THE CREATOR — Fruitcake Enterprises

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: C
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B
Special Effects: B+

The Creator is a visual achievement, and if that’s all you need, it will work very well for you. It’s also a narrative mess.

This film seems to be leaning into ideas of xenophobia, American exceptionalism, the narrative structure of Apocalypse Now (which itself was a loose adaptation of the 1899 Jospeh Conrad novella Heart of Darkness), and even, arguably, both-sides-ism. The script, co-written by Chris Weitz and director Gareth Edwards, doesn’t fully commit to any of these things to achieve any truly crystalized ideas. This movies seems to want, at the same time, to entertain both American military jingoists and self-identified compassionate leftists.

It’ll probably satisfy average viewers just looking to watch a science-fiction action movie. And on that front, it does impress: Gareth Edwards, with previous directorial offerings from Monsters (2010) to Godzilla (2014) to Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), has an established history as a gifted visual storyteller. He knows how to integrate visual effects on a modest budget that serve the story rather than the other way around. And in The Creator, every scene is visually compelling. with attention paid to every part of the frame, foreground as well as background. Combined with the production design, it makes for very effective world building.

I just wish the story these things are serving were better. Too many things don’t add up, not least of which is the idea of a world threatened by AI that exists in self-contained, individual robot units, some of them with only robot parts, some with heads and faces indistinguishable from humans, aside from cylindrical holes that pass through where ears would otherwise be. I’m frankly astonished that Edwards would make a movie like this without once considering the idea of, say, a wifi network in which all of these machines are connected to each other, as one unified whole. These AI “beings” exist as though they are all singular personalities, much like androids. Except this is never the way that would go, especially if humanity were to declare war on the lot of them, as has happened here—due to a coding error that resulted in Los Angeles getting nuked, fifteen years before the events of this movie.

We’re moving through the 2060s here. What’s the state of climate change, then? No one ever even mentions it. I suppose I’m nitpicking here, but still, I prefer movies like this to make sense. The best science fiction extrapolates from plausible, present-day realities, which this film all but ignores. Instead, it relies on wild plot contrivances.

I hesitate to even get into the moral quandary of “compassion” for artificial intelligence. Multiple times we hear the line: “It’s not real. It’s just programming.” This movie clearly wants us to hear that as misguided, and take the side of the AI. The problem with this is that “it’s just programming” is actually correct. Ironically, humanity is wildly vulnerable to emotional manipulation by AI to think it’s “alive,” and The Creator itself is a movie that successfully manipulates our emotions. To say there’s a lot to unpack with this movie is a wild understatement.

Further complicating matters is how undeniably entertaining it is, at least when you’re not thinking too much about its many plot holes and lapses in logic. John David Washington makes a great protagonist in this world, easily seduced by the adorableness of “the weapon,” a super-advanced “AI” being designed to look like a little girl, played by a seven-year-old Madeleine Yuna Voyles—complete with her own cylindrical hole through her head, ear to ear. These two have great chemistry together, and could have been a classic duo in a better written movie, the “lone wolf and cub” trope notwithstanding.

Between the acting, the cinematography, and the visual effects, The Creator has more than enough going for it to keep viewers rapt from start to finish. When it comes to the technical elements, this is a very well crafted film. If you don’t mind that it really has nothing original or even cohesive to say, then I guess it delivers.