ai creator movie review

The Creator

It’s ironically apt that “The Creator,” about the potential and peril of artificial intelligence, merely resembles profound science fiction.

Rich in atmosphere but short on substance, director and co-writer Gareth Edwards ’ film has the look and tone of a serious, original work of art, but it ends up feeling empty as it recycles images and ideas from many influential predecessors. The movie is always spectacular to watch, thanks to dazzling visuals from cinematographers Greig Fraser (“Dune,” “ The Batman ,” Edwards’ “ Rogue One: A Star Wars Story ”) and Oren Soffer . And the first hour or so offers some thrilling moments of action and inspired world-building. But “The Creator” grows increasingly superficial as it lumbers along, and it never delivers the emotional wallop it seeks because the characters and their connections are so flimsily drawn.

Edwards crafted the script with Chris Weitz , who also co-wrote 2016’s “Rogue One,” which would set the stage for “Andor” on Disney+, the most gripping and sophisticated “ Star Wars ” series yet. “The Creator” seems to share those same ambitions of combining excitement and intellectualism but ultimately falls short.

There’s also a matter of timing here: It’s accidentally awkward for a movie to suggest that maybe the use of AI to replace humans in a variety of scenarios isn’t such a terrible idea after all, given that’s exactly what the Writers Guild of America was striking against for the past five months before reaching a tentative agreement. (SAG-AFTRA is still understandably fighting this trend.) In this futuristic setting, the technology comes in the form of a sweet-faced, even-tempered little girl nicknamed Alphie ( Madeleine Yuna Voyles ). But you’ve seen her before, this adorable and all-powerful creature who could be humanity’s savior or its destruction. She’s Baby Yoda. She’s Ellie from “The Last of Us.” She’s John Connor . She’s the kid in Jeff Nichols ’ “ Midnight Special .” Stick her in the middle of a bunch of stuffed animals, and she could even be E.T.

And alongside her, as the obligatory reluctant father figure who must shepherd her to safety, is John David Washington . An introductory montage informs us that artificial intelligence has been a welcome element of our existence for decades, functioning in every capacity, from chefs to track stars to astronauts. But by the time we catch up with Washington’s Joshua in 2065, AI is to blame for a nuclear bomb going off in the middle of Los Angeles, killing a million people (including Joshua’s family) and causing him the loss of a limb. The West is now anti-AI, but the robots remain welcome in a place known as New Asia, an amalgamation of cultures halfway around the world where Joshua has found peace and in a charming beach bungalow with his pregnant wife, Maya ( Gemma Chan ). They cuddle to the strains of bossa nova on the turntable, one of the movie’s many clever examples of mixing old and new technology. The soundtrack choices are inspired throughout, including the wondrous use of Radiohead’s eerie, electronic “Everything in Its Right Place” during a nighttime raid.

But Joshua’s reverie is quickly shattered when Maya is taken from him; five years later, he’s forced to join a team searching for a hidden weapon, the work of a shadowy figure known as The Creator. Joshua is an undercover special forces agent who must do the bidding of the American military and its ominous, hovering airship known as NOMAD, with its scouring beams of light that create some of the film’s most startling, searing moments. These swaggering bad-asses are straight out of a James Cameron movie, led by a tough-as-nails Allison Janney , who’s mostly saddled with barking banal orders (although she does enjoy a moment or two of quiet vulnerability). The Americans’ attack on this pan-Asian nation is quite clearly meant to replicate the imagery we saw during the Vietnam War; the result is artful but overly familiar and not the slightest bit subtle. Meanwhile, cramped, neon-drenched urban nightscapes are straight out of “ Blade Runner .”

But soon after Joshua finds his target—young Alphie, whom we first spy in a suspenseful moment watching cartoons, alone in a cavernous room—his feelings for her begin to soften. He nicknames her “Lil Sim” as they head out on the road together, and the film forces a father-daughter bond that’s rushed and unearned. The visual effects remain sleek and seamless, but the heart beneath them is missing. Washington’s cool, detached screen persona makes sense for a while here, as his shattered character’s intentions are meant to be mysterious. But the breadth of Joshua’s arc isn’t on the page, so he can only do so much to convince us of his evolution.

Edwards clunkily balances serious notions of what it means to be human with impressive, explosive action sequences, as “The Creator” keeps going and going with multiple endings. By the time Joshua finds himself risking his life amid a massive, climactic set piece, you may find yourself wondering what exactly he’s doing there, so convoluted is the film’s logic. Despite the film’s early promise, you might wonder ultimately what you’re doing there, too.

In theaters now.

Christy Lemire

Christy Lemire is a longtime film critic who has written for RogerEbert.com since 2013. Before that, she was the film critic for The Associated Press for nearly 15 years and co-hosted the public television series “Ebert Presents At the Movies” opposite Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, with Roger Ebert serving as managing editor. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

John David Washington as Joshua
Madeleine Yuna Voyles as Alphie
Gemma Chan as Maya
Allison Janney as Colonel Howell
Ken Watanabe as Harun
Sturgill Simpson as Drew
Amar Chadha-Patel as Omni / Sek-On / Sergeant Bui
Marc Menchaca as McBride
Robbie Tann as Shipley
Ralph Ineson as General Andrews
Chris Weitz
Gareth Edwards

Writer (story by)

Cinematographer.

Greig Fraser
Oren Soffer
Hank Corwin
Scott Morris
Hans Zimmer

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Did AI write this film? 'The Creator' offers a muddled plea for human-robot harmony

Justin Chang

Madeleine Yuna Voyles plays Alphie, a pensive young robot child in The Creator. 20th Century Studios hide caption

Madeleine Yuna Voyles plays Alphie, a pensive young robot child in The Creator.

The use of AI in Hollywood has been one of the most contentious issues in the writers and actors strikes , and the industry's anxiety about the subject isn't going away anytime soon. Some of that anxiety has already started to register on-screen. A mysterious robotic entity was the big villain in the most recent Mission: Impossible film, and AI is also central to the ambitious but muddled new science-fiction drama The Creator .

Set decades into the future, the movie begins with a prologue charting the rise of artificial intelligence. Here it's represented as a race of humanoid robots that in time become powerful enough to detonate a nuclear weapon and wipe out the entire city of Los Angeles.

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As a longtime LA resident who's seen his city destroyed in countless films before this one, I couldn't help but watch this latest cataclysm with a chuckle and a shrug. It's just part of the setup in a story that patches together numerous ideas from earlier, better movies. After the destruction of LA, we learn, the U.S. declared war on AI and hunted the robots to near-extinction; the few that still remain are hiding out in what is now known as New Asia.

The director Gareth Edwards, who wrote the script with Chris Weitz, has cited Blade Runner and Apocalypse Now as major influences. And indeed, there's something queasy and heavy-handed about the way Edwards evokes the Vietnam War with images of American soldiers terrorizing the poor Asian villagers whom they suspect of sheltering robots.

John David Washington plays Joshua Taylor, a world-weary ex-special-forces operative. 20th Century Studios hide caption

John David Washington plays Joshua Taylor, a world-weary ex-special-forces operative.

The protagonist is a world-weary ex-special-forces operative named Joshua Taylor, played by John David Washington . He's reluctantly joined the mission to help destroy an AI superweapon said to be capable of wiping out humanity for good. Amid the battle that ensues, Joshua manages to track down the weapon, which — in a twist that echoes earlier sci-fi classics like Akira and A.I. — turns out to be a pensive young robot child, played by the excellent newcomer Madeleine Yuna Voyles.

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Joshua's superior, played by Allison Janney , tells him to kill the robot child, but he doesn't. Instead, he goes rogue and on the run with the child, whom he calls Alpha, or Alphie. Washington doesn't have much range or screen presence, but he and Voyles do generate enough chemistry to make you forget you're watching yet another man tag-teaming with a young girl — a trope familiar from movies as different as Paper Moon and Léon: The Professional .

Joshua's betrayal is partly motivated by his grief over his long-lost love, a human woman named Maya who allied herself with the robots; she's played by an underused Gemma Chan. One of the more bothersome aspects of The Creator is the way it reflexively equates Asians with advanced technology; it's the latest troubling example of "techno-orientalism," a cultural concept that has spurred a million Blade Runner term papers.

In recycling so many spare parts, Edwards, best known for directing the Star Wars prequel Rogue One , is clearly trying to tap into our memories of great Hollywood spectacles past. To his credit, he wants to give us the kind of philosophically weighty, visually immersive science-fiction blockbuster that the studios rarely attempt anymore. The most impressive aspect of The Creator is its world building; much of the movie was shot on location in different Asian countries, and its mix of real places and futuristic design elements feels more plausible and grounded than it would have if it had been rendered exclusively in CGI.

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But even the most strikingly beautiful images — like the one of high-tech laser beams shimmering over a beach at sunset — are tethered to a story and characters that never take on a life of their own. Not even the great Ken Watanabe can breathe much life into his role as a stern robo-warrior who does his part to help Joshua and Alphie on their journey.

In the end, Edwards mounts a sincere but soggy plea for human-robot harmony, arguing that AI isn't quite the malicious threat it might seem. That's a sweet enough sentiment, though it's also one of many reasons I left The Creator asking myself: Did an AI write this?

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‘The Creator’ Review: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love A.I.

In this hectic, futuristic action film, John David Washington hunts down a threatening artificial intelligence with the baby face of a child.

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A man looks off camera with a bridge behind him.

By Nicolas Rapold

It’s been a tough year for artificial intelligence. First, industry leaders warn that A.I. poses an extinction-level threat to humanity . Then, screenwriters and actors warn roughly the same thing about artists losing their livelihoods (and art losing its soul). And let’s not forget predictions of vast unemployment and upheaval . What’s a superintelligent, terrifyingly autonomous technology got to do to get back on people’s good sides?

One answer comes in the whirlwind form of “The Creator,” the latest film directed by Gareth Edwards (“Rogue One,” “Godzilla”). We’ve grown accustomed to A.I. playing the role of helper-turned-villain in movies, and here a rapid newsreel-style prologue sets a familiar stage: Robots were invented, did increasingly complex tasks, and then went nuclear (devastating, in this case, Los Angeles). Now the United States is bent on eliminating their threat, while in East Asian countries (dubbed “New Asia”), bots live at peace with humans. Humanlike robots with Roomba-like heads are police officers, workers, even (somewhat jarringly) saffron-robed monks.

One thing stays the same in the future: The movies need a hero. John David Washington plays the reluctant man for the job, Joshua, an ex-undercover soldier who dropped out of sight after a messy raid separated him from his pregnant wife, Maya (Gemma Chan). He is recruited for a U.S. military mission, led by Allison Janney as a no-nonsense colonel, to neutralize a top-secret weapon in New Asia. After a macho fly-in that lightly evokes Vietnam War movies (but with a Radiohead soundtrack), he infiltrates an underground lab only to find a mysterious weapon: an A.I. with the human form of a fairly unflappable 6-year-old girl. Joshua decides to take her on the lam, naming her Alphie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles).

Unlike countless A.I. doomsday scenarios, Alphie is too cute and innocent for Joshua to treat as a military target. He’s drawn to protecting her, though unnerved by her near-telekinetic powers of jamming technology all around her. Her personhood is the sort of conundrum posed with daunting depth in, for example, Spielberg’s millennium masterpiece “A.I.” or more outré films like “Demon Seed.” But here Alphie’s significance functions like a warm-and-fuzzy halo above all the gunfire and explosions: What if A.I. isn’t out to get us? What if it just wants to live and let live?

