- UK release: September 2023
- Director: Gareth Edwards · Writers: Gareth Edwards, Chris Weitz
- Studio / distributor: 20th Century Studios; New Regency; Entertainment One
- Genre: Science fiction war drama / AI thriller · Runtime: 133 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- Main cast: John David Washington (BlacKkKlansman, Tenet) as Joshua; Madeleine Yuna Voyles as Alphie; Gemma Chan (Crazy Rich Asians, Eternals) as Maya; Ken Watanabe (The Last Samurai, Inception) as Harun; Allison Janney (I, Tonya) as Colonel Howell
- IMDb: 6.7 / 10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 67% critics / 75% audience · My rating: 8 / 10
Gareth Edwards keeps making the same wager and keeps winning it. On Monsters he proved a first-time director could conjure a continent-sized catastrophe on a holiday budget; on Godzilla and Rogue One he showed he could keep a sense of human scale inside a studio machine that usually crushes it. The Creator is the boldest version of that wager so far: an original science fiction war film, not a sequel or an adaptation, shot on real locations with consumer-grade cameras and finished to look like it cost four times what it did. In a year of franchise instalments, a standalone idea executed at this size is worth paying attention to before you have seen a frame of it.
The setup
The premise is a future in which artificial intelligence, blamed for a nuclear detonation over Los Angeles, has been outlawed across the West and embraced across a region the film calls New Asia. Joshua (John David Washington) is a burnt-out former special forces operative pulled back into the war and sent to destroy a new AI weapon rumoured to be able to end it. What he finds is not a bomb but a child, an artificial being called Alphie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles), and the rest of the film follows a soldier learning to question the side he is fighting for. If that reads like Aliens crossed with the road-movie compassion of a dozen reluctant-guardian stories, you are not far off, and I will come back to why the borrowing matters less than you might expect.
The cast
Washington carries the film on a particular kind of weariness. He is good at men who have already lost something and are pretending to function, and Joshua’s grief gives the chase a centre of gravity it would otherwise lack. The discovery is Voyles, making her debut as Alphie, who has to be uncanny and sympathetic at once and manages both without tipping into preciousness. Gemma Chan brings real warmth to Maya, the thread connecting Joshua to the world he is meant to be destroying, and Ken Watanabe lends Harun the quiet authority he can summon in his sleep. Allison Janney, cast against her usual register as the relentless Colonel Howell, is harder and colder than you expect and all the better for it.
The craft
The craft is the reason to see it. Edwards and his cinematographers shoot real Thai and Nepalese landscapes and drop towering technology into them in post, and the seams almost never show. The result has a lived-in, sun-faded texture that most clean digital science fiction lacks: rice paddies and tanks, monasteries and gunships, robots with exposed mechanical heads kneeling at prayer. Hans Zimmer’s score knows when to fall silent and when to swell, and the film’s quieter passages, a child watching a sunset, a farewell on a beach, land harder than the firefights. It is the rare blockbuster where the world feels older and larger than the plot moving through it.
How it stacks up
The obvious comparisons are honourable ones. There is Blade Runner in the question of what a manufactured being is owed, District 9 in the grubby, documentary handling of a science fiction premise, and Children of Men in the idea of a hardened man shepherding a fragile new life through a war zone. Chappie tried something similar with childlike AI and fumbled the tone; The Creator keeps its footing. Against Edwards’s own Rogue One, this is looser and more personal, less beholden to a pre-existing universe and freer for it. None of these comparisons is a criticism. The film wears its influences openly and earns its place beside them on look and feeling.
Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are divided, sitting around 67%, with audiences a little warmer at 75%. The recurring complaint is fair: the plot is familiar and the script paints its politics in broad strokes, with thinly drawn supporting characters serving the journey rather than living alongside it. The praise is also fair, and louder, for the world-building and the sheer visual ambition delivered on a modest budget. My own reaction lands closer to the audience than the critics. The story being secondhand bothers me less than it bothers them, because what the film is selling is a place and a mood, and on that count it delivers something genuinely uncommon.
Verdict
This is squarely in my territory: intelligent science fiction, a world you want to keep looking at, and a thoughtful question about artificial minds running underneath the action. The screenplay is the weak link, the emotional beats are signposted, and a sharper script would have pushed this higher. But the texture, the score and the world-building carry it, and it is the kind of film I will happily put on again just to wander through its landscapes. An original blockbuster this confident deserves to be seen big. 8⁄10.
Availability: On general release in UK cinemas now. See it on the largest screen you can find; the scale is the whole appeal.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: The Creator underperformed at the box office relative to its ambitions, which makes the case for original studio science fiction harder to argue, though it found a second life on home formats and a devoted following among people who value world-building over plot. Its visual effects work, achieved for a fraction of the usual blockbuster spend, earned an Academy Award nomination and became a talking point in the industry about how such films are made. It is now available on 4K Blu-ray and digital, and streams on Disney+ depending on region.
BBFC content advice
Rated 12A by the BBFC for moderate violence, threat, injury detail, infrequent strong language. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Violence: The film contains several intense and prolonged shoot-outs, as well as scenes in which humans are beaten, with occasional blood. People die in explosions, and one scene includes a disturbing verbal reference to atrocities, presented without visual depiction.
Threat and horror: There are prolonged scenes of threat. These include scenes in which characters are hunted down, as well as those featuring races against time and facing death. One scene shows a soldier threatening a child’s pet dog, causing distress.
Injury detail: There are close-up depictions of facial injuries after repeated punching, including blood. Another scene shows a beaten man coughing blood, with aftermath scenes featuring bloodstained clothing on deceased individuals.
Language: There is infrequent strong language (‘f***k’), as well as implied strong language, and milder terms (for example, ‘shit’, ‘dick’, ‘son of a bitch’, ‘frig’, ‘asshole’, ‘bastard’, ‘screw’, ‘God’, ‘damn’, ‘hell’).
Sex: There are comic verbal sex references. A man and his wife share intimate moments in bed.
Drugs: A man briefly takes prescription medication for pain relief.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
