fi landscape, which aims more for sequels and reboots, mining IP to the bedrock. But in its originality, you can still see the sweeping influences from the works of George Lucas and the world of Star Wars that Edwards has touched before. It’s not entirely bad, but those Lucasfilm fingerprints may be too detailed for some to overcome.

In the end, The Creator is a lot of things. It’s beautiful and grand, it’s emotional and intimate, it’s loud and explosive, but it’s also too simple and too reductive. As a film, and in a vacuum, Gareth Edwards’s ambition is in the upper echelon of sci-fi, but if you venture out of the silo, you’ll find it lands as just “good.”

The Creator is streaming now on Hulu.