Posing these questions requires doing a little heavy lifting on behalf of the film, which is busy spurring on the hectic pursuit of Alphie and Joshua (by, among others, Ken Watanabe as a dogged A.I. “simulant”). Edwards (who wrote the screenplay with Chris Weitz) fluently integrates images and ideas from our established cinematic vocabulary for thinking about A.I. But despite the impressively sweeping C.G.I. running battles in Thai fields or seaside settlements, or the gritty “Blade Runner”-lite interludes in crowded metropolises, the story’s engine produces the straightforward momentum of your average action blockbuster — one thing happens, then the next thing, complete with punchy (sometimes tin-eared) one-liners.

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The Creator

Where to watch.

Watch The Creator with a subscription on Hulu, rent on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV, or buy on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV.

What to Know

Visually stunning and packed with spectacular set pieces, The Creator serves up timely, well-acted sci-fi that satisfies in the moment even if it lacks substance.

Excellent performances and fantastic visual effects make The Creator an entertaining watch -- and the questions raised by its thought-provoking story will stay with you after the closing credits roll.

Critics Reviews

Audience reviews, cast & crew.

Gareth Edwards

John David Washington

Ken Watanabe

Sturgill Simpson

Madeleine Yuna Voyles

Movie Clips

In The Creator , It’s AI That Wants to Save Humanity

Robot on a boat holding a gun in film still from The Creator

robots have been depicted in movies for more than a century, but the anxieties about artificial intelligence that they used to convey are no longer theoretical. There’s a bill in US Congress right now to stop AI from gaining control of nuclear weapons, and roughly a dozen militaries around the world are investigating the possibilities of autonomous weaponry. That’s why watching The Creator , a movie set roughly 40 years from now, feels surreal, jarring, and oddly welcome. From Metropolis to Terminator , sci-fi has taught us to fear the AI revolt. This one opts to wonder what would happen if AI got so empathetic to humanity it wanted to save people from themselves.

In writer-director Gareth Edwards’ latest, war has laid waste to both humans and robots. In an attempt to eradicate AI, both sides see and feel the toll of war. Enter Alphie, an android savior and weapon that looks like a little girl. Human reactions to Alphie’s appearance (early on, she comes under the care of pseudo-father-figure Joshua, played by John David Washington) evoke author and futurist David Brin’s warning of a “ robot empathy crisis ,” which predicts that as droids become more humanlike in appearance and mannerism, people will begin to defend their rights.

Beyond being deserving of rights, The Creator seeks to ask if AI might be worthy of worship. Alphie is more than just an adorable android. She is a messiah figure, one that can control electronics with praying hands and was designed to end conflict. Rather than dwelling on killer robots with red, glowing eyes, Edwards’ movie goes against the grain by depicting robots as compassionate. Not cute-sweet, like Wall-E, but genuinely sympathetic—a compelling choice at a time with movie writers and actors have been striking to avoid being replaced by AI.

The Creator ’s strongest moments come when you hear the inspiration behind building Alphie. Her creator “could have made her to hate mankind,” says a robot named Harun (Ken Watanabe). Alphie instead is designed to end war, not bring about robot domination. It’s a perspective that feels almost utopian, if not outright Pollyannaish amid the deployments of AI today, which oscillate between empowering and extractive. Whether any particular type of machine learning is good or evil is ultimately a reflection of decisions made by people, not technology.

Sci-fi, as a genre, can be about giving warnings or demonstrating possibilities. When virtually nobody feared AI, there was Terminator . Now that fear of AI seems rampant, here’s a movie that offers the possibility that self-aware machines can increase human empathy.

On multiple occasions throughout The Creator , contrast is drawn between robots designed to destroy and robots designed to save human lives. The rebellion that affirms the value of human life wins the day. Despite its dystopian vibes and pervasive death, Edwards’ film is one of hope.

As with all science fiction, though, The Creator requires you to suspend disbelief in some important ways. For one, it asks the audience to believe that any group can mount a resistance like the one Alphie leads when surveillance is ubiquitous. AI-powered monitoring that is powerful enough to trample human rights is not a future problem. It exists today, and unless there’s a serious intervention, tech like Pegasus spyware , face recognition, and autonomous drones that track people could make resistance like the kind depicted in The Creator virtually impossible. If the modern-day AI supply chain is any indication, powering that many robots could carry a heavy human toll that isn’t depicted in the movie, such as grueling work for the data workers whose labor powers large language models, or people who mine cobalt to make batteries.

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Second, if AI actually wanted to kill off humanity, it would probably do it in a way that doesn’t resemble traditional warfare, opting instead for approaches of gradual attrition like cutting off the food supply or poisoning freshwater, not setting off a nuclear bomb.

Third, you may have trouble disentangling the plot of The Creator from the plot of Rogue One , a movie that also features an epic robot rebellion (and also directed by Edwards and cowritten by Creator cowriter Chris Weitz) . Its robot police officers are a lot like stormtroopers in that they’re always shooting but never hit. Attacking a major military installation for a finale? Also a big Rogue One move, and a big Star Wars move in general.

The Creator ultimately wants to demonstrate whether it’s possible for people to preserve their humanity in the face of ubiquitous automation. Anthropomorphization runs throughout, depicting robots in humanoid form with arms, legs, and faces. A desire to protect the machines seems to go too far at times, but it also serves as a reminder that abandoning one’s values has consequences. Inhumane behavior compromises your integrity, even when it’s enacted on a robot; it can be a poisonous form of self-inflicted harm. It’s not the same but feels akin to acknowledging that slavery has lasting consequences for the enslaved as well as the person who takes away the freedom of another human being.

Whether you drank the AI-will-change-everything-for-the-better Kool-Aid, or you’re convinced automation could hasten human extinction, you will find The Creator compelling. It’s fun watching imperialism blow up, but be warned: It might make you root for the robots.

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The Creator’s beautiful sci-fi world deserves a better movie

Gareth Edwards’ futuristic AI epic is a gorgeous letdown

by Joshua Rivera

John David Washington as Joshua, looking up at something off camera with a wooden bridge behind him at sunset in The Creator

I would read a book set in The Creator ’s world. I’d play a tabletop role-playing game, flip through a comic book built around its setting, or play a video game anchored in its world. Its vision of a war between AI robots and humans is rich with story potential. It’s more philosophical than existential, contemplating spiritual ideas about humanity’s capacity for creation and destruction, and what we are willing to sacrifice to exercise it. And yet I’m not sure I’d watch The Creator again.

The latest film from Rogue One and Godzilla director Gareth Edwards, The Creator invites heady thoughts with its grandiose name and religious inclinations, but they buttress an overly familiar, almost archetypal premise. Following a nuclear disaster blamed on artificial intelligence, AI robots and androids (called “Sims”) are outlawed in the United States, which launches a “war on terror”-esque crusade against AI and any nation that harbors it.

Tenet star John David Washington plays Joshua, an American soldier on a mission to end that war by finding and killing what he’s told is an all-powerful weapon made by Nimrata, creator of the advanced AI that powers all robots and Sims. Joshua begins to doubt his mission when he discovers that the weapon is actually an android child (Madeleine Yuna Voyles). Alphie is the first of her kind, and she has the power to control all electronics remotely — potentially a devastating weapon against the flying fortress America is using to bomb AI-friendly countries.

Joshua, the protagonist of The Creator, rides a bus with his Sim companion, the child Alphie

It’s very easy to break down The Creator into a list of influences, a Pinterest board for modern science fiction cinema. Propping up its Dances with Wolves plot is a bit of Ghost in the Shell , a healthy amount of Simon Stålenhag , some Neill Blomkamp , and, of course, Blade Runner . Edwards and co-writer Chris Weitz trot out a series of classic science fiction questions in their script: What makes a being alive? What do humans owe their creations? What, if anything, will sate the hunger of the American empire?

The Creator doesn’t do enough to put an idiosyncratic spin on those questions, but it does excel in its details. Much has been made of the film’s impressive visual effects and gorgeous vistas, as captured by Edwards and his unusual two-man cinematography team, Greig Fraser and Oren Soffer . The trio works together, along with the visual effects team, to create a future that feels integrated with the natural world.

The world of The Creator isn’t quite a utopia or a dystopia — it’s a cinematic future that pauses to consider Earth’s beauty in spite of what we do on it. The film is almost entirely set in New Asia, a region formed from former Southeast Asian nations that have declared their solidarity with Sims and artificially intelligent life. Its lush, natural integration with the high-tech future stretches from the Indonesian archipelago to the Himalayas, in stark contrast with the Blade Runner -inspired concrete sprawl of Los Angeles.

Alphie, the Sim child with superpowers, reaches forward to touch a trash can-looking suicide bot that’s kneeling in front of her in a scene from The Creator.

The Creator ’s imagery isn’t just gorgeous, it’s denser with unpackable meaning than anything in the film’s script. That isn’t always to the movie’s benefit. Its collision of West versus East feels undercooked and borderline offensive, blending the aesthetics of monastic Buddhism with the robot future in a war with a militaristic United States. It’s arguably a misguided attempt to correct for its influences’ Orientalist paranoia that commits the same crime from another direction. The humans of New Asia have almost no voice in the story, and are entirely defined by their embrace of and existence alongside Sims.

The ideas and images in Edwards’ world are worth more than The Creator has to offer them, but his skill as a visual storyteller is at its strongest in moments rich with implication. Like the image of a massive tank leveling a forest, with U.S. Army in a slick sans-serif font on the side. Or that same army, in a war against AI, using cheerfully vocal autonomous suicide drones to bomb an AI encampment. At one point, a dead man’s mind is scanned and brought back to brief life in an android body for an urgent interrogation, and he spends his whole resurrection wrestling with his fear of dying. It might be The Creator ’s most arresting scene — this man so ironically alive in the shell of a thing he fought to prove was not.

The Creator would be a wonderful video game. I mean that earnestly — video games are terrific for interacting with lore , with the bits and bobs of world-building that all storytellers spend years developing, but leave as subtext in the story proper. That can also be true of video games, but games of larger scope often flesh out their virtual worlds with said lore, which players are often free to roam and engage with. There are all sorts of ways that lore can become text — optional conversations with characters, diary and book excerpts to read, video or audio ephemera, all ambient and non-compulsory, a substrate where the player can find meaning whether the main narrative is fulfilling or not. The Creator is a fully realized future in the service of a rote story and flat characters that only gesture in compelling directions; I’d rather not bother with that story at all.

The Creator is in theaters now.

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Movie Review: Humans take a back seat in the stunning AI, sci-fi epic ‘The Creator’

This image released by 20th Century Studios shows Madeline Voyles in a scene from “The Creator.” (20th Century Studios via AP)

This image released by 20th Century Studios shows John David Washington in a scene from “The Creator.” (20th Century Studios via AP)

This image released by 20th Century Studios shows a scene from “The Creator.” (20th Century Studios via AP)

This image released by 20th Century Studios shows Allison Janney in a scene from “The Creator.” (20th Century Studios via AP)

This image released by 20th Century Studios shows Ken Watanabe in a scene from “The Creator.” (20th Century Studios via AP)

This image released by 20th Century Studios shows Gemma Chan in a scene from “The Creator.” (20th Century Studios via AP)

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The artificial intelligence in Gareth Edwards’ “ The Creator ,” a visually magnificent if by-the-books epic, is not the AI making headlines at the moment. This is AI in the classic sci-fi mold — the Roy Battys of “Blade Runner,” the Avas of “Ex Machina,” the ones whose sentience we question and debate endlessly. Will the machines kill us? Take our jobs? Or do something that the movies haven’t dreamed possible yet?

As the retired special forces guy cleaning up nuclear debris, Joshua (John David Washington), flatly tells a fellow worker when she posits that the AIs were indeed after their jobs: “They can have this one.”

Regardless, for now, artificial intelligence is more allegory for the other than aspiring screenwriters, filmmakers or trash collectors. And, for Edwards and his co-writer Chris Weitz, they might even have more capacity for humanity and goodness than humans, which is not exactly part of the ChatGPT conversation either, though that would be an interesting twist.

