The Creator: Sadly not very creative

The Creator is a movie from Gareth Edwards of Star Wars; Rouge One fame. It’s a movie I was looking forward to because it looked like a mishmash of Blade Runner, District 9 and Avatar. And it certainly borrows from those other films. It’s a stunning movie with visuals that blew me away and with some great acting. It’s sadly let down by a rather simple script with some serious continuity issues.

So what’s it about? Well it’s a tale old as time. Man makes AI. Ai kills man. Man returns the favour. ‘Hasta la vista, baby’. In this case, man was working alongside his creation and all was good. Until a nuke, purportedly set off by a robot, kills a million people in America. What follows is America wiping our its own robots, and then trying to do the same overseas.

Creator themes

One issue with this movie is its rather obvious thematic ideas. They are so on the nose, it irked me. America, and the imperial country, wiping out innocent robots and their human friends. All see in the paddy fields of Asia. Mmm, come on now. We’ve seen this done before. They even have the dedicated Captain who kills indiscriminately in pursuit of her mission. She reminded me of Stephen Lang’s character in Avatar. A character whose motivations are as deep as ‘it’s cus we hate robots’ and that’s about it.

John David Washington, who plays Joshua, a name that has obvious Bible references of being a traitor, is motivated by the cause. He hates them robots, that is until he meets a young robot child. This child is special though. We’re never told HOW this robot kid is able to do what it does, only that it’s able to turn off technology. And control it remotely. Very useful stuff.

Joshua’s entire mission is a very generic one. Rogue soldier goes on quest to save hunted child. It’s a pity this PG-12 movie didn’t try and do more with it. And being a PG-12 also seems to get in the way of the movie. It’s quite brutal, to the robots. And there are some scenes that will leave you going, wait, did they just detonate a bomb in a room with people AND kids? But it just felt too DISNEY at times.

Here’s my first reactions as I walked out the cinema. Just to note, some prick almost ran me over when I was crossing at the pedestrian crossing so I might appear a little distracted.

If you like science fiction I think you’ll enjoy The Creator. It isn’t anything new, but the action pieces are fun, and it’s stunning. A lot of it had me thinking of the artwork of Simon Stalenhag, which the series In the Loop made use of. The acting is really good though. Ken Watanabe and John David Washington make use of what little character development that they can. In particular the #Alph’ child, Madeleine Yuna Voyles, is superb.

I give The Creator a…

7/10