Gareth Edwards is a tough director to track. Or at least he’s tough for me to track because none of his movies left a lasting impression. Monsters hangs as one of those intriguing, let ’s-see-what-he-does-next debuts. He then leveled up to Godzilla, which had stunning visuals and a deadening pace. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story kept him in franchise confines and fizzled in its attempt to do anything novel.
And now comes The Creator, a science fiction epic that allows Edwards to explore the ramifications of our increasingly connected, technologically-driven world. He came up with the story, co-wrote the screenplay, and directed the whole shebang. It’s a slam dunk for an auteurist read, and the healthy budget and seemingly free reign he had means there’s nowhere for his strengths and weaknesses to hide. This movie is Gareth Edwards’ alone, and it reveals nothing new about the middling filmmaker.
IMPRESSIVE QUALITIES
The Creator is the kind of movie that begs for a pass. None of it is garishly horrible, and there’s elements that rise to Edwards’ ambitious aims.
Front and center is star John David Washington, who previously threw himself wholeheartedly into the sci-fi mess that was Tenet. He does the same with this uneven feature, playing Joshua, a former American soldier who went undercover during the still-raging war with AI robots. There he got caught up in the messiness of personal emotions and the inevitable loss of war, pains he carries in his face and body throughout the film. It’s not a complicated emotional core, but Washington finds far more weight in his character than he’s given.
I have to point out, though, that this role probably should’ve gone to another actor. Joshua has limb differences, and as great as Washington is and as seamlessly his arm and leg are erased, roles for actors with limb differences are few and far between. Give them these opportunities (even if this is barely used in the film, but more on that later).
Where The Creator truly shines is when Joshua’s problems and the plot overall are dropped and Edwards’ known visual strength comes to the fore. Think back to Godzilla. If you remember anything from that film, it’s the nighttime HALO jump, small men plummeting through the vastness of the sky as giant monsters battle around them. It remains a striking scene nearly 10 years later, and Edwards has replicated this sense of visual grandeur again and again.
In The Creator, this usually comes across in the action. It’s clean, easy to follow, and embedded in a world that blends the familiar with the fantastic. Old, well-worn war scenarios play out with wonderfully rendered futuristic tech, and Edwards is great at finding the perfect frame and pacing for these scenarios.
These moments are very satisfying, and while caught up in them, it’s easy to forget the rest of the film’s flaws. But eventually, the film returns to everything else it’s doing, and it’s more disappointing in comparison.
We’ve Been Here Before
I’ve been vague about the details of the plot until now because their redundancy needs their own breakdown. But seriously, every beat of this movie is painfully familiar, and you’ll be tapping your foot waiting for the obvious reveals.
The movie begins with a setup of the world, where sentient AI robots are integrated into every aspect of human life. Eventually, the robots demand more than servitude, war breaks out, and a nuclear bomb is dropped on LA. The devastation of this event is not at all reminiscent of 9/11 (it’s very reminiscent of 9/11), nor is the ensuing global war and the US’ oppressive use of a military superweapon that looms in the sky, dropping bombs on their defenseless targets, at all similar to the drone-heavy war that raged for decades after. Again, this is just the setup, and it’s laid out so artlessly that it’s hard not to roll your eyes.
Washington’s Joshua is sent back to war to find and destroy the AI’s newest weapon. He’s haunted by the loss of his pregnant wife five years earlier, and whaddayaknow, the weapon is a five-year-old robot he can’t bring himself to kill. I’m shocked, shocked I say! All I was waiting for was the complicated emotions of his mechanical prostheses to crop up, but they peculiarly never come into play. Why is that there, then? Why is that there???
One could ask the same of nearly everything in The Creator because everything either lands with a familiar thud or goes nowhere. It’s chock full of way more science fiction tropes than I can list, its fullness contributing to its inability to do anything with the individual pieces. It even looks familiar, with the emotionally expressive robots (particularly the young girl played by Madeleine Yuna Voyles and a military leader played by Ken Watanabe) given a full human face to work with. Sure, that means I read and connected to their emotional lives easily, but it also means I was constantly thinking of how well Ex Machina used a similar design.
Anyone Alive Out There?
Familiarity, of course, is not an immediate death sentence for a movie. Age-old stories exist because their emotional cores are universal, easily relatable, and can be formed into a satisfying story. Telling these stories just means focusing on these emotional cores, something The Creator utterly fails to do.
Washington does his best to get across Joshua’s emotional arc, but the film constantly undermines his effort. A guy learning to connect through an adventure with a kid? You ever seen a Western? Or Logan? Or The Last of Us? Those successes focused on the emotional core of the story and didn’t get distracted by the genre trappings around them. The Creator tells us Washington is motivated by his losses, then has him behave like a mindless soldier to make the plot streamlined. Which is he, Edwards? You don’t get to pick and choose.
Even at the scene level, the editing distracts from the emotional focus. Think of how one of the greatest familiar but satisfying movies, Titanic, handled its big scenes. When Rose is being lowered onto a lifeboat, chaos and death all around her, we still want her to jump back on the Titanic because Jack is there. Their relationship is the emotional core of the film, so the camera stays almost exclusively on the two of them, the grandeur of a boat sinking around them faded into the background. The Creator handles similar moments by entirely messing up this balance. The camera stays for far too long on the chaos of war instead of on Washington’s face, or in moments of laughable ineptitude, costume designs obscure his face. It’s as if Edwards got distracted by his shiny toys and forgot why he was playing with them in the first place: to see a man learn, grow, and grieve.
Conclusion: The Creator
The Creator’s many impressive technical qualities are entirely mishandled, their import put above what a movie really needs: a good story.
The Creator releases in theaters on September 29th.
Watch The Creator
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