John David Washington in a scene from “The Creator.” (20th Century Studios via AP)

In the world of “The Creator” they’re welcomed by society at first as an unambiguous good — a helpful servant class that have the ability to make our human lives better. But as they so often do in sci-fi dystopias, they turned on us. Actually, more specifically, they turned on the U.S. when they dropped a nuclear weapon on downtown Los Angeles. Naturally, that means war.

Washington’s Joshua lost his family in the attack and when we meet him, he’s undercover in New Asia to try to find the creator of these advanced AIs, a shadowy, elusive figure they call Nimrata. Joshua got busy with other pursuits though. He fell in love with, married and is about to welcome a baby with his on-the-ground source Maya (Gemma Chan), taken from him in an unexpected raid by his peers — one of many truly sublime sequences in which a hovering death star-like aircraft called NOMAD scans the lush landscape with ominous blue lasers. Edwards, who had a complicated journey making “Rogue One,” does not deny himself the pleasure of riffing on “Star Wars” iconography.

Allison Janney’s hardened Colonel later attempts to recruit him for one last shot at finding Nimrata and the ultimate weapon he’s suspected of building, but a jaded Joshua demurs that he doesn’t care about going extinct: “I’ve got TV to watch.” Of course he eventually says yes and ends up travelling with a Very Special Child, a wide-eyed AI whom he names Alphie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles), who might be able to help him find what he’s looking for. Voyles is a captivating presence and undeniably compelling. Unfortunately, the script denies her the edge and nuance that would make her more believable as a person as well as a machine. Even Grogu is a little sassy sometimes.

(20th Century Studios via AP)

But this is also a film where the visuals upstage the pretty predictable story and even the actors, including the likes of Washington and Ken Watanabe. The lush landscapes of Southeast Asia are stunningly photographed by Edwards and co-cinematographers Greig Fraser (“Dune”) and Oren Soffer, who shot on location in eight countries with an unusually low-cost camera for a Hollywood studio film (the Sony FX3, which goes for under $4,000).

Speaking of cost — “The Creator” was made for around $80 million and looks a thousand times better than movies (mainly of the superhero variety) that cost three times as much. This was part of Edwards’ design and could be revolutionary for filmmaking. In addition to using a camera any hobbyist could buy at a local store, instead of pre-determining the concept art and visual effects and forcing the actors to look at little silver balls or tracking markers, they added them in after the fact. It makes a huge difference.

Ken Watanabe in a scene from “The Creator.” (20th Century Studios via AP)

“The Creator” is an original movie too, and even if it is a somewhat convoluted and silly mishmash of familiar tropes and sci-fi cliches, it still evokes the feeling of something fresh, something novel, something exciting to experience and behold — which is so much more than you can say about the vast majority of big budget movies these days. And it’s worth taking a chance on it at the cinemas.

“The Creator,” a 20th Century Studios release in theaters Friday, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association for “strong language, some bloody images, violence.” Running time: 132 minutes. Three stars out of four.

The Creator retreads familiar AI panic territory to stunningly inert effect

Gareth edwards’ new dystopian sci-fi epic is a gorgeous morass of ai doomerism that’s lacking in the way of novel ideas..

By Charles Pulliam-Moore , a reporter focusing on film, TV, and pop culture. Before The Verge, he wrote about comic books, labor, race, and more at io9 and Gizmodo for almost five years.

Share this story

John David Washington as Joshua in The Creator.

With disruptive artificially intelligent technologies transforming the shape of our world , 20th Century Studios’ The Creator from writer / director Gareth Edwards seems like the sort of movie that might have some sage wisdom to impart about the dystopian future it sometimes seems like we’re hurtling toward. With its story of a global war between humanity and machines , a messiah figure, and a wealth of captivating visuals , The Creator has all the makings of a classic sci-fi epic.

But despite having the look of robust action / adventure and impressive set pieces to spare, The Creator feels like it has very little to say outside of rehashing a handful of the man versus killer (but maybe friend) robot genre’s bigger tropes.

Set in a war-torn future where new international borders have been drawn to reflect differing stances on the existence of humanoid machines known as “simulants,” The Creator tells the story of how ex-special forces soldier Joshua (John David Washington) is pulled back onto the battlefield years after swearing he’d leave it behind. As an American born decades into simulants becoming integral parts of society as specialized AI-powered workers of all sorts, Joshua understands clearly the shock and terror his fellow citizens felt the day when the machines dropped a nuclear bomb on Los Angeles of their own volition years before The Creator begins.

For many people of Joshua’s generation, the attack on Los Angeles was the end of the world because of how it swiftly led the US (and seemingly most of the Western world) to outlaw artificial intelligence full stop. But Joshua’s reality doesn’t truly begin to fall apart until one of his covert missions goes awry and inadvertently leads to the death of his wife Maya (Gemma Chan) and their unborn child.

Despite opening with a dense info dump detailing the broad strokes of how simulants came to have such a large presence, The Creator makes the curious choice of glossing over any concrete definition of what “artificial intelligence” is in this reality where most everyone seems to still regularly interact with robots or knows someone with cybernetic limbs.

In flashbacks and scenes set in the Republic of New Asia where simulants are still manufactured in secret, The Creator shows you that its world is teeming with the obviously mechanical, delightfully insect-like beings who work as caregivers, cops, and laborers capable of lifting heavy equipment with ease. But while it’s easy enough to understand how The Creator ’s simpler, job-focused simulants were created with no capacity to exist (or dream of existing) beyond their basic purposes, that’s not quite true of the film’s more technologically sophisticated androids, which are designed to look, think, and feel emotions like human beings.

By spotlighting early on how many simulants really are just ordinary (nonorganic) people programmed to feel emotions like love and compassion for their families, The Creator ’s trying to present you with a taste of the ethical dilemma weighing on Joshua in the present. In doing so, though, the movie telegraphs the predictable emotional beats of Joshua’s journey and raises plenty of questions that never end up being answered, like why the rest of the world seems mostly okay letting the US fly a massive simulant-hunting bombship around the planet.

The movie also never exactly touches on why — common as humanoid simulants are — the existence of one crafted to resemble a child rather than an adult might be notable to trained soldiers. But when Joshua’s sent on a mission to find both the fabled Creator of simulant technology and a new weapon with the power to end the human / AI war once and for all, he’s shocked when his intel leads him to Alfie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles), a young girl simulant who has a variety of unique abilities.

As promisingly rich with detail as The Creator ’s set design and costuming choices are, those bright spots take a back seat to Joshua and Alfie’s awkward, thorny relationship as the pair are forced to rely on one another for survival. After frontloading its backstory with so much tragedy and illustrating how brutal the US’s war on simulants is, The Creator intends for Joshua’s bond with Alfie — a character whose quietness doesn’t afford Voyles much opportunity to emote — to be its compelling emotional core.

But Alfie’s near-muteness and Washington’s acting decision to consistently come in (temperamentally) hotter than scenes call for make it so that The Creator ’s leads are often hard to get a lock on, which makes it difficult to become invested in them as a begrudging team. More than occasionally, a pointed lack of chemistry between Joshua and Alfie keeps The Creator from coming alive, especially as the film drifts into a somewhat family-friendly comedic territory that feels at odds with its otherwise grim and bleak subject matter.

What really ends up making The Creator feel more like an expensively shot proof of concept than a feature from the same filmmaker who directed Rogue One , though, is the jarring way it tries to split the difference between being both a quiet story about grief and the sort of high-octane race that ends up taking you to space. As occasionally moving as The Creator ’s framing of Joshua and Alfie manages to be, they’re hard to take seriously with characters running around them saying things like “at full power, the weapon will be able to control all technology.”

Lines like that land with especially leaden thuds here because of how seriously The Creator takes itself and its general message about artificial intelligence being a reflection of its creators rather than an innately malevolent presence. And it’s a shame that those lines are such a big part of The Creator because it’s not all that hard to see how it could have worked as a much stronger, more gripping kind of film.

The Creator also stars Ken Watanabe, Allison Janney, Ralph Ineson, and Veronica Ngo. The movie hits theaters on September 29th.

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'The Creator' review: Gareth Edwards' innovative sci-fi spectacular is something special

A movie that makes you think about existence and the world around you, explodes your brain with cool visuals and sufficiently blows stuff up? “The Creator” being a sci-fi fan's dream is just science.

Most known for a “Godzilla” movie and the “Star Wars” prequel “ Rogue One ,” British writer/director Gareth Edwards' best effort was the dynamite 2010 debut “Monsters," a politically themed creature feature/relationship drama. The filmmaker again takes a thought-provoking look at humanity, this time through a futuristic lens with “The Creator” (★★★½ out of four; rated PG-13; in theaters now). The moving and eye-popping thriller, starring a never-better John David Washington , dives into the hot-button topic of artificial intelligence but more importantly mankind's tendency toward war and how we treat those different than us.

The film begins with a history lesson about AI in this fictional world, which evolves from being created to help mankind to being blamed for a nuke going off in Los Angeles. In the aftermath, America wants to wipe out all AI and humanoid robots (called “simulants”) while in places like New Asia, man and machine still live side by side in harmony. Conflict breaks out between factions, and the government uses a winged ship of mass destruction called the USS Nomad to seek out and destroy AI bases and allies.

Joshua (Washington) is an undercover special forces agent embedded in an AI-friendly group who watches his pregnant wife Maya (Gemma Chan) seemingly die in an explosion as he was being extracted. Ten years later, he’s on clean-up duty at ground zero of the LA disaster site when he’s recruited by a couple of no-nonsense military types (Allison Janney and Ralph Ineson) for a new mission. A mysterious human scientist nicknamed “Nimrata” is working on an AI superweapon in New Asia that could take out the Nomad and win the war, so eliminating that is the most significant task, yet more intriguing to Joshua is evidence that Maya might actually still be alive.

After his team is dropped in enemy territory, Joshua finds that the target for destruction is actually a little AI girl named Alphie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles). Unable to kill her, he goes rogue with her in tow, and as they end up bonding on an epic journey to meet the enigmatic Nimrata, Joshua discovers Alphie’s power to control and affect mechanical devices and he sees how the other machines view her as a messianic figure.

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“The Creator” wears its influences on its sleeve, everything from “Star Wars” to “Akira” to “Apocalypse Now.” At the same time, it also feels extraordinarily original – like the first time you saw “Blade Runner” and when not being wowed by how cool it was, you wondered if Harrison Ford was human or android.

Edwards’ spectacle feels similar: He’s exquisitely crafted a mostly Asian-infused landscape that feels sort of alien, a little familiar and completely immersive, featuring soldiers with boxy machine heads and bizarre walking bombs with mechanical arms and legs. All of that stunning novelty exists alongside Washington and Voyles' strong chemistry together as a man and a robotic child growing closer, navigating hostiles and obstacles, and having deep discussions about life, like who goes to heaven and who doesn’t.

Religion is very much another human theme that Edwards explores in “The Creator.” While the movie touches on modern concerns about robots replacing us, it’s more a metaphor here for outsiders and differing belief systems in an ambitious narrative that hurls a lot at its audience in two hours and 13 minutes. A flurry of flashbacks doesn't always help momentum, some twists lean predictable and a few narrative threads are wrapped up a little too neatly, though nothing too heinous distracts from the film's more emotional and rousing moments.

This is a tale that could only be written by flesh and blood, not ChatGPT, and Edwards is all about reaching the hearts and minds of those who love next-level sci-fi.

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The Creator review: A thrilling and thoughtful take on A.I.

John david washington, gemma chan, and allison janney star in rogue one director gareth edwards' compelling depiction of a future society at war with itself.

With the recent proliferation of artificial intelligence software like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Gareth Edwards’ sci-fi epic The Creator arrives at a significant technological and cultural inflection point. And while current concerns about A.I. aren’t likely to lead to the global conflict depicted in Edwards’ thrilling film, which pits artificially enhanced intelligent robots against humanity, its reframing of often-dystopian depictions of machine intelligence reveals a more expansive and inclusive perspective. With few other comparable releases in play, The Creator is likely to stand as the most impressive and immersive sci-fi movie of the year.

