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Before it was released, “The Creator” felt outdated from its premise alone. Its world almost begs comparison to prior science fiction films from “Blade Runner” to “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” to “The Terminator,” films which have addressed reality and artificiality with such depth that there’s seemingly no more ground to cover.

“The Creator” is set in a near-distant future where the United States government wages war against artificial intelligence that they originally created. Such stories of humans versus AI, and the blurring of the lines between the two, have been so overdone that retreading this ground now is repetitive.

Unfortunately, the only line that “The Creator” blurs is the one between inspired and unoriginal. The latest film from director Gareth Edwards, who created “Godzilla” and “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” makes its influences clear, taking visual inspiration from “Akira” and “Star Wars” in the designs of its characters and cities. But the film struggles to find a distinct voice in how it deploys the tropes and iconography of these sources.

Edwards opens with fictionalized newsreel footage of the government’s development of advanced AI for labor use. The AI detonates a nuclear warhead in Los Angeles, killing over one million civilians. This event spurred the U.S. to launch a military campaign to eradicate all AI. The flagship of the military’s efforts is a massive space station called the USS NOMAD, a hulking and imposing ship capable of unleashing devastating firepower from orbit.

The AIs — resembling humans in appearance, language and occupation — take refuge in New Asia, a Southeast Asian country whose people embrace and coexist with AI against the demands of the West. A hazy, problematic amalgamation of several Southeast Asian nations of various diverse cultures into one, New Asia is shown to us through the eyes of Sergeant Joshua Taylor (John David Washington), an undercover agent tasked by the U.S. to get closer to Maya (Gemma Chan). This woman, who eventually marries Joshua, is believed to be the daughter of the anonymous chief AI architect Nirmata.

The film depicts New Asia as one vague yet cohesive mass in which the U.S. government commits war crimes. The othering of various groups of people as a justification for conflict is a recurring theme in sci-fi, especially in the militaristic age we live in. But works like “The Creator” partake in essentialization themselves by broadly fitting members of a highly diverse group into one box.

The film lumps artificially intelligent people of numerous ethnic backgrounds into New Asia but is largely uninterested in their identities and cultures. This othering on the part of the film dehumanizes the Asian characters and ultimately contradicts the central message of acceptance.

Fernanda Kligerman | Design Editor

AI in “The Creator” assumes a role similar to the replicants in “Blade Runner.” Whereas the latter film’s director, Ridley Scott, goes deeper in his examination of the humanity of simulant beings, even going as far as to indict us as less than human for how we treat each other, Edwards merely victimizes robots and defines them solely by their artificiality. Their characterization lacks the same humanity the film wants to convince us to believe in.

Rapid, blockbuster-style pacing prevents Edwards from focusing on any of the numerous ideas he throws at the wall here. “The Creator” jumps from location to location, plot point to plot point, and sacrifices texture along the way. This banal storytelling isn’t an issue in Edwards’ 2014 “Godzilla” reboot, where the humans exist primarily to lend an overwhelming sense of scale to the colossal monster mayhem that drives the film’s action. But for a film ostensibly about humanity like “The Creator,” the development of the human characters leaves much to be desired.

Joshua’s tragic backstory, for example, revolves around the supposed death of his pregnant wife Maya, who gets caught in a NOMAD blast after discovering he is an undercover agent. We see moments of him mourning her loss that amount to brief flashbacks of the couple running around and smiling on a beach.

To make matters almost laughable, at one point Joshua looks at a picture of him and Maya, chuckles and says “I remember that” out loud. These lackluster moments of grieving continue to pop up even when Joshua is thrust back into action when the military tells him that Maya is still alive.

As such, the film is driven not by its themes or characters but entirely by its images. To his credit, Edwards has a knack for striking, foreboding imagery that sticks long after the credits roll — thanks in large part to his directors of photography Greig Fraser (the Oscar-winning cinematographer of “Dune”) and Oren Soffer.

Take the NOMAD, for instance: it’s a hulking symbol of death that looms over the characters for the entire film. This large spacecraft capable of immense destruction creates a staggering contrast with the peaceful AI settlements on the ground. Given his work in the “Star Wars” franchise, this Death-Star-esque image may already be in his wheelhouse, but the NOMAD is still spectacular to behold.

Like its narrative, however, the film’s visuals otherwise fail to evoke much emotion. It contains beautifully composed establishing shots of neon-lit cityscapes, wide-open farmlands and secluded mountainous villages, though the camera is hesitant to linger on its frames or let its locations stand apart from one another.

“The Creator” contains little perceivable atmosphere because it is more concerned with moving between gorgeous frames than it is at giving us a sense of what these places are. Even at its most visually stunning, the film is essentially a slideshow of concept art.

Not only has the “humans versus robots” story become a hackneyed one, but right now antagonism against AI isn’t entirely groundless. Therefore, equating this conflict with real-world military intervention and race relations is a sorely misguided effort.

What’s left is a film of considerable aesthetic beauty and impressive visual effects that evoke little emotion. It’s a story rooted in ideas developed with far more profundity in other science fiction media. “The Creator” is a jack-of-all-tropes, but master of none.

Published on October 3, 2023 at 11:10 pm