The Creator Review: Visually Breathtaking - But No Storytelling Creativity In Sight

Few director origin stories in recent memory have been quite as inspiring as those of Gareth Edwards. After making a guerrilla monster movie — appropriately titled "Monsters" — for less than $500,000, where he'd filmed overseas without shooting permits and completed all the special effects on his laptop, he was quickly given the keys to the Hollywood kingdom. Usually, a new director's voice gets obscured if they make the leap to franchise filmmaking too early on; what was remarkable about his take on "Godzilla" was that it felt like a seasoned filmmaker bending a familiar tale to his own sensibility, not the sophomore effort of a director who completed post-production on his previous film entirely by himself, in his bedroom.

After two blockbuster guarantors, Edwards has been given a blank check to cash. Upon first glance, "The Creator" feels like the movie he was dreaming of making right back at the beginning of his career: an original, special effects-driven work that aims to bring to life what a shoestring budget could never.

Make no mistake, "The Creator" is a film that feels reverse-engineered from concept art. The narrative has been pieced together in a way that can encapsulate various androids, futuristic weapons, and spacecraft as well as pay visual homage to everything from "Blade Runner" to "Apocalypse Now" and the "Fallout" video game series. This isn't necessarily a bad thing when Edwards has a keener eye for the practicalities of his designs than many of his directorial contemporaries, as well as two accomplished cinematographer collaborators — Greig Fraser and Oren Soffer — who can make every shot impossible to look away from. But it does mean that, at a certain point, it becomes obvious the story is an afterthought. It pales in comparison to its myriad influences, but it looks gorgeous while doing so.

While it may sound like a backhanded compliment, it must be said that "The Creator" peaks with its opening scene, a 1950s-style newsreel giving us a brief overview of how artificial intelligence took over this alternate Earth. Eventually, AI grew too sentient and triggered a nuclear attack on Los Angeles. The West quickly outlawed AI, but over in the East, it remained prominent, and a war has been sustained between both sides of the planet in the years since. The wounded former special forces agent Joshua (John David Washington) is reluctantly brought back into the fold after word arises about a new threat that could destroy the weapon the U.S. has spent the last decade making, therefore losing the war for good.

His superior, Howell (Allison Janney), tasks him with joining a team to go behind enemy lines to this robot-controlled territory to find and kill the creator of this technology. But during his mission, Joshua uncovers their most threatening weapon of all: an AI child (Madeleine Yuna Voyles) he nicknames Alphie, which shows an increased capability for human emotion. Can he achieve his objectives while growing a bond with this unlikely surrogate child, finding out what happened to his long-presumed-dead wife (an under-utilized but still second-billed Gemma Chan) in the process?

It's not necessarily a criticism that "The Creator" feels like a dystopian sci-fi a teenage boy would make. A stopped clock is right twice a day, and that hypothetical teen would be right in thinking the movie's retro-futuristic aesthetic is pretty damn cool. (It's never clear, though, whether this tale begins in an alternate, more scientifically advanced Earth in the 1950s, or is this a future deliberately calibrated so Edwards didn't need to get too bogged down by predicting next-gen technology?) The war between East and West, a particularly contentious plot point in Hollywood's current globally conscious era, similarly feels like the product of a teen who has just seen "Apocalypse Now" for the first time. Battle scenes have been placed in settings highly reminiscent of rural Vietnam so viewers can imagine what the "Rise of the Valkyries" scene would look like if it had robots running rampant in the middle of it and a classic Radiohead track in place of a booming orchestral score.

Despite the setting, "The Creator" doesn't have anything to say about current anxieties between the U.S. and China, and after opening the film by establishing long-running tension between opposing sides of the globe, "The Creator" bends over backward to ensure any similarities between the plot and current events are sheer coincidence. "The Creator" is similarly half-hearted in any attempts to critique the American military-industrial complex, playing its Asian-set sequences entirely straight to convey the havoc this enduring war has brought upon even the tiniest communities, without needing to develop any characters on this side of the divide to back this up.

To a certain extent, it is quite commendable that the movie refuses to make audiences root for either side of the 15-year-conflict, giving both armies generically evil traits — one side overpowers via military might, the other via advancing artificial intelligence so dangerous it's been banned across most of the planet. The problem is that the movie doesn't explore this prescient theme with any depth; it's all a McGuffin for globe-trotting action sequences, making "The Creator" the rare science fiction film that has nothing to say about the issues its story appears to be grappling with.

Where Edwards' film does excel is in its bleak buddy movie vibes; Joshua is an underwritten protagonist, with a generic, Christopher Nolan-style "haunted by missing wife" motivation, but when paired with Alphie, the character manages to breathe some life into over-familiar material. Admittedly, there's nothing in his journey that will surprise — the curmudgeonly protagonist who becomes an unlikely parental figure is a tired trope, even if "The Creator" appears to be grittier than your average take on that narrative. Joshua kills others in front of Alphie and ponders the very nature of existence, pushing this artificial child to the brink of an existential crisis.

Their relationship is the bruised heart of the film, and these moments — the ones away from the action — paradoxically prove Washington's stature as a budding action hero. The way he can build authentic screen chemistry with young co-stars is reminiscent of the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger in "Terminator 2: Judgment Day," one of the great examples of an actor with limited dramatic capabilities building something deeper from a comedic odd-couple dynamic to find the heart of the material.

So while "The Creator" doesn't offer anything you haven't seen from many science fiction blockbusters before, it makes up for its lack of thought-provoking ideas with capital-B Blockbuster spectacle. I probably won't remember the story in a few days' time, but there are images from this movie that will be seared into my brain forever.

"The Creator" premieres in theaters on September 29.