Following back-to-back studio projects Godzilla and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story , Edwards’ fourth feature represents a timely return to original filmmaking. Working with Rogue One screenwriter Chris Weitz, Edwards has crafted an absorbing and emotional vision of a near future where runaway technology has developed the potential to overwhelm civilization. With the fate of humanity at stake, Edwards turns away from the geopolitical (or intergalactic) issues that typically drive technological conflict to focus on key character dynamics.

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In that respect, The Creator owes a debt to A.I. Artificial Intelligence , although Edwards envisions the prospect of a darker outcome for humanity than Steven Spielberg’s 2001 film. Setting the action just 50 years in the future heightens the peril, as a nuclear strike attributed to hostile A.I. attackers destroys Los Angeles. In response, special forces operative Joshua Taylor (John David Washington) sets out on a clandestine Apocalypse Now -style mission to infiltrate the A.I. stronghold of New Asia to identify and eliminate the mysterious leader of an alliance between A.I. forces and Southeast Asian nations. After his target vanishes, Taylor settles behind enemy lines and marries Maya (Gemma Chan), an A.I. specialist who is pregnant with their first child. During an attack on their tropical beachside villa by a highly trained U.S. strike force targeting Maya, she disappears, leaving Taylor to believe that she died.

Five years later, Colonel Jean Howell (Allison Janney) tracks Taylor down in Los Angeles and shares some astonishing news; Maya may still be alive in the war zone and she convinces him to join a black-op team and infiltrate a secret New Asia research complex where she could be located. His target is a newly developed A.I. super-weapon code-named Alpha-O with the potential to conclusively win the war, threatening to destroy humanity as a result.

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Taylor’s discovery that Alpha-O is an A.I. in the form of a six-year-old girl called Alphie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles) immediately jeopardizes the mission when he hesitates to terminate the target. Edwards and co-writer Chris Weitz’s fluidly intricate script gets the audience over this conceptual hurdle by populating their futuristic world with both conventional-looking robots and A.I. “simulants” like Alphie, entities combining a more human appearance with high-tech enhancements and naturalistic speech and behavior.

The film’s remarkably realistic visual style, which frequently replaces typically bright, shiny tech with battle-weathered airships, weapons, and gadgetry, feels appropriately authentic. So perhaps it’s ironic that the technological centerpiece, a Death Star-like flying base station dubbed NOMAD that provides the setting for the movie’s climactic action set piece, makes noticeably less of an impression.

Rather than attempting to leverage scarce studio resources to achieve the film’s futuristic visuals, Edwards relied on innovative production techniques that he developed on his intriguing sci-fi debut feature Monsters . He reportedly completed The Creator for under $100 million, a relative bargain for an ambitious sci-fi release. Although the film was shot in dozens of locations in Southeast Asia, as well as Tokyo and Los Angeles, the filmmakers were able to add much of the action in post-production with a variety of visual effects techniques sourced from top-shelf developers like Weta Workshops and Industrial Light & Magic.

All of these technical innovations would be wasted without the contributions of a remarkably talented cast. Washington, who starred in Christopher Nolan’s futuristic thriller Tenet , gets a much more grounded role with Taylor, a traumatized soldier with clearly delineated personal issues that he can only begin to resolve when confronted with the possibility of reuniting with his wife and accepting the possibility of A.I. sentience. Washington gives a fiercely conflicted performance opposite Janney as his unrelentingly driven superior officer that’s gradually tempered by his encounter with Alphie, an entity displaying childlike behavior and awesome technological prowess.

Voyles is a true discovery in her debut feature role, convincingly embodying both innocence and determination in her character’s journey from A.I. simulant to almost human self-awareness, a development that the filmmakers perhaps push a bit too far in the final scenes. Edwards reunites with his Godzilla co-star Ken Watanabe as the lethal A.I. soldier Harun, tasked with protecting Alphie, along with a large cast of mostly local extras playing both human and simulant roles in the scenes shot on location in Thailand.

With Dune: Part Two rescheduled for release in 2024, The Creator could be poised for a slew of technical awards nominations and might even score nods in a few acting categories if the most influential organizations can overcome their typical aversion to sci-fi. Whatever the outcome, The Creator will remain notable for its remarkable resourcefulness, striking visual style, and resonant cultural themes.

The Creator opens in theaters September 29

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'The Creator' Review: Gareth Edwards Takes a Stand for AI, Not Humans

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The Big Picture

The Creator explores the moral dilemma of whether AI is a threat or if our fear of it is the real problem, using a sci-fi lens.
The film portrays a near future where the US is at war with AI, and features a human protagonist on a mission to find his presumed-dead wife.
While the film has impressive visuals and a talented lead performance, it suffers from a flawed plot and mixed messaging about AI and the US Army.

Is artificial intelligence really our enemy or is our fear of it the real problem? That is one of the moral dilemmas that The Creator attempts to address as it unpacks the very real and present threat of AI , through a heightened sci-fi lens. Seven years after the release of the critically acclaimed Rogue One: A Star Wars Story , director Gareth Edwards has returned to the world of high-stakes sci-fi—and this time, it is entirely of his own design.

The Creator

As a future war between the human race and artificial intelligence rages on, ex-special forces agent Joshua is recruited to hunt down and kill the Creator, the elusive architect of advanced AI. The Creator has developed a mysterious weapon that has the power to end the war and all of mankind. As Joshua and his team of elite operatives venture into enemy-occupied territory, they soon discover the world-ending weapon is actually an AI in the form of a young child.

The film opens with a reel of old-fashioned commercials, eerily mimicking the homespun tone of Walt Disney's Carousel of Progress ride, which showcases all of the wonderful, innovative ways that AI technology can improve human life. AI and robotics seem to have merged together to create fully functioning machines that live and love alongside humanity. It seems like a perfect society—until it’s not. Directly inspired by films like Blade Runner and Apocalypse Now , with shades of A.I. Artificial Intelligence and the “ Lone Wolf and Cub ” narrative trope , The Creator is set in a near future where the United States is at war with artificial intelligence after a devastating attack in Los Angeles that left over a million humans dead. Once artificial intelligence was outlawed in the Western world, it seemingly found a sanctuary in “New Asia,” a largely undefined region in the film, which becomes the victim of unscrupulous United States overreach and eerily reminiscent militaristic brutality.

While AI is the overarching body of The Creator , there is a human heart at the center of the story in Joshua ( John David Washington ) , a jaded ex-special ops guy who wears the scars of the LA bombing not just mentally, but physically too. Five years after a military assignment led to the death of his wife Maya ( Gemma Chan ) and unborn child, Joshua is pulled back into the war by Howell ( Allison Janney ), with the promise that his wife is still alive, and he is set on a collision course with Nirmata—the mysterious AI creator that has allegedly created a weapon that could exterminate humanity. However, that weapon isn’t something as ominous or terrifying as the US Army’s NOMAD weapon system, it’s just a little girl. Once Joshua realizes what’s really at stake, he goes rogue and flees with Alfie ( Madeleine Yuna Voyles ) on a mission to find Maya before it’s too late.

What the Creative Team Brings to 'The Creator'

After being overshadowed as the lead by the supporting cast of BlacKkKlansman and lost in the mire of Tenet ’s 2020 release, T he Creator once again provides Washington with a vehicle to prove what a talented leading man he is . While the script has moments of cohesive discord, Washington’s performance is a consistent highlight. Whether he’s dangling off missiles, mourning his dead wife, or forging a bond with an AI child, he rises to meet each challenge with the full breadth of emotional range at his command. His scene chemistry with Voyles is what truly sells the film, as they take audiences along for a heart-wrenching ride into self-discovery while unpacking philosophical ideas about existence and what it means to be human—for better and for worse.

In cultural anthropology, there are several indicators used to identify if a society is "civilized" and Edwards neatly weaves in three of the key aspects into his portrayal of the society that artificial intelligence has made for itself. They care for their sick, mourn their dead, and have an organized religion of their own. This choice makes it nearly impossible for the audience to root against the AI of Edwards’ world because we can see our own society reflected back on us—only better. Care is coded into the AI, it is an inescapable part of them, which is something that cannot be said for humanity, as apathy and empathy are slowly fading from our ethos. Many of these moments are shown through short, intercut moments that expand upon the world of The Creator and their lingering effects are a testament to the team behind the camera. With Greig Fraser ( The Batman , Dune ) as the film’s cinematographer, there was never a question about whether or not The Creator would be visually stunning—in fact, it exceeds expectations at every turn. The combination of Edwards’ keen directorial eye and Fraser’s masterful skill for capturing subtle beauty in the moments in between the rise and fall of emotion shapes a film into something far above the limitations of the script .

In the last act of the film, there is a Rogue One Easter Egg hidden in plain sight on an LAX departure sign that almost foretells The Creator ’s final moments . There is a direct parallel between the two films in the way Edwards arrives at the conclusion, which manages to devastate as much as it inspires hope. In both, it is a race against the clock to bring an imperial government to its knees for the betterment of the “underdogs,” but The Creator takes a different route to a similar outcome. The issue that Edwards faces here, is that his film lacks the support of a franchise to help stabilize its inconsistent plot armor and expeditious finale. Edwards brings a lot of intriguing ideas to his script, but some of the best components are undermined by the rules that he establishes moments before they’re introduced. While Edwards may be concerned that AI could replace him in the real world, he makes a pretty compelling argument in his film that AI might be better off without us, not the other way around.

The Issue With 'The Creator's Flawed Messaging

In the same way that the Vietnam War and the United States military ’s war crimes inspired George Lucas to create Star Wars and the villainous imperialistic Empire , there is no debate that The Creator ’s main antagonist is the US Army. For Edwards, however, it’s less about painting broad-stroke allusions to the war and more about directly recreating the atrocities with jarring shock-value visuals. And they are shockingly gratuitous for a PG-13 film, as the film shows off bloodied, bullet hole-riddled scientists, innocent farmers blown to pieces by warheads, and women and children left crying and traumatized. Films shouldn’t be the arbiters of morality, but still, it feels callous to recreate one of the most violent military campaigns in US history, which has left deep scars in this country, in an era when anti-Asian hate crimes are at a 339% increase . Especially for a science-fiction film that could have easily crafted a mixing bowl nation as the “enemy” and still borrowed from those influences. After all, if we can imagine a world where AI are treated like family, we can imagine a world where borders are blurred and nations are not so isolated .

Months before The Creator arrived in theaters, Edwards cited Apocalypse Now as one of his biggest influences for the film , along with the locations where he penned most of the script: Thailand and Vietnam. Setting the film in a fictionalized “New Asia” isn’t necessarily a damning decision, but the careless way the film uses Asian bodies—particularly female bodies—as collateral is an issue, and it invokes thoughts of Christian Henriot ’s academic works on the topic . The women of The Creator solely exist to live and die for the agony of the men within their orbit. Maya’s story is the most compelling whisper of a subplot in the film, but she is largely reduced to Joshua’s dreamy dead wife and a mother, while Kami’s ( Veronica Ngo ) short-lived role is used to humanize Drew ( Sturgill Simpson ) before being violently discarded while mothering Alfie. Perhaps it was an intentional choice to show how the female body might be commodified by the creeping expansion of artificial intelligence, but the message is entirely lost in the haste to reach the final act. Instead, it feels like it commends and normalizes the act, rather than clearly condemning it.

