Director/Story – Gareth Edwards, Screenplay – Gareth Edwards & Chris Weitz, Producers – Gareth Edwards, Kiri Hart, Arnon Milchan & Jim Spencer, Photography – Greig Fraser & Oren Soffer, Music – Hans Zimmer, Visual Effects – Atomic Arts (Supervisor – David Simpson), Crafty Apes (Supervisor – Nicholas Daniels), Fin Design + Effects (Supervisor – Stuart White), Folks VFX (Supervisor – Phil Prates), Industrial Light and Magic (Supervisors – Charmaine Chan, Ian Comley, Jay Cooper & Dave Dally), Jellyfish Pictures (Supervisor – Simon Kilroe), Misc Studios (Supervisor – Edward Hawkins), Monsters Aliens Robots Zombies (Supervisor – Justin Bunt), Outpost VFX (Supervisor – Joe Divalerio), Territory Studio (Supervisor – Luca Zappala) & VFX Los Angeles, Inc. (Supervisors – Joseph Sperber & Izzy Traub), Supervising Special Effects Supervisor – Neil Corbould, Production Design – James Clyne. Production Company – New Regency/Bad Dreams.
Cast
John David Washington (Joshua Taylor), Madeleine Yuna Voyles (Alphie), Gemma Chan (Maya), Allison Janney (Colonel Howell), Ken Watanabe (Harun), Sturgill Simpson (Drew), Amar Chadha-Patel (Omni/Sek-On/Sergeant Bui), Marc Menchaca (McBride), Ralph Ineson (General Andrews), Veronica Ngo (Kami), Robbie Tann (Shipley), Michael Esper (Captain Cotton), Syd Skidmore (Bradbury)
Plot
The year 2055. Vast leaps in robotics and artificial intelligence have resulted in machine self-awareness. However, the machines have turned against humanity, detonating a nuclear weapon in Los Angeles. The USA has banned A.I.s and the remaining robots and simulants have relocated in New Asia. Joshua Taylor is a US soldier who has been sent to infiltrate New Asia in search of Nirmata, the fabled god that the machines revere. There he has settled down with the roboticist Maya and they are expecting a child. However, she is killed when US soldiers conduct a raid. Five years later. A retired Joshua is called back into service by the US military who show him footage of Maya still alive in New Asia. Joshua joins a military sortie but ends separated in a raid on a robotics plant. He guides a simulant child to safety through the gunfire. He finds that the child, who he gives the name Alphie, has an ability to control machinery. With orders to bring her back, Joshua discovers that Alphie has incredible powers, but this has the two of them hunted on all sides.
British director Gareth Edwards made an extraordinary debut with Monsters (2010), a film set in an alien-infested zone where Edwards performed the visual effects duties himself. The sleeper success of Monsters led to Edwards being offered the directorial reins of the English-language revival of Godzilla (2014), followed by the Star Wars prequel Rogue One (2016). Edwards took some time to return with The Creator. Unfortunately, the film struggled at the box-office, just managing to scratch the $100 million mark worldwide and break even on its purported $80 million budget, placing a further nail in the coffin of independent, non-IP driven cinema. The surprise name on the credits in Edwards’ co-writer Chris Weitz, no less than the co-director of American Pie (1999) and solo director of films like The Golden Compass (2007) and New Moon (2009), who had also served as a writer on Rogue One.
The Creator is an extraordinary a watch in the same way as seeing Her and Ex Machina were when they came out was. Although if there is a film among the abovementioned that The Creator resembles it is surely Finch with Tom Hanks taking a road trip with robot slowly coming into self-awareness. Gareth Edwards substitutes war-ravaged Southeast Asian territories for Finch’s post-apocalyptic world, but the overall premise is not dissimilar. On a plot level The Creator reads a rather ordinary Road Movie variant on the soldier who is left with care of the gifted kid or individual that we have seen in a number of other genre films like Starman (1984) and Race to Witch Mountain (2009) to mundane efforts from Rain Man (1988) to A Perfect World (1993).
Alphie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles) communes with a walking bombThe midst of the New Asia war zone – Gareth Edwards’ stunningly detailed future world
However, the effect that the film has is less in its story than in the world that it builds. Gareth Edwards comes from a background in visual effects, which he taught himself to do on his home computer, before he became a director. His expertise was abundantly apparent on big spectacle films like Godzilla and Rogue One. On the other hand, Edwards’ greater skill is far more evident in Monsters where he uses visual effects to insert creatures and background elements into the regular everyday landscape so that you are never certain what is real and what is imaginary. There is the same effect here from the opening montage of news clips where we see NASA shuttle footage, sports games, riots, mocked up 1950s ads and the like into which the robots have been inserted. (These scenes segue into a Congressional speech from a US military head who looks uncannily like Transformers director Michael Bay).
This same blending of the artificial and the real continues as the film expands out to show us its future world. We see robots and simulants as police officers, tilling paddy fields, riding motorcycles, even crying over their dead and the glorious image of simulants as Buddhist monks (which rather intriguingly suggests the idea left implied that the machines have developed a religion). Rather than building elaborate sets for the film, Edwards filmed in locations around the world that most resembled the futuristic places he envisioned – primarily in Thailand but as diverse as Nepal and L.A. – and elaborated on these using visual effect. You are absorbed in one of the few completely lived in Future worlds on screen – one of the few films to successfully do so since Blade Runner (1982).
Edwards has an enormous amount of fun coming up with unique looking pieces of tech – the massive flying wing of the Nomad ominously moving through the skies sweeping target beams that encircle their targets; the road vehicles that look something like the Batbike out of The Dark Knight (2008); the massive battle tank that is the size of a whole city block wheeled into operation at the battle at the bridge; and the undeniably cute image of talking bombs that eagerly run off into action – which kept giving me flashbacks to the ones parodied in Dark Star (1974). The scenes with the attack on the bridge and the climactic ones aboard the Nomad are breathtakingly epical – Edwards is one of the few directors who can rival James Cameron in both the creation of a self-contained world and in making future tech and action look dazzling on screen.
The other quibble might be the question of just how big the Nomad is – at the end, where John David Washington and Madeleine Yuna Voyles venture up to attack it, it is in orbit and he is wearing a spacesuit. However, when we see it in action, it is a behemoth travelling through the skies below cloud cover – if that is a space station, it must be utterly massive to occupy so much of the sky. Or if is it moving up and down from orbit, this would surely involve a huge amount of fuel expenditure.
(Winner for Best Film in this site’s Top 10 Films of 2023 list. Winner for Special Effects, Nominee for Best Director (Gareth Edwards) and Best Production Design at this site’s Best of 2023 Awards).
