Out of all the filmmakers who were dragged out to the studio sea by the riptide of their early ‘10s indie-genre debuts, Gareth Edwards – not to be confused with Gareth Evans of The Raid fame – has had the best, if not the easiest, time acclimating to the world of blockbuster filmmaking. His debut, Monsters, was smartly done sci-fi on a budget and, in retrospect, acted as a proper preview of coming attractions. Edwards has always been a fabulous stylist, and his works maintain a sense of continuity regardless of what property he happens to be working on at a given time. What unifies them as a cohesive whole, even more so than their shared genre, is Edwards’ sense of scale: his commitment to presenting you with the fantastic as it feels, as it would be if you were to watch a skyscraper-sized monster tear across Las Vegas or see a moon-sized space station pop into orbit. With that comes his understanding of color – think of the HALO jump in Godzilla or Rogue One‘s blue-hued rainy worlds (and how they contrast with Vader’s appearance at the end, with its faded electric red illumination) – and an intelligent way of staging action, that doesn’t require him to sacrifice his aesthetic rigor to be understandable. There are some things that he’s less skilled at (Godzilla‘s cast and script were a major sticking point for me until I just eventually gave up and appreciated it for what it was doing), though each film, even as they grew in size, managed to improve on the one before it. The same is true for The Creator, his first original work since Monsters a decade ago. It is brassy and bold original science fiction that people always said Neill Blomkamp was making, even when it started to become clear that he wasn’t.
The Creator is, in a way, a rarity for a filmmaker who’s directed a Star Wars movie: It sees Edwards take the lessons that he learned working within the Lucasfilm toybox and apply them in service of something approximating ol’ George’s original vision for the Star Wars films. Now, by this, I don’t mean in the “let’s rip-off Dune and Republic serials” vein; I mean in the thematic sense that you will often hear about at a film school’s equivalent of a frat party, spouted off by some kid who thinks they’re imparting grand knowledge to you by saying “You know Star Wars is actually about the terrorists winning, right?” And it’s true – a lot of Star Wars emerged from the Vietnam-era anger that Lucas and the New Hollywood felt towards the government (and keep in mind, there’s an alternative universe in which Lucas and John Milius made Apocalypse Now, albeit with a very different outlook). Edwards takes all of those influences and makes them explicit: The world of The Creator unfolds as a kind of alternate history, especially if one ignores the presence of Radiohead’s “Everything In Its Right Place” during the lead-up to one action sequence, in which mid-20th century innovations led to the early rise of artificial intelligence. Much of this background is dispensed with in an early montage, captured in grainy Super 16, of the ever-expanding presence of robots in day-to-day society. They’re beating us in races, taking our jobs, even getting facial modifications so that they can look like us. The stew is primed for conflict, and when a nuke is set off in Los Angeles, the collected mass of humanity declares total war on AI, pushing them to a small area of land in Southeastern Asia, where a giant low-orbit space station drops high-powered bombs on the landscape.
This is the world that Joshua (John David Washington) was born into, and he has suffered its consequences. He starts the film scavenging in the still-ruined part of Los Angeles – a devastation he witnessed personally and lost plenty from. His entire family was killed in the blast, and the cybernetic arm and leg attached to his scarred torso ensure that he never forgets. Joshua was a soldier, once tasked with a deep-cover mission intended to find the “creator” of the title, but after an ill-timed raid blew up the op, he wound up losing even more than he thought possible. His wife, Maya (Gemma Chan), died carrying their unborn child that day. She was his target, after all, the daughter of the man who may have been working on giving AI a fighting chance in this war, but she became so much more to him than the government could ever understand. So, he spends his days looking for the still-existing robots trapped in the rubble, ready to place them in a trash compactor full of their kind, metal yet sentient misery crushed into neat blocks. Yet his story is not over – top brass from the military emerge from the shadows one night and tell him that the superweapon Maya’s father was working on is ready to deploy. He doesn’t want any part of the violence, having turned his back on that life five years earlier, but Colonel Howell (Allison Janney) gives him the kind of news that would make any person reconsider their priors. Maya is still alive, behind enemy lines, captured on a holographic recording days earlier. It’s the first anyone has seen of her in years, and it is the perfect piece of leverage to get him back in the game again.