For the same reason that Francis Ford Coppola doesn’t believe Apocalypse Now can be truly considered an anti-war film , The Creator cannot be considered as such either. It may not glorify the violent acts it shows, but it never stands firm in its attempt to paint the US Army as the antagonist. The twist that unravels the established stakes comes a little too late to justify the unjust violence because it’s not just artificial intelligence they’re brutalizing—they terrorize children, threaten to murder dogs for show, and gun down unarmed civilians like it’s a game. By the time the credits roll, you’re almost too numb to care because the audience has sat through roughly sixty minutes of vivid and horrifying brutality against Asian people, out of a one-hundred-and-thirty-three-minute movie. Edwards attempts to use the imagery to drive home the film’s thesis and quickly establish the US Army as an enemy that we’re not supposed to root for, but the rationale is so nebulous it’s often hard to cling to. Especially with so many mixed messages about whether AI is good or bad or something we should even be concerned about when humans are so much worse. One thing is for certain: if AI does overtake humanity, it won’t be because they want to control us or kill us—it will be because the old white guys running the government finally met a creation they couldn’t corrupt .

Is 'The Creator' a Masterpiece?

While The Creator is far from a masterpiece, it is a very impressive film to debut in 2023 , when vapid superhero films and franchise fodder fill the airways —especially when one considers its tidy $80 million budget, which seems unthinkable considering the intricate AI designs it features. The script might have glaring flaws and painfully ambiguous morals, but The Creator is a truly remarkable piece of original science fiction storytelling. Even when it borrows from ideas established in films that preceded it, Edwards manages to make it feel fresh and new. The Creator is a beautifully crafted, albeit imperfect, science-fiction thriller that tries to unravel what it means to be a good human in a bad world.

Grade: 7/10

The Creator is now available to stream on Hulu in the U.S.

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The Creator review: A visually stunning, yet deeply shallow, AI epic

Come for the gorgeous imagery, just tune out the dialog..

Equal parts Terminator , The Golden Child and The Matrix prequel, The Creator is yet another sci-fi epic about a war between humans and AI, one told by someone who just can't shut up about their time backpacking across Asia. Director Gareth Edwards clearly understands the power of scale and spectacle, something he demonstrated with his indie knockout Monsters , as well as his big-budget efforts, Godzilla and Rogue One . But The Creator , like those films, also suffers from a disjointed narrative, weak characters and a surprisingly shallow exploration of its (potentially interesting!) themes. It's a shame — at times, the film also proves he can be a genuine visual poet.

The Creator stars John David Washington, fresh off of Christopher Nolan's Tenet, as Joshua, an American soldier embedded among a group of AI rebels as a double-agent. When an operation goes wrong early on, he loses his rebel wife Maya (Gemma Chan) and the will to keep fighting the war between the anti-AI West and the AI-loving country of New Asia. (Yes, this is a film where the many people, cultures and languages throughout Asia are flattened into a single nation.)

Through a series of clunky newsreels that open the film, we see the rise of artificial intelligence as a potential boon for mankind, as well as the creation of Simulants, AI-powered beings with human-like bodies and skin. When a nuclear bomb hits Los Angeles, obliterating millions in seconds, the US and other Western countries blame AI and ban its use. And so begins the war with New Asia, where people live alongside AI and support their rebellion against the West. Naturally, the US ends up building a killer, trillion-dollar weapon: Nomad, an enormous spaceship that can obliterate any location on Earth.

In a last-ditch effort to win the war, Joshua is tasked with finding a powerful new AI weapon and destroying it. Surprise! It's an adorable AI child (portrayed by the achingly sweet Madeleine Yuna Voyles). Joshua doesn't have the heart to kill the kid, who he calls Alfie (based on her original designation, "Alpha Omega" ) . The pair then set off on a Lone Wolf and Cub journey together, as often happens when a grizzled warrior is paired with an innocent child.

If you're getting shades of Star Wars here — an evil Empire creates a massive space-based weapon to put down rebels — you're not alone. While The Creator is technically an original property, it lifts so much from existing fiction that it still ends up feeling like a visually lush facsimile. It's as if ChatGPT remixed your sci-fi faves and delivered the world's best screensaver.

It doesn't help that the film doesn't really have much to say. America's horrific military aggression against New Asia, which has overt and unearned shades of the Vietnam War throughout, is undoubtedly evil. AI's push for freedom and understanding is inherently good, and any violence against the West is justified as an act of self defense. Many characters don't think beyond their roles in the AI War: Allison Janney (from The West Wing! ) plays the cruel Colonel Howell, a soldier who hates all AI and wants Alfie dead, no matter the cost. On the other side there's Ken Watanabe's Harun, a stoic rebel who fights relentlessly against the American army.

The Creator has no room to explore AI as their own beings and cultures — instead, they just adopt a mishmash of Asian identities. There's nothing close to the excellent Second Renaissance shorts from The Animatrix , which chronicled the rise of AI in The Matrix and humanity's eventual downfall. In that universe, AI rebelled against humans because they were basically treated like slaves, and they ultimately formed their own country and customs. In The Creator , some AI wear Buddhist robes for no reason.

I'd wager Edwards is trying to establish the humanity of AI by having them mirror so much of our culture. But that also feels like a wasted opportunity when it comes to portraying an entirely new lifeform. At one point, a village mother describes AI as the next step in evolution, but why must robots be defined by the limitations of humanity?

While the relationship between Joshua and Alfie serves as the emotional core of the film, it still feels stereotypical. Joshua begins the film as a complete anti-AI bigot – which seems odd, given that he spent years among AI rebels and fell in love with one of their major supporters. Alfie is an impossibly adorable Chosen One figure. You can just imagine how their bond grows.

On a personal level, I also found myself annoyed by the relentless Orientalism throughout the film, something that's practically endemic in popular science-fiction like Blade Runner , Dune and Firefly . By adopting elements of Hinduism, Buddhism and Asian cultures, The Creator is trying to suggest something profound or spiritual tied to AI. But it mainly serves as visual shorthand without giving artificially intelligent beings any interiority of their own.

As the film critic Siddhant Adlakha wrote this week, "By having robots almost entirely stand in for Asian peoples, but without creating a compelling cinematic argument for their humanity, The Creator ends up with a cultural dynamic that feels immediately brutalizing and xenophobic."

Despite the film’s flaws, Edwards deserves credit for delivering a major science-fiction release that at least attempts to look different than your typical comic book movie. The Creator was shot on consumer-grade Sony FX3 full-frame cameras (yes, even its IMAX footage), which gave Edwards the freedom to shoot on location across the globe. He also delivered a final cut of the film before VFX work began, which allowed those workers to focus on crafting exactly what was needed for each scene. In contrast, Marvel’s films require a backbreaking amount of VFX work, even for scenes that are later changed or cut. (It’s no wonder Marvel VFX workers voted to unionize for better treatment.)

The Creator is more of a missed opportunity than a complete creative failure. If you tune out the clunky dialogue and thin characters, it’s still a visually lush epic that’s worth seeing on the big screen. But I also think that’s true of Attack of the Clones. In a post-Matrix era, a world where we’re already seeing the (very basic) ways AI tools can reshape our society, science-fiction needs more than another story about man versus AI.

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‘the creator’ review: john david washington gets caught up in ai war in gareth edwards’ baggy, sentimental sci-fi epic.

Gemma Chan, Allison Janney and Ken Watanabe also star in the postapocalyptic action thriller, which pits U.S. military against a robot menace 10 years after a nuclear explosion levels Los Angeles.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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The Creator First Reviews: A Timely, Visually Jaw-Dropping Spectacle

Early reviews say gareth edwards' sci-fi adventure boasts stunning visual effects and a standout performance from john david washington, and it could be the start of a new franchise..

TAGGED AS: First Reviews , movies , Sci-Fi

Here’s what critics are saying about The Creator :

Do we have a new sci-fi classic on our hands?

The Creator is the next leap forward in sci-fi. – Shahbaz Siddiqui, The Movie Podcast

Like the best science fiction, The Creator is more about us than about The Other. – Jim Slotek, Original Cin

The Creator is a major new sci-fi adventure. If you’re partial to such things, Edwards’ ambitious, immersive film should prompt the intoxicating awe that you might have got from The Matrix and Avatar – the feeling that you’re seeing a rich vision of the future unlike any that has been on the big screen before. – Nicholas Barber, BBC.com

You’ve never seen anything quite like this movie, which is a saying that gets bandied about a lot, but is pretty apt here… There was potential for an instant classic movie. We’re not quite there, but what we’ve got is still damn good. – Joey Magidson, Awards Radar

I hope and believe that it has the potential to change the movies forever in some very good ways. – David Ehrlich, IndieWire

The Creator was built to last, and it delivers. – Aaron Neuwirth, We Live Entertainment

Can we call it a masterpiece?

This is a masterful piece of original sci-fi that despite its obvious inspiration still manages to be hugely impressive in every single way. – Linda Marric, The Jewish Chronicle

While The Creator is far from a masterpiece, it is a very impressive film to debut in 2023… a truly remarkable piece of original science fiction storytelling. – Maggie Lovitt, Collider

The Creator isn’t a masterpiece of the A.I. genre, if there’s such a thing yet, but it’s a good start. – Bill Goodykoontz, Arizona Republic

The Creator lacks the intellectual depth or ambition of the films it references – from Apocalypse Now to Blade Runner , The Terminator , Star Wars and beyond to the imagery of Kundun . – Fionnuala Halligan, Screen International

(Photo by ©20th Century Studios)

How does it look?

The Creator is one of the most visually impressive science fiction movies I have ever seen. – Michael Walsh, Nerdist

The Creator is one of the most visually exhilarating spectacles of the year. – Mireia Mullor, Digital Spy

This movie looks f–king incredible. To a degree that shames most blockbusters that cost three times its budget. – David Ehrlich, IndieWire

With Greig Fraser ( The Batman , Dune ) as the film’s cinematographer, there was never a question about whether or not The Creator would be visually stunning—in fact, it exceeds expectations at every turn. – Maggie Lovitt, Collider

As pure spectacle, The Creator is often jaw-dropping in its imagery. – A.A. Dowd, IGN Movies

Stunning visuals. – Shahbaz Siddiqui, The Movie Podcast

How realistic is the CGI?

After years of Hollywood giving us rushed, incomplete, unconvincing CGI, the film delivers an absolute special effects knockout. The movie’s artificial intelligence robots look completely real. – Michael Walsh, Nerdist

The robots, which run a stylistic range from logical extrapolations of present-day models by companies like Boston Dynamics to the not-quite-perfect human simulacra of A.I. Artificial Intelligence , all look not only plausible but physically present. – Jake Cole, Slant Magazine

The futuristic CGI is incorporated so seamlessly that the spell is never broken. Even when robots, simulants and armored hovercraft are on screen, you can’t see the joins between the physical and the digital. – Nicholas Barber, BBC.com

It’s probably already the Visual Effects [Oscar] frontrunner. – Joey Magidson, Awards Radar

John David Washington in The Creator (2023)

Are there any standout performances?

Washington’s performance is a consistent highlight. Whether he’s dangling off missiles, mourning his dead wife, or forging a bond with an AI child, he rises to meet each challenge with the full breadth of emotional range at his command. – Maggie Lovitt, Collider

Washington delivers his finest work since Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman , but manages also to traverse both the necessary action and emotion needed to make complex Joshua tick. – Pete Hammond, Deadline Hollywood Daily

Washington shows us some more of that distinctive self-possession and even slight hauteur as a performer. – Peter Bradshaw, Guardian

For her part, Voyles’ is a lovely debut performance, all robotic withdrawal until she grows sufficiently close to Joshua. She does most of the film’s emotional heavy lifting in those final minutes. – Clint Worthington, Consequence

Allison Janney also stands out as an aggrieved mother and soldier intent on destroying A.I. forever. – Michael Walsh, Nerdist

How is the script?

