The Cre­ator review – wel­come, benev­o­lent A.I. overlords!

To root for your species’ sur­vival is both log­i­cal and bio­log­i­cal­ly imper­a­tive. It makes per­fect sense to want your fel­low men, women and chil­dren to live well and have con­tin­ued domin­ion over the plan­et, but it’s not hard to per­suade peo­ple to think oth­er­wise. You only have to look to all the peo­ple (I’m peo­ple) who spent the sum­mer vocal­ly sup­port­ing the orcas when they start­ed team­ing up against the human race (Jus­tice For Tilikum). So while Gareth Edwards’ The Cre­ator may not have the most fab­u­lous tim­ing with its pro‑A.I. mes­sage, it’s not so far beyond the bound­aries of imag­i­na­tion to pic­ture a near future where you get bet­ter vibes from the great-grand­child of Chat­G­PT than politi­cians and lead­ers of humanity’s mil­i­tary-indus­tri­al complex.

The year is 2065, and fol­low­ing a nuclear war­head that A.I. dropped on Los Ange­les 10 years pri­or, the US has banned all A.I. and seeks to wipe it off the face of the plan­et. Amer­i­can Sergeant Joshua Tay­lor (John David Wash­ing­ton) has been sent to East Asia, where its cit­i­zens have tak­en the oppo­site approach and live in har­mo­ny with ​“sim­u­lants”, humanoid robots dis­tin­guished by the exposed tech where their ears and necks should be. His under­cov­er mis­sion is to locate Nir­ma­ta, the archi­tect of the most advanced A.I. whom the sim­u­lants wor­ship, but his wife Maya (Gem­ma Chan) was raised by A.I. and believes they have every right to live and be free as their fleshy coun­ter­parts. Need­less to say, this rela­tion­ship ends very bad­ly with­in the film’s first few min­utes, at which point we flash for­ward anoth­er five years to 2070 when Joshua is recruit­ed back into the army for one last mis­sion. He’s tasked with destroy­ing an advanced weapon that comes in the form of an adorable sim­u­lant called Alphie (an utter­ly charm­ing Madeleine Yuna Voyles).

The film is not rein­vent­ing the wheel. We’ve seen sim­i­lar action sci-fi who place humans as the bad guys in Blade Run­ner, Avatar and Dis­trict 9, to name but a few. The alle­gories for the wars in Viet­nam and ​“against ter­ror” are sol­id, if not a lit­tle played out. But what makes Edwards, the direc­tor behind Mon­sters, Godzil­la and Rogue One, one of the best pop­ulist film­mak­ers out there is his stun­ning world-build­ing and knack for cre­at­ing inven­tive, excit­ing action sequences which give weight to the lives and com­mu­ni­ties being mas­sa­cred. The film report­ed­ly cost $80 mil­lion to make, which is not exact­ly loose change, but Edwards turns it into a grand feast, actu­al­ly shoot­ing on loca­tion and hav­ing details in the urban sprawls and remote tem­ples that speak to a well-con­sid­ered his­to­ry and com­plex cul­ture that evolved where man and machine could find com­mon ground.

The craft and care tak­en and the seam­less inte­gra­tion of CGI into the land­scapes are a joy to behold and make the hideous green screen mon­strosi­ties that Feige et al. have churned out on $300 mil­lion bud­gets all the more of an abom­i­na­tion. Not only does The Cre­ator work as a good time at the movies, but it is also a reminder that mid-bud­get, (some­what) orig­i­nal, crowd-pleas­ing sto­ries can be told with aplomb. Even if the world faces an AI apoc­a­lypse in a few decades (or pos­si­bly soon­er), Hol­ly­wood still has plen­ty of time to course-cor­rect and embrace some visu­al­ly exhil­a­rat­ing cin­e­mat­ic spectacle.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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