The Creator immediately endears itself to audiences simply by hitting the ground running. This is not a Transformers scenario where viewers will have to sit through a lot of disposable human drama before a robot shows up half an hour into the runtime. Instead, The Creator's opening montage quickly introduces the feature's versions of automatons to the audience before quickly delivering instantly memorable imagery like robotic soldiers emerging from the ocean. Writer/director Gareth Edwards is here to deliver the goods and doesn't beat around the bush when depicting the most tantalizing possibilities of this fictional world. With such an enjoyable kick-off, The Creator charges out of the gate on the right foot. Happily, the rest of the movie lives up to the promise of those inaugural scenes to deliver a robot-centric motion picture that's incredibly human.
In those opening scenes, viewers meet Joshua (John David Washington), a soldier in the war between humans and artificially intelligent robots. This battle has waged on for years now and Joshua, after suffering a deep personal loss, is just not in the mood to do any more fighting. However, he's brought back into the front lines for a special mission: to eliminate some new weapon that could turn the tide of this entire conflict. As he breaks into enemy terrain, Joshua discovers that this weapon is a robot child later named Alfie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles). His superiors, like the robot-hating Howell (Allison Janney), want Alfie immediately terminated. But Joshua can't do that. Unable to pull the trigger on this mechanical youngster, Joshua is now on the run with Alfie. Joshua is consumed with a desire to reconnect with somebody from his past all while walking alongside a child who could be the future incarnate.
The screenplay for The Creator, penned by Edwards and Chris Weitz isn't reinventing the wheel. Certain character beats and plot points won't register as grand surprises to experienced viewers. Later on, the more traditional climax contains features some strained set-ups for emotional moments that take the viewer out of the moment. You can see screenwriters trying to get a specific pathos-oriented end goal rather than the characters acting organically. It's easier to swallow some familiar storytelling material, though, when The Creator delivers so well on its visual ambitions. It's been a long year of blockbusters exclusively filmed in basements in Atlanta, Georgia covered in green screen. To see a new sci-fi movie that actually feels like it inhabits the world we know and makes unbelievable automatons so believable is a balm for the soul for sci-fi fans.
A bevy of gorgeous locales in countries ranging from Vietnam to Thailand provide stunning environments for this heightened story to operate in. Cinematographers Greig Fraser and Oren Soffer serve these backdrops well with their default epic scope to framing the world of The Creator. This is a grand film told through expansive wide shots that deftly communicate how Joshua inhabits a world far bigger than himself. Plus, the lenses and cameras they utilize really make the textures of this movie seem extra tangible. This is a virtue that's especially helpful in two of my favorite scenes in The Creator; a pair of montages where voice-over dialogue is set to random shots from across this film's world. There's a quasi-Terrence Malick quality to listening to John David Washington comment on the connectivity between organisms or answer existential questions from Alfie as we see robots cuddle with cats, monkeys scurry across bridges, and other throwaway moments of everyday existence. There's a larger world out there that the character of Joshua has closed himself off from. In these poignant and visually rich montages, we begin to see the elements of the wider world that are creeping back into his existence.
Those introspective moments are thoroughly enhanced by Fraser and Soffer's style of palpable camerawork relying heavily on natural light. These two montages are also the sort of contemplative detours that many other blockbusters wouldn't dare execute. Such scenes would be considered "too boring" or "slow" for lesser big-budget fare. Thankfully, Edwards recognizes the value of stopping to slow down and appreciate the world Joshua and other characters are navigating. Perhaps that's why some of the overly familiar narrative and story arc elements feel more digestible in these confines. The Creator sometimes treads recognizable ground, but at least it does so with some moving pathos and lots of gorgeous imagery. Those two elements go a long way to making Joshua and Alfie's rapport something you can get involved in.
The more intimate qualities of The Creator also allow John David Washington to flex his chops as an actor, especially in how much emotion he can pack into subdued line deliveries. His scenes with Madeleine Yuna Voyles' Alfie are also extremely well done, especially their earliest scenes together where Washington amusingly depicts Joshua straining to be both some kind of paternal figure and an on-the-lam criminal. Washington and Voyles anchors a rock-solid cast that turns in some mighty fine work, with Allison Janney especially being a welcome presence as a tough-as-nails military veteran with a hatred for robots. It'd be nice if Gemma Chan, the highest-billed lady in the cast, had a more substantial part to play with the character of Maya, but what she is given benefits from her greatest strengths as a performer. Certainly the innate magnetism of Chan means you can never take your eyes off Maya whenever she's on-screen.
Blockbuster movies are known for juggling lots of moving parts. Yet it's often the simplest things that separate the Mad Max: Fury Road's from the King Arthur: Legend of the Sword's. The Creator is nowhere near up to the standards of the greatest blockbusters of all time thanks to a reliance on some overly familiar narrative elements. However, it's got lots of low-key and subtle details, especially in its visuals, that make it a rewarding experience, especially when viewed on a big IMAX screen. Sci-fan cinema fans especially will likely greet this one with cheers after so many underwhelming 2023 entries in the genre like 65 and Landscape with Invisible Hand. Never fear fellow sci-fi nerds, Gareth Edwards has delivered the goods on The Creator to wipe the taste of Quantumania out of your mouths.
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