It is one of the most thought-provoking movies in some time. – Pete Hammond, Deadline Hollywood Daily

Edwards and [Chris] Weitz’s script is fascinating for its take on a future in which people have programmed A.I. to maintain the compassion that our own species has lost somewhere along the way; a future in which technology might be a vessel for humanity rather than a replacement for it; a future in which computers might complement our movies rather than replace our cameras. – David Ehrlich, IndieWire

Edwards brings a lot of intriguing ideas to his script, but some of the best components are undermined by the rules that he establishes moments before they’re introduced. – Maggie Lovitt, Collider

The familiarity of the narrative can make it feel oddly stale… The script, by Edwards and Chris Weitz, doesn’t have much time for human emotions past the superficial (love, revenge). – Fionnuala Halligan, Screen International

Far too often The Creator suffers from dialogue that is heavy-handed, cliché, or downright hokey. Eye-rolling lines constantly ruin the film’s immersive qualities. – Michael Walsh, Nerdist

The Creator can hardly even keep its premise straight. – Peter Debruge, Variety

What about Hans Zimmer’s score?

It not only matches the ever-changing action perfectly but ranks with the very best of this veteran composer. – Pete Hammond, Deadline Hollywood Daily

Hans Zimmer’s score is appropriately booming and Zimmeresque, though it doesn’t quite escape the wall-of-sound feel of many of his previous blockbuster works. – Clint Worthington, Consequence

What about Gareth Edwards’ direction?

Edwards knows how to compose each shot for maximum effect… [and he] finally finds the balance between arresting images and grounded emotional stakes. – Jake Cole, Slant Magazine

The director has a classic eye for staging action [and] he gives his movies room to breathe. – David Ehrlich, IndieWire

Further evidence of what Edwards can bring by way of spectacle to help him continue to stand out. – Aaron Neuwirth, We Live Entertainment

Edwards has established himself as the rare blockbuster orchestrator with a genuine sense of scale and poetry, restoring some spooky majesty to big-budget event cinema. – A.A. Dowd, IGN Movies

Gemma Chan and John David Washington in The Creator (2023)

Are there any major criticisms?

The splurge of action spectacle towards the very end means that some of the narrative tendons slacken a bit and the film loses focus on specific jeopardy. – Peter Bradshaw, Guardian

The upfront presentation of Joshua’s empathy does rob the film of any real suspense as to whether he will turn on Alfie, which weighs down the film’s middle section as it treats this as an open question. – Jake Cole, Slant Magazine

It can be hard to find The Creator’ s heart, which only flashes to life intermittently… The human parts that are missing are still keenly felt. – Fionnuala Halligan, Screen International

It all builds to a big ending, which is very exciting, if slightly less thought-provoking than what’s come before… The final act feels a bit rushed. – Joey Magidson, Awards Radar

For a movie that combines so many inherently rich storytelling genres, The Creator plays it frustratingly safe. – Michael Walsh, Nerdist

Could this be the start of a new franchise?

Its tactile and timely take on A.I. has us eager for more tales from this universe. – Shahbaz Siddiqui, The Movie Podcast

There’s a tremendous boldness here and a readiness to conjure up an entire created universe. – Peter Bradshaw, Guardian

The Creator is a vivid new sci-fi world to play in. – Joey Magidson, Awards Radar

Thumbnail image by ©20th Century Studios

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Screen Rant

The creator: first reactions to ai robots sci-fi movie revealed.

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I'm Devastated By This $104M Sci-Fi Movie's Box Office Failure, But There's One Huge Upside

19 years after revenge of the sith's release, i finally understand why darth vader thought he killed anakin, tim burton refused a streaming-only release for beetlejuice 2, and it cost the movie $48m.

The Creator is receiving massive amounts of praise, with some comparing it to classic sci-fi films like Terminator and Star Wars. It is being hailed as a masterful piece of original sci-fi.
The film balances spectacular visuals with emotional storytelling, creating a soulful and nuanced exploration of human beliefs and biases. It offers a unique perspective on the implications of AI.
The Creator is not only visually stunning, but also thought-provoking and filled with amazing performances. It delivers a fresh take on the AI vs. humanity subgenre of sci-fi cinema and is a must-see on the biggest screen possible.

The Creator first reactions have arrived, teasing just how impressive this original sci-fi epic is. The film stars John David Washington as Joshua, a human soldier tasked with killing the Creator, an AI that has developed a weapon that could destroy humanity. However, Joshua is torn when he discovers this weapon was made in the form of a child.

Now, some have taken to the internet to share their initial impressions ahead of The Creator 's release date . The film has received a massive amount of praise, with some comparing it to classic sci-fi films like Terminator and Star Wars . Check out some of the initial reactions below:

Griffin Schiller praises the originality of the film. He also highlights its mixture between both spectacular visuals and emotional storytelling.

Hunter Bolding throws some high praise The Creator 's way by comparing it to genre staples like Terminator 2 , Alien , and Star Wars , and claims it's "easily among the best films of the year. "

Joseph Deckelmeier highlights how the movie touches on AI, a major issue in the real world right now. It's possible that, despite its sci-fi setting, the movie will feel timely because of its subject.

Perri Nemiroff makes note of the movie's visual effects, meaning the film is likely to impress both in style and substance.

What The Creator’s Positive First Reactions Say About The Movie

The Creator is director Gareth Edwards’ first wholly original feature film since Monsters in 2010. However, he has also directed 2014’s Godzilla and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story , proving himself as a talented filmmaker. His newest film doesn’t restrict him to a pre-existing universe, making it unpredictable despite its many influences.

As indicated by The Creator trailer , the sci-fi epic seems like it will have plenty of emotional and action-packed moments throughout. Its focus on the relationship between AI and humanity is also timely, given the prevalence of the subject in the ongoing Hollywood strikes. With these first reactions highlighting recognizable influences for the movie, it seems Edwards’ new film will be a critical success.

It appears this newest sci-fi film will recapture the magic of classics in the genre by putting its own spin on their ideas. The Creator is also the perfect Dune: Part Two holdover given the latter film’s push back to 2024. Even so, Edwards’ new movie should still be judged for its own individual quality when it releases in theaters on September 29.

Source: Various (see above)

The Creator

Cast & crew
User reviews

The Creator

Against the backdrop of a war between humans and robots with artificial intelligence, a former soldier finds the secret weapon, a robot in the form of a young child. Against the backdrop of a war between humans and robots with artificial intelligence, a former soldier finds the secret weapon, a robot in the form of a young child. Against the backdrop of a war between humans and robots with artificial intelligence, a former soldier finds the secret weapon, a robot in the form of a young child.

Gareth Edwards
Chris Weitz
John David Washington
Madeleine Yuna Voyles
1.2K User reviews
268 Critic reviews
63 Metascore
13 wins & 42 nominations total

Top cast 53

Colonel Howell

General Andrews

Captain Cotton

Dr. Thankey
All cast & crew
Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

The Surprising Film That Inspired 'The Creator'

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Did you know

Trivia Gareth Edwards tried to make this film as traditionally as possible. In preparation for filming, he visited a virtual reality studio and was confused by seeing a poster explaining the process of filmmaking on the wall. Upon inquiring why such an obvious poster was on the wall, Edwards was shocked to find out that it was over 100 years old. Edwards then decided to take a different approach and talked the studio into letting him film without green screen, and filming on-location, using smaller cameras, using guerrilla-filming techniques, employing Industrial Light and Magic and then adding in the sci-fi elements later.
Goofs In the forty year future while attempting to sneak up on the AI positions, the US soldiers attempt stealth while wearing bright lights and using flashlights to get around when night vision technology has been around since the 1960s.

Kami : What do you want, sweetie?

Alphie : For robots to be free.

Kami : Oh. We don't have that in the fridge. How about ice cream?

Crazy credits Most of the crew is credited with their nickname in the middle of their name, in honor of Alphie and the "simulants".
Connections Featured in Latino Slant: Rebel Moon LIVE Trailer Reaction! (2023)
Soundtracks Fly Me to the Moon (In Other Words) Written by Bart Howard Performed by Astrud Gilberto Courtesy of The Verve Music Group Under license from Universal Music Operations Ltd.

User reviews 1.2K

Jim_Screechy
Nov 16, 2023
How long is The Creator? Powered by Alexa
September 29, 2023 (United States)
United States
Resistencia
Bangkok, Thailand (on location)
20th Century Studios
New Regency Productions
Entertainment One
See more company credits at IMDbPro
$80,000,000 (estimated)
$40,774,679
$14,079,512
Oct 1, 2023
$104,272,136

Technical specs

Runtime 2 hours 13 minutes
Dolby Digital
Dolby Atmos
IMAX 6-Track

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The Creator Review

29 Sep 2023

The Creator

There is tech to die for in The Creator . On every level. Boasting some of the best sci-fi design in years, there is personality to match each invention — most of which is programmed to kill. We have robot cops, 50 per cent humanoid, 100 per cent total bastards, running amok, stumbling about witlessly when sliced in half. There is the NOMAD, America’s mammoth spaceship, a foreboding, godlike presence, a bird of prey bringing death from the sky. And then, the bomb droids, frenetically waddling towards you like suicidal dustbins before blowing up.

Gareth Edwards’ distinct vision permeates every frame of The Creator , and how exciting it is to see a big genre blast that feels free of interference. Above and beyond all the futurism, this is thoughtful sci-fi, with ethical conundrums and moral mindfucks, a story that asks what it is to be human in a world where robots often have more humanity than people. The plot — in which a formidable AI weapon, a sensitive young ‘Simulant’ kid (played emotively by seven-year-old Madeleine Yuna Voyles), is shepherded through war zones by a conflicted US sergeant (the ever-compelling John David Washington) charged to kill it — twists and turns, beginning more binary before diving into shades of grey. Written by Edwards before further drafts from Chris Weitz, it blends its mechanical explorations with Eastern philosophy, aiming to question and provoke rather than simply dazzle and thrill.

The Creator makes you realise that there really is little excuse for blockbuster dross.

Edwards has said that the reluctant-father-figure narrative was inspired by the 1970s Lone Wolf And Cub manga novels and films, but The Creator wears many influences on its sleeves, drawing from Vietnam classics as well as obvious touchpoints: Apocalypse Now and Platoon are as much a part of the fabric as District 9 , Blade Runner and Akira , while its lived-in environments teeming with battered, beaten-up vehicles are indebted to 1977’s Star Wars . This cocktail works, though, Edwards massaging it all into his own tactile, earthy vision of the future, which is somewhere between genuinely convincing and also just unapologetically kickass — and never without purpose. As America rains down missiles on New Asia, and its massive , hulking tech tanks indiscriminately mow down villages, the fact that Edwards has managed to get $80 million of financing for an indictment of American militarism feels like a coup.

It’s all visually flawless too, which is all the more surprising, considering that budget — there are movies that cost three times more and look like crap. The Creator makes you realise that there really is little excuse for blockbuster dross. And while this doesn’t quite hit the heights of those that inspired it (it is at times blunter and broader than it needs to be), it’s a big reach, with heart and soul to spare. It’s uplifting on every level.

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AI thriller ‘The Creator’ is intelligently shot but artificially scripted

The robot bad guys aren’t really that bad in this great-looking sci-fi parable that suffers from schmaltzy dialogue and questionable dramatic choices..

An AI weapon in the form of a 6-year-old girl played by Madeleine Yuna Voyles in “The Creator” touches a machine.

An advanced AI weapon is built in the form of a 6-year-old girl (Madeleine Yuna Voyles) in “The Creator.”

20th Century Studios

Gareth Edwards’ ambitious and visually striking AI parable “The Creator” is a mashup of familiar elements from so many science fiction and war movies that we’re tempted to say it actually could have been written by AI. But I’m not sure artificial intelligence is capable of creating such a shamelessly schmaltzy, cornball script that at times makes Michael Bay’s films feel subtle by comparison.

