The Creator
The Creator (2023)
Image From IMDB
As a big Gareth Edwards fan I was predisposed to like this one, so I was relieved when I did. I put off watching it for a while having little faith in modern movies, especially some of the modern sci-fi, but found the story enjoyable and the world building fantastic. The sprawling story had a good pace to it, and the settings were amazing.
The Creator is about an ex-special forces solider Josha, played by John David Washington, who has to return to the scene of his wife’s death and his undercover failure, in order to capture a weapon built by AI capable of destroying the human race’s only hope against the terroist robots. Thing’s are complicated when the weapon turns out to be a robot child, the first and only of its kind, and may know the location of Joshua presumed dead wife.
As mentioned, the thing I loved most about The Creator was the world building. I enjoyed it in Gareth Edwards low budget masterpiece Monsters, but it's done to a much bigger scale here. Rather than monsters mixing with nature, it’s robots. It all looks like a cross between Cyberpunk 2077 and District 9. The buildings. The ships. The tech. The cities. All the stuff in Asia with the robots and people mixing together looks and feels incredible. A world you want to step right into, and on screen, it feels like you could.
The story itself plays out like a Road Movie, with plenty of moral dilemma and interesting characters. Allison Janney in particular is having great fun in a role you wouldn’t normally see her in, while young Madeleine Yuna Voyles does a great job as the heart of the movie, the impressional young robot Alphie.
My only slight question of the movie was John David Washington’s performance. It’s a difficult one to judge because for large sways of the movie he’s not remotely likeable, but I also think he probably not meant to be. We want him to come around and realise the humans are the dicks, not the robots, but he seems incapable of seeing what’s in front of him––although there were so character beats as to why. To be honest, i’m undecided about him in the movie.
The effects all look amazing, the action is cool when it takes place, and the pace of the movie is good. The settings are great with many real locations used, which is always a massive positive nowadays. I think The Creator slightly lacks the magic of Monsters, but i’m very pleased to see Gareth Edwards writing and directing an original movie again and I hope he continues to do so.
I thought overall that it was a great film, and maybe one that i’ll grew to like even more over time. As mentioned, there’s a couple of things which didn’t quite work, but there’s so much about the movies world building to admire. If they brought out a Creator game i’d be all over it. Well worth a watch.
