The Creator: A striking sci-fi diminished by tired Hollywood tropes

The film may dress itself up in new technologies and mesmerising special effects, but beneath it all, The Creator is a strangely familiar and predictable story. In a cultural moment where Hollywood is endeavouring to produce more inclusive and culturally diverse stories (see Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and Raya and the Last Dragon, both 2021), The Creator feels strikingly anachronistic – encumbered by several clumsy plot points that summon tired, antiquated tropes of Hollywood’s depictions of Asian entities. 

Directed by Gareth Edwards (Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, 2016), who counts Blade Runner (1982) and Apocalypse Now (1979) as inspirations for the film, The Creator’s opening minutes show a nuclear warhead detonation in Los Angeles, reducing the city to rubble. The American government blames Artificial Intelligence (AI) for this attack and bans these sentient creatures across the country. Launching a war against AI, New Asia (with its recognisably Southeast Asian landscapes) becomes the final frontier where Nirmata, the creator controlling the global AI force, is thought to be hiding. 

Throughout the film, the sprawling American military-industrial complex is on full display: from the behemoth ‘U.S.S Nomad’ spaceship looming in the sky, to endless piles of weaponry, to the unrelenting military bravado – the latter personified by Colonel Howell (Allison Janney), whose character has little depth beyond this. John David Washington, however, puts in a commendable effort as the battle-weary and conflicted Joshua. 

A young child, Alphie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles) – sentient and gifted with powers – is set up to be the turning point in the war. However, in The Creator’s narrative arc, it turns out that there is little redemption or agency for New Asia’s characters; instead, they function merely as collateral damage in service of America’s overseas techno-dystopia spectacle. Joshua romances Maya (Gemma Chan), a key figure in the local community where he has been sent in search of Nirmata. However, this relationship feels uncomfortably tinted by the spectre of American power – is Joshua merely using Maya for access to fulfil his (secret) mission to find Nirmata?

Some viewers may find the many sequences depicting carpet bombing by American forces across New Asia particularly disturbing and historically tone-deaf, especially given how the film was shot on-location across Vietnam and Thailand. Against the landscape of paddy fields, mountain temples and villages, New Asia becomes the theatre for America’s war – a defenceless, forlorn backdrop for Western destruction. 

The Creator attempts to show that New Asia has developed better alternatives to American ways of violence and control. Compared to the bitter war between man and machine in America, it is in New Asia where humans and AI live together in harmony. Melding metal and flesh, many hybrid creatures (termed “simulants”) also live together with humans and are equally capable of love, care and emotions.

The film’s considerably over-enthusiastic posture towards AI, especially in its conclusion, is awkward and cognitively dissonant to watch, given the heated debates over AI that the industry’s writers’ and actors’ strikes have raised. Despite its best intentions and Edwards’s innovative filmmaking methods, The Creator ultimately feels like a film that bungled its time-travelling coordinates, and landed in the wrong moment.    

► The Creator is in UK cinemas now.