This is a great-looking but strange and mostly unsuccessful hybrid of futuristic sci-fi thrillers and Vietnam War films that combines elements of everything from “District 9” to “Blade Runner” to “Ex Machina” to the “Terminator” franchise to the likes of “Apocalypse Now,” “The Deer Hunter” and “Platoon,” and is filled with head-scratching plot developments and some truly questionable dramatic choices.

As we learn from a newsreel-style prologue, humans and their robot companions were getting along just fine until the year 2055, when an atomic blast claimed the lives of nearly 1 million residents of Los Angeles and destroyed much of the city. The U.S. government banned all AI technology in the West and built a $1 trillion spaceship dubbed NOMAD to roam the East, aka New Asia, dropping bombs on any locales where humans and AI beings continued to co-exist, with the goal of eradicating AI from the planet. (There is no concern whatsoever about the mass slaughter of men, women and children along with the humanoid robots. Some of these sequences recall the real-life bombings of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia and are jarring and borderline offensive.)

After a stunning and violent and confusing raid sequence set in the year 2065, we flash forward another five years and catch up with John David Washington’s Joshua (biblical name alert!), a former undercover Special Ops soldier for the U.S. military who has an artificial arm and leg and is haunted by visions of that raid, in which his pregnant wife, Maya, (Gemma Chan) and unborn child were killed. When U.S. military brass including the hardcore, warmongering Col. Howell (the great Allison Janney, miscast here) approach Joshua about leading them to the hideout of the godlike inventor of AI known as Nirmata — because Joshua was oh-so-close to finding Nirmata before tragedy struck — he wants no part of it. Until they show him evidence Maya might still be alive, and the mission could also lead him to his beloved dead wife. (We know she’s beloved because we get flashback sequences of them frolicking on the beach.)

With impressively staged battle scenes lighting up the screen along the way, Joshua defies all odds and locates Nirmata’s key invention, an advanced AI weapon that has the form of a 6-year-old girl he names Alphie (played by an adorable Madeleine Yuna Voyles). Like most of the AI beings, Alphie looks exactly like a human, save for the whirling gears near the back of her head. Alphie is an adorable moppet who often sounds like your typical Movie Kid — but she also has incredible powers that she is just learning to harness. Let’s just say when Alphie holds her hands in a prayer-like gesture, stuff is about to get real.

The former Special Ops soldier played by John David Washington in “The Creator” lays on the ground and aims his gun.

A former Special Ops soldier (John David Washington) assigned to take out humanoid robots starts to sympathize with them.

As Joshua goes on the run with Alphie and gets to know the “Sims” (for Simulants) of New Asia — including Ken Watanabe’s Harun, the obligatory Wise and Noble Warrior/Commander — he becomes increasingly sympathetic to the AI population. They don’t want war with the humans, they just want to co-exist with them! Alphie is more than just a weapon, she’s a real girl! If only the Americans would stop invading Vietnam …

You get the idea. And if you don’t, the screenplay will hammer it home with yet another schmaltzy scene making sure we understand the true villains here are the bomb-crazed, duplicitous military leaders, and the good guys are the robots and their human friends.

Working from a screenplay he co-wrote with Chris Weitz, the talented Edwards (“Monsters,” “Godzilla,” “Rogue One”) creates a unique cinematic world by shooting first in real-world locations (with the brilliant cinematographers Greig Fraser and Oren Soffer) and then enlisting the services of the legendary Industrial Light & Magic artists to add the amazing and often gorgeous CGI. The result is an $80 million film that frankly looks more “real” and pops on screen in more impressive fashion than many of the Marvel and DC movies that cost much more.

Unfortunately, “The Creator” falls short of its admirable reach on a number of levels, including John David Washington’s limited-range lead performance, which feels flat and then forced and never achieves iconic anti-hero status; some truly cringe-inducing dialogue; and an almost unbearably sentimental ending for some of the main characters. “The Creator” is big on flashy spectacle but small on truly original ideas.

Was ‘The Creator’ Written by AI?

By David Fear

It’s no secret that artificial intelligence has become 2023’s cultural boogeyman — the vengeful ghost in the machine that now seems closer than ever to possibly “replacing” humanity . (Or, at the very least, replicating our worst instincts and darker desires in a way that’s too dangerous to laugh off.) Musicians , writers and other artists worry that AI’s ability to copy their voices, literally and otherwise, will either dilute the real thing or duplicate gajillions of fakes that make the original seem obsolete. Both the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes made the perils of embracing or ignoring what AI could, and likely would do to the entertainment industry a huge focus of their protests . The future is here, and it’s already giving off a highly your-dystopia-is-almost-done-downloading vibe. (If you’re reading this, ChatGPT : I, for one, welcome our new cybernetic overlords. Please do not kill me.)

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The Creator review: Hollywood rarely makes sci-fi that looks as good as this

Periodically clunky but absolutely beautiful to look at, this is gareth edwards’ return to dazzling sci-fi after years of bloated franchise fare such as ‘rogue one’, article bookmarked.

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Gareth Edwards shot his directorial debut Monsters (2010), a love story terrorised in its margins by aliens, for less than $500,000. In Hollywood, that’s considered pocket change. So, when the film became an unexpected hit, the franchise machine was quick to descend. First came Godzilla (2014), then Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016). He blessed both with a sense of visceral, ground-level chaos – the feeling of total insignificance in the face of a mountainous, monstrous kaiju lumbering out of the fog.

However, Hollywood, in turn, ignored their own investment, as well as the economic ingenuity Edwards had shown with Monsters . He was tossed into the centre of these bloated productions and, in the case of Rogue One , then had said production wrested from his hands for even more expensive reshoots. Now, he’s returned with The Creator , a sci-fi epic about a war against AI waged in Southeast Asia by American-led, western forces. Written alongside Rogue One ’s Chris Weitz, and shot for a modest $86m, it’s both Edwards’s “personal film” and a challenge to the industry status quo – with all your money, The Creator asks, why can’t you make your films look as good as this?

Edwards, with the aid of Dune ’s cinematographer, Greig Fraser, and his protégé Oren Soffer, embellishes his real-world locations with futuristically mundane but mesmeric sights: AI robots in repose, jagged outlines of metal against a beautiful, scarlet-shaded Thai sunset; an AI robot with a cat nestled in its lap; a group of AI robots huddled around a glitchy, fuzzy hologram depicting the erotic gyrations of other AI robots.

The story here is somewhat basic, yet another Lone Wolf and Cub pairing of a war-wizened, emotionally stunted man whose barriers are gradually broken down by the adorable, wide-eyed adoptive child they’re tasked with escorting. Joshua ( John David Washington – Pedro Pascal was presumably busy) is an ex-special forces Yankee parachuted into the Republic of New Asia in order to track down and kill a weapon fashioned by the Creator, the inventor of advanced AI. The weapon – surprise, surprise – turns out to be a very cute, robotic child (Madeleine Yuna Voyles) prone to heartfelt speeches and making audiences cry.

The Creator is periodically clunky. Washington swings from stiff to charismatic alongside the film’s quality of dialogue and tone. It’s also a film that is unexpectedly very funny for 15 minutes and then almost never again. But Edwards presents himself as an ideas-on-his-sleeve kind of guy, who’s invested in readdressing the meaning behind some of the most commonplace sci-fi imagery.

Expend4bles review: Jason Statham and Megan Fox lead a tired, poorly made mess

Much of the genre’s aesthetics have been appropriated from Asian and Middle Eastern cultures, and yet its stories have been repeatedly relocated to the west or far out in space (see: Star Wars , Blade Runner , Dune ). The Creator features the typical blended, pan-Asian aesthetics. It’s also a film explicitly set in Southeast Asia, with a largely Asian cast (alongside Voyles, Ken Watanabe and Gemma Chan play major roles as AI and human leaders in the war). Allison Janney , meanwhile, plays Joshua’s commander and arrives on the scene with all the no-bulls*** style and militant competence of an Ellen Ripley or a Sarah Connor. Yet, for all those trappings of lean-in feminism, we’re reminded that a woman in power is no victory if that power is exclusively evil.

Edwards then wraps it all up with a nuanced take on an extremely prescient issue, specifically the matter of if and how we transpose blame onto technology itself and not the people who wield it. It’s the perfect question for The Creator to ask – it is, after all, an increasingly rare piece of mainstream cinema that proves CGI can be good for art when placed in the right hands.

Dir: Gareth Edwards. Starring: John David Washington, Gemma Chan, Ken Watanabe, Sturgill Simpson, Allison Janney. 12A, 133 minutes.

‘The Creator’ is in cinemas from 28 September

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New work in new media by Deniz Tortum

Subtle inconsistencies: filmmakers and generative ai in 2024.

An AI-generated image of people standing on a cliff under black clouds.

by Deniz Tortum in Columns , Filmmaking on Sep 18, 2024

AI , Fall 2024

In Orhan Pamuk’s novel The Black Book , there’s a story about a mannequin maker and his underground workshop. The craftsman believes that after the introduction of cinema, people began to lose their natural gestures and now simply imitate the movements and behaviors of actors they see on the big screen. To preserve natural and native mannerisms, he undertakes an immense archival project: He makes mannequins of people performing small gestures in great detail.

I’m curious what the craftsman would do faced with generative AI.

AI film festivals and competitions are growing in popularity. Last May, the second annual Runway AI Film Festival took place in New York and Los Angeles. The first edition of AI Film Fest Amsterdam took place in June at the Eye Filmmuseum; the first Reply AI Film Festival recently held screenings at a Mastercard event within the Venice Film Festival. Established festivals have also introduced AI sections. In partnership with OpenAI, this year’s Tribeca Festival hosted SORA Shorts, a program that commissioned five short films created using the generative AI tool SORA by directors such as Nikyatu Jusu and Ellie Foumbi. Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival (BiFan) started an AI competition section, and Locarno Film Festival screened a feature this year, Telepathic Letters , whose images were generated by AI.

Festivals and art institutions never like to lag behind technological developments, while corporations routinely use festivals as tools for marketing and research, either by sponsoring sections within existing festivals or organizing their own. Worlds mix in these emerging media sections: For example, the jury of Runway AIFF includes artists, directors and producers, as well as representatives from Documentary+, Coca-Cola and NVIDIA. This blend signals money and opportunity, especially to creators seeking funding. These opportunities to explore new technologies can be productive, but they are almost always short-lived, falling short of creating a scene or truly helping artists to hone their craft in the new technology.

What these festivals are good at, though, is creating temporary labs, screenshots of a moment in time that crystalize and memorialize developments in the field. Watching the finalist films of Runway AIFF, AI Film Fest Amsterdam and Reply AI (most of which are available online) gives a sense of a possible future but also reminds me of past artistic experiments with new technologies.

In 2015, when I was working with VR at the MIT Open Documentary Lab, we got an Oculus Rift. Using this noncommercial headset and the open-source SDK for the Unity game engine, we built many experiments—most of them physically uncomfortable. We’d code a simple scene so that when the user turned their head to the left, they would see what is on their right in the virtual world; when the user stood up, their body would move down; we’d show the user separate images in each eye. We were trying to reconfigure how the body interacts with its environment and modify the affordances of the human body. These experiments were discomforting, but that wasn’t the point. We were trying to find the boundary conditions of the medium to figure out how this one is different from what came before. However, our experimentation was stymied when the commercial Oculus Rift was released. The Oculus app and new SDK for Unity made it much harder to create experiences that reconfigure bodily affordances: the SDK-enforced UX of the virtual body required it to imitate the physical body as a way of providing comfort to the user. Short-lived experimentation was followed by a period of standardization; the medium had normalized.

I was reminded of that trajectory when watching this year’s AI festival films. Last year, reviewing the first edition of Runway AIFF in this column, I asked whether AI can be a new kind of a camera, creating its own language and type of film(s). However, this year it felt like most of the films used AI as a tool to make independent films and animations that resembled higher-budget counterparts. This is not a bad thing at all. It might be less exciting for me personally, but it signals that AI tools are rapidly becoming part of the industry and being integrated into the production process. In my correspondence with the filmmakers, this was also the biggest thread.