He is then flown halfway across the world and dropped with a group of special forces commandos on the outskirts of a small village. The men under Howell’s command are gung-ho types, some of whom border on psychopaths, and Joshua feels a distinct unease around them. The goal remains, however, and they can infiltrate the giant compound beneath the thatch-roofed huts and make their way toward their objective. The weapon lies behind a giant sealed airlock, meant to hide it from the outside world totally and the prying eyes of the US government, and there’s enough security surrounding it to suggest its terrible importance. Joshua is the only member of his team who can make it inside, and he expects some bomb, perhaps, or a giant neural network. He finds an old chair in front of a television set, the light from the cartoons on-screen bouncing off small toys and coloring books. In the chair sits a girl whose only tell that she’s a robot is the hollow metal cylinder replacing her ears and the space between them. Understandably, Joshua has a moral crisis once he sees the girl, reminding himself that she’s not human. Still, she can escape before he can cross the ethical rubicon, and he too is forced to flee once the station appears in the sky, its laser crosshairs painting the targets of its devastation. He will, of course, find her, but rather than doing what Howell begs him to, he asks for her help in finding Maya, serving as her protector even as much as it discomforts him to do so. Meanwhile, varying groups – the US Military, a band of resistance fighters, and the robot police of the AI city-state – aim to get them so that they can use the girl for their purposes, and as the walls close in, Joshua begins to grow close to her. She dubs herself Alphie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles), and their journey is an emotional voyage as much as a cross-country trek to find Maya’s semi-mythical whereabouts.
Befitting a filmmaker whose Star Wars movie ended with the wholesale annihilation of its cast, Edwards’ vision of this world is genuinely bleak. Upon exiting the screening, I made some jokes about how, like with Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, I’d happily buy different cuts of this movie for the next twenty or thirty years because lying within the theatrical cut is an epic of genuinely soul-rending proportions, a parable about the intractable nature of cultural conflict between societies centered around different and hard-to-comprehend value systems, and the casualties that emerge from it. That said, the version you’ll see in cinemas this weekend is fantastic, though not without its tonal compromises. There are moments of levity that feel studio-mandated and out of place (any time an animal does something in this movie, you can feel a studio executive patting themselves on the back, saying “See, that’s what the kids will want from this, not this depressing stuff”), as well as a struggle between the film wanting to be a black-hearted blockbuster voyage across devastated landscapes like James Mangold’s Logan, and the faux-Amblin ambitions of Mangold’s later Indiana Jones sequel. This incongruity makes the movie interesting, if not wholly coherent, but Edwards’ vision of this world ensures that the emphasis remains on the awe and its realization. If the great contribution of Star Wars to science-fantasy was its lived-in feel, the grimy yet pastoral landscape of The Creator is a well-appreciated innovation. There is a thematic and practical rigor to every image put on screen, with layers of implied history ripe for the imagination to peel back, and the effects work is top-notch, with the Doug Chiang-styled androids striking a more evocative note than what Blomkamp spent years trying to bring to life similarly. Even better, the metaphor he strides for doesn’t feel hoary or totally reductionist. These AI are sentient beings made of metal, not flesh, and our fear of them leads us to devastation. Of course, the conflict would be ugly enough to justify historical comparison.
There’s a bit of truth to the idea that Edwards has always been more focused on his visuals than on his characters or the story, with the emotional and physical logic of the scenario taking on a supporting role to ensure that those VFX-heavy shots get on-screen. That’s become less fair with each film he’s released, and though The Creator suffers from a few of these flaws – the relationship between Joshua and Alphie never quite clicks in the way it should, though it is often still pretty moving – this is, by far, the most emotionally complex film he’s ever released. There’s a pervasive sadness within every character Alphie comes into contact with, and if we have to have these sort of Siddarthan tales of “emerging from the womb into suffering,” they should all have this kind of strange grace. The only real villain here is a stuffed uniform, played by Ralph Ineson, and every other supporting character is shaded with the burden of consequence. Even Janney’s Colonel has been moved to do the awful things she does by loss: Her second scene is centered around trying to connect with Joshua over the people they’ve lost, telling him of her sons, each killed in action throughout the war. This makes Alphie’s role in the story as moving as intended: she is a being untouched by the pain of conflict and its sins, equipped with the resources to resolve and absolve them.
There’s no better image than when she stops a walking bomb – literally, an explosive device with arms and legs, given a mind by whatever evil person dreamed it up – and it bows before her, her hand placed on its domed head, suggesting not submission but of an alternative to its intended purpose. There may be something more in there than combustible materials and integrated circuitry if only anyone could ever stop to look.