The Creator: Flawed Magnificence

Perhaps the most impressive thing about Gareth Edwards's The Creator is how profoundly and thoroughly it demonstrated to me that nearly every last budget manager in Hollywood needs to be fired as soon as possible. Working on a comparatively shoestring budget of $80 million, this movie's visuals aren't just par with the course. No, they're among the very best and most immersive I've seen to this day, with budgetary limitations or without, seamlessly mixing practical and computer-generated imagery to remarkable effect in a way I've yet to see replicated, to say nothing of exceeded. To catch you up on what the movie's about, The Creator is a science fiction epic set in the mid-21st century, which is about a decade after the banning of AI in the United States and many other Western nations following the detonation of a nuclear weapon in Los Angeles by a rogue AI unit. However, unlike the West, the Far East is partial to its artificial intelligence technology and not keen to follow suit. I've yet to come to an opinion on whether or not this movie's release window was genius or idiotic given the current uproar in Hollywood over the possibility of AI taking jobs away from people, but either way, The Creator is the movie we got, and it's food for thought and conversation aplenty. Enter Joshua, a sergeant in the US military with a tragic past, who's dispatched to Asia to track down something called Alpha O, a weapon that could threaten NOMAD, a space-faring warship designed to destroy pockets of AI worldwide. As is relatively par for the course when it comes to movie plots, what Joshua doesn't realize is how personal this mission is going to become for him, and before he knows it, he's thrust into a conflict with others and with himself that he wasn't trained or prepared for in the slightest.

Truth be told, this movie does a lot of things very well, and I loved how The Creator insisted on immediately grounding itself within the confines of our reality with a very good history-based hook that effectively bridges the gap between a very real past and an imaginary future that the movie needs you to believe is real. For all its flaws, everything The Creator does is a calculated move to make you believe that its fictional story really does hold legitimate weight, and this is an important thing a great science-fiction film needs to be able to do. Too often when a spaceship in a sci-fi flick explodes, it doesn't feel like there's anyone inside of it. That is far from the case here, and thankfully so. Assisting this illusion is an artistic and fresh visual style that seamlessly blends practical and grounded sets with excellent computer-generated effects that strike a perfect balance between familiar and accessible, visionary and uncharted. The Creator is simultaneously everything you've seen before and yet unlike anything you've ever seen.

But this said, if the aesthetic of The Creator is its greatest ally, these images are a mere coat of paint to what is, unfortunately, the movie's biggest flaws. The Creator is not entirely unlike Detroit: Become Human with its robot-driven exploration of what it means to be human, but I found myself wishing that there was more to explore here. Joshua and Alphie, a child-like AI, make for a qualified enough team-up, but I found myself wanting more from their characters than the movie bothered to give me. Granted, the acting from both John David Washington and Madeleine Yuna Voyles is good, but what the movie was trying to do required more depth than it actually took the time to carve out and explore. The wafer-thin characterization of Joshua and Alphie doesn't do this movie any favors in the slightest, and so it's fortunate that it has the decency to treat its subject matter, however imperfect, with a deadly serious tone that distinguishes it from other science fiction movies. That doesn't mean The Creator is humorless, as it does feature the periodic joke, but it doesn't constantly undercut its tone like other less visionary blockbusters do, moving and acting with a surprisingly consistent amount of reverence. And for all the characterization flaws to be seen here, this self-serious approach helps the third act land with a raw, heartbreaking, and utterly wonderful humanity that I didn't see coming. So while the symphony may have been a flawed one, it ended on an incredibly high note that set a favorable mood as I walked away.

On one hand, the pacing shortcomings and characterization blemishes of The Creator hold it back from attaining greatness. But on the other, I cannot tell a lie. I adored this movie. It's a raw, beautiful, stunning portrait of a remarkably well-realized future Earth. Gareth Edward's grounded yet visionary touches are all over it, harkening back in many ways to Rogue One: A Star Wars Story both aesthetically and thematically. The cinematography and production design are nothing short of stunning, a cinematic miracle with or without this movie's small budget. All in all, the great things about The Creator just make the flaws all the more painful to acknowledge, and its fundamental errors bar it from an otherwise-assured position amongst my favorite films. Nonetheless, we need more movies like it, movies that play the hand they've been dealt by a studio in utterly miraculous and undeniably businesslike ways. Heck, staying on the topic of this universe, let's see a The Creator spin-off series. Shoot, a whole line-up of films set in the same universe.

I'd be completely down to see more of this type of imperfect but striking and bold filmmaking that makes the magic of filmmaking seem all the more magical while making the problems plaguing the rest of Hollywood seem all the more problematic.

The Creator - 6/10

James 3:9-12