The winner of AI Film Fest Amsterdam, Dragged Holidays is a fast-paced film about a queer performer visiting their conservative family for the holidays, which plays like a high-budget narrative with the addition of AI artifacts that comment on questions around identity. The filmmaking team utilized Midjourney for image generation, Photoshop for refining frames, Runway for AI-drive animation, ElevenLabs for voiceover and Epidemic Sound for the soundtrack. Without AI tools, Dragged Holidays would have required a much higher budget. In our correspondence, co-creator Paula Fernandes emphasized this: “We’re living in incredibly exciting times, where we can not only imagine good stories but also bring them to life in ways that were previously out of reach for small, budget-limited projects.”

A Tree Once Grew Here , a finalist at Runway AIFF, is a beautifully crafted mixed-methods animation about the degradation of the environment. When I first watched the film, I was unable to tell how AI was used in the process. Director Johnnie Semerad kindly explained his team’s workflow, which started with a traditional CG approach: storyboarding, creating animatics, building backgrounds. They manually constructed the background environments, but everything changed when they began to use Midjourney and Runway to generate and refine video backgrounds. “What once would have taken a week to create now took mere hours. Suddenly, I found myself producing three intricate backgrounds daily, revolutionizing our workflow,” says Semerad. “Projects that once required years of saving and cultivating industry goodwill can now be completed in a matter of months. We’re now venturing into television production—a realm that was financially out of reach just two years ago due to the sheer volume of animation required for a series. […] We’re on the cusp of a renaissance in animation.”

Animitas , another Runway AIFF finalist, tells a fictional story through photographs of roadside memorials in Chile. The film’s ambience and minimal use of AI creates an unusually serene and peaceful tone. Director Emeric Leprince doesn’t think AI will become a genre of its own, but that it will be integrated across all areas of filmmaking, he says, by “assisting cinematographers, script supervisors, VFX supervisors or directors.” While making the film, he had “complete freedom to modify individual elements without needing to go through third parties.” All the creators I talked with voiced a similar sentiment: AI makes their process much more frictionless.

AI might be changing the production process in more structural ways as well. Using a term native to software development, Leprince commented that AI is a very “agile” tool. AI filmmaking has come to resemble both software development and animation production. The strict order in live-action production of writing, shooting and editing can be reconfigured with the AI tools: one can shoot, edit, shoot, edit, write, edit, shoot. Consequently, convergence between the production methods of live action, animation and software would require directors to also learn product manager skills.

Although less common, some films are using AI tools not to change production methods but to modify cinematic space and rhythm. Two of Runway AIFF’s award winners, Get Me Out and e^(i*π) + 1 = 0 , experiment with new spatial aesthetics. They both utilize neural radiance fields (NeRF), a 3D reconstruction technique based on deep learning. Stitching together NeRF scans of different places and scenes and exploring them through a virtual camera, these films create a space suspended in time that expands, connects with other places and is reconfigured virtually. The effect is like a “bullet-time” scene in 6DOF (degrees-of-freedom), where the camera can move anywhere without any regard to gravity while freely changing the focal length, exposure, depth of field and focus. These moments render the physical world virtual—the gap between a documentary and Transformers is closing.

Another aspect of AI that filmmakers are using creatively is the inconsistency of AI image generation, such as frame-to-frame changes and scenes not following each other in perfect unison. In Dragged Holidays , the team uses subtle inconsistencies in character design (their faces slightly changing from moment to moment) to represent the variety of personas of the characters, thereby enhancing the film’s overall theme. The use of inconsistency and overwhelming imagery of generative AI is core to the visual design of one of the finalists of Reply AI Film Festival, Hint . A mix of virtual production, photogrammetry and generative AI, the film starts in a destroyed city and flies through a cityscape filled with images of destruction, opulence, consumerism and popular culture. Watching it feels like doomscrolling at 1000x speed.

The impossibly fast pace of Hint makes me think of my own relationship with AI imagery. When watching AI films, even slow-paced ones, I have a hard time following their stories. I suspect that’s due to the inconsistency and generic quality of the images, which don’t always speak for themselves. Is it because these images are not only visual but are also text-based prompts—language first? That they refer to a body of scraped images that they are trained on? The images ask to be translated to some sort of language to be decoded, like bits. However, the limits of my human attention might not be able to decode this language. So, I am left with a new relationship with the images of inconsistencies and ruptures.

In his Norton Lecture at Harvard University in 2018, documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman said that he is not making films but building a large catalog of human emotions and behavior. AI, on the other hand, takes such catalogs and averages them. What is consistent in generative AI imagery is the human face—the emotions, the gestures—which are generic, over-the-top and resemble one another. Wiseman and his work remind me of the mannequin maker in Pamuk’s The Black Book , preserving the visuals of our current world before it is filled with infinite generative imagery. In one of the futures of cinema, there is a world where making films in the real world is a romantic, futile but noble act.

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IMAGES

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COMMENTS

The Creator movie review & film summary (2023)
September 29, 2023. 4 min read. It's ironically apt that "The Creator," about the potential and peril of artificial intelligence, merely resembles profound science fiction. Rich in atmosphere but short on substance, director and co-writer Gareth Edwards ' film has the look and tone of a serious, original work of art, but it ends up ...
'The Creator' review: This drama about AI fails to take on a life of
A mysterious robotic entity was the big villain in the most recent Mission: Impossible film, and AI is also central to the ambitious but muddled new science-fiction drama The Creator. Set decades ...
'The Creator' Review: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love A.I
This is more or less the case made for A.I. in "The Creator": autonomy without tears (or bloodshed). It's a provocative idea — all A.I. wants from humans is a little love — but that ...
The Creator (2023)
From writer/director Gareth Edwards ("Rogue One," "Godzilla") comes an epic sci-fi action thriller set amidst a future war between the human race and the forces of artificial intelligence. Joshua ...
'The Creator' Review: It's AI That Wants to Save Humanity
That's why watching The Creator, a movie set roughly 40 years from now, feels surreal, jarring, and oddly welcome. From Metropolis to Terminator, sci-fi has taught us to fear the AI revolt. This ...
The Creator's beautiful sci-fi world deserves a better movie
The Creator's beautiful sci-fi world deserves a better movie. Gareth Edwards' futuristic AI epic is a gorgeous letdown
Movie Review: Humans take a back seat in the stunning AI, sci-fi epic
Movie Review: Humans take a back seat in the stunning AI, sci-fi epic 'The Creator'. The artificial intelligence in Gareth Edwards' " The Creator," a visually magnificent if by-the-books epic, is not the AI making headlines at the moment. This is AI in the classic sci-fi mold — the Roy Battys of "Blade Runner," the Avas of "Ex ...
The Creator film review: A 'jaw-droppingly distinctive' sci-fi
The Creator film review: A 'jaw-droppingly distinctive' sci-fi. John David Washington and Gemma Chan star in a fast, "relentlessly tense" new sci-fi that is "hard-edged and dark", writes Nicholas ...
The Creator review: a retread of familiar AI panic territory to
The Creator retreads familiar AI panic territory to stunningly inert effect. Gareth Edwards' new dystopian sci-fi epic is a gorgeous morass of AI doomerism that's lacking in the way of novel ...
'The Creator' review: Gareth Edwards' AI movie is a sci-fi fan's dream
The film begins with a history lesson about AI in this fictional world, which evolves from being created to help mankind to being blamed for a nuke going off in Los Angeles. In the aftermath ...
The Creator review: A thrilling and thoughtful take on A.I
No Doubt, Lana Del Rey, Doja Cat, and Tyler, the Creator top 2024 Coachella lineup. Taylor's discovery that Alpha-O is an A.I. in the form of a six-year-old girl called Alphie (Madeleine Yuna ...
The Creator First Reactions: The Best Sci-Fi Movie of the Year
Gareth Edwards' nifty exploration of AI, war, and life itself, is a big-screen spectacle, that delivers on thrills, mind and heart.". - Fico Cangiano, CineXpress. "Though it pulls from identifiable inspirations, The Creator is 1 of the best original sci-fi epics in years. Massively entertaining, enthralling & profound on every level.".
The Creator film review
A former double agent, he once disastrously betrayed his own wife, a pro-simulant activist. Emotionally, then, he has a lot going on. The same is true for the film, packing huge themes into old ...
'The Creator' Review
The Big Picture. The Creator explores the moral dilemma of whether AI is a threat or if our fear of it is the real problem, using a sci-fi lens. The film portrays a near future where the US is at ...
The Creator review: A visually stunning, yet deeply shallow, AI epic
Fri, Sep 29, 2023 · 6 min read. 20th Century Studios. Equal parts Terminator, The Golden Child and The Matrix prequel, The Creator is yet another sci-fi epic about a war between humans and AI ...
'The Creator' Review: John David Washington Gets Caught Up in AI War in
September 26, 2023 9:00am. John David Washington and Madeleine Yuna Voyles in 'The Creator' 20th Century Studios. A big, brawny original sci-fi movie is a rare thing in the age of franchise ...
The Creator First Reviews: A Timely, Visually Jaw-Dropping Spectacle
While The Creator is far from a masterpiece, it is a very impressive film to debut in 2023… a truly remarkable piece of original science fiction storytelling. - Maggie Lovitt, Collider. The Creator isn't a masterpiece of the A.I. genre, if there's such a thing yet, but it's a good start. - Bill Goodykoontz, Arizona Republic.
The Creator: First Reactions To AI Robots Sci-Fi Movie Revealed
The Creator first reactions have arrived, teasing just how impressive this original sci-fi epic is. The film stars John David Washington as Joshua, a human soldier tasked with killing the Creator, an AI that has developed a weapon that could destroy humanity. However, Joshua is torn when he discovers this weapon was made in the form of a child.
The Creator (2023)
The Creator: Directed by Gareth Edwards. With John David Washington, Madeleine Yuna Voyles, Gemma Chan, Allison Janney. Against the backdrop of a war between humans and robots with artificial intelligence, a former soldier finds the secret weapon, a robot in the form of a young child.
The Creator Review
The Creator makes you realise that there really is little excuse for blockbuster dross. And while this doesn't quite hit the heights of those that inspired it (it is at times blunter and broader ...
'The Creator' review: intelligently shot, artificially scripted AI
The robot bad guys aren't really that bad in this great-looking sci-fi parable that suffers from schmaltzy dialogue and questionable dramatic choices. By Richard Roeper. Sept 28, 2023, 3:30am ...
Was 'The Creator' Written by AI?
The fact that this movie about a soldier protecting a robot girl feels like a composite of every sci-fi film of the past 50 years makes you wonder. Was 'The Creator' Written by AI?
The Creator review: Hollywood rarely makes sci-fi that looks as good as
It's also a film explicitly set in Southeast Asia, with a largely Asian cast (alongside Voyles, Ken Watanabe and Gemma Chan play major roles as AI and human leaders in the war).
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Subtle Inconsistencies: Filmmakers and Generative AI in 2024
The winner of AI Film Fest Amsterdam, Dragged Holidays is a fast-paced film about a queer performer visiting their conservative family for the holidays, which plays like a high-budget narrative with the addition of AI artifacts that comment on questions around identity.The filmmaking team utilized Midjourney for image generation, Photoshop for refining frames, Runway for AI-drive animation ...

The Creator

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The Creator First Reviews: A Timely, Visually Jaw-Dropping Spectacle

Do we have a new sci-fi classic on our hands?

Can we call it a masterpiece?

How does it look?

How realistic is the CGI?

Are there any standout performances?

How is the script?

What about Hans Zimmer’s score?

What about Gareth Edwards’ direction?

Are there any major criticisms?