The Creator

6 / 10

While delivering a visual feast for the audience with its monumental montages of a future conflict, in which mankind aims to eradicate the artificial intelligence for the dropping of a nuclear warhead on Los Angeles, the unfolding of the world in Gareth Edwards’ The Creator sadly works like a conveyor belt sushi restaurant during its 134 minute-long runtime. One beautifully arranged dish (or set piece in this case) after another is served on plates which are unfortunately glued onto the belt, forcing the spectator to hastily taste and eat pieces of every food until it goes back to the screenwriter’s kitchen.

On top of the little time window to truly appreciate the atmosphere, the hot topic of the continuously evolving A.I. is reduced to a footnote by escalating the fears in the present to a revival of the Vietnam War in the future with updated armor, quick translation tools and apt references to “Apocalypse Now”. In fact, it’s a pursuit from start to finish in Vietnam with a one-dimensional, at times awkward U.S. cavalry led by General Andrews and Colonel Hussell (Ralph Ineson and Allison Jenney) against the turned renegade Joshua (John David Washington) with his key child companion named Alphie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles).

The characters feel shallow with John David Washington coming off as a standard video game protagonist and the story doesn’t really earn its tears. Furthermore, the war angle of “advanced man versus man-turned machine” leads to a spectacular-looking dullness – something that “Avatar: The Way of Water” also suffers from – including scenes of sophisticated machines giving bland preaches to "New Asian" children about resistance and peace. But there’s no denying that this 80 million-dollar-expensive film deserves to be called epic with its excellent usage of various locations – most of them set in Southeast Asia – and a grand sound design accompanying the confrontations. On the musical side of things, if there wasn’t the news that Hans Zimmer composed the score for the film, it would have been a real surprise to see his name during the end credits, because the score felt like a forgettable, probable b-side of his upcoming contribution to Villeneuve’s “Dune: Part Two”.

The best thing about The Creator is the fact that epic sci-fi stories can emerge from a relatively mid budget of 80 million dollars. With this bar now being set, it’s a good, admittedly cynical advice for Netflix to not disclose the budget for their two-parter “Rebel Moon”. Coming back to Edwards’ film, his fast-moving, never boring journey contains an excellent costume and set design (“Blade Runner” comes into mind), but also characters, beats and lines that lack energy. Artificial intelligence and technology in general are front and center in this picture, though both subjects are barely developed story-wise. There’s room for thought about the absence of the latter and the nature of errors, but these moments literally last for a few seconds. Both sides are destined to fight each other due to the way they are written. It’s pretty much a black-and-white contrast: No discussion, no hesitation – a thin agenda laid out against a mechanical force with the predictable, but believable presentation of symptoms. It’s a bummer. In the end, The Creator simply lacks time and depth.