Directed by Gareth Edwards
In cinemas
A MAN loses his wife in a war with robots. The machines didn鈥檛 kill her, human military ineptitude did. She was pregnant with his child. The man (John David Washington, whose heart-on-sleeve performance can鈥檛 quite pull The Creator out of the fire) has nothing to live for, until it turns out his wife (Gemma Chan) is alive after all, and working with the robots. She has built them a weapon 鈥� a robot child (an irresistible performance from 7-year-old Madeleine Yuna Voyles) who can control machines at a distance. The man steals the child from its lab and they go in search of his wife, who is in hiding. They are a family in wartime, trying to reconnect, and their reconnection will change everything.
The Creator鈥榮 great strength is its futuristic South-East Asian setting. (You know a film has problems when a reviewer launches straight in with the set design.) Police drones like mosquitoes rumble overhead. Mantis-headed robots in red robes ring temple bells to warn of US air attack.
Advertisement
This is Apocalypse Now Lite: the US aggressors have been traumatised by the nuking of Los Angeles, an atrocity they blame on their own artificial intelligence. They have hurled their robots into the garbage compactor (literally 鈥� a chilling, upscaled retread of that Star Wars scene). But South-East Asia has fallen in love with AI technology. The way a unified, Blade Runner-esque 鈥淣ew Asia鈥� sees it, LA was an accident a long way away, people replace people all the time and a robot is a person.
Hence: war. Hence: villages annihilated under blue laser light and missiles launched from space against temple complexes in mountain fastnesses. If nothing else, it is spectacular.
The Creator is not so much a standalone sci-fi blockbuster as a game of science fiction cinema bingo. Huge battle tanks, as large as the villages they crush? Think Avatar. A very low-orbit space station, visible in the daytime? Think Oblivion. Child with special powers? Think Stranger Things.
This is a science fiction movie assembled from the tropes of other science fiction movies. If it isn鈥檛 as bankrupt as Ridley Scott鈥檚 Alien prequels Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, it is because we haven鈥檛 seen South-East Asia cyborgised before (though readers of sci-fi have been inhabiting such futures for over 30 years) and also because director Gareth Edwards once again proves that he can pull warm human performances from his actors. This isn鈥檛 nothing. Nor, alas, is it enough.
As a graduate, Edwards won a film contest in London and got the chance to make a low-budget feature, Monsters (2010). On the back of it, he got a shot at a Star Wars spin-off in 2016, which hijacked the entire franchise (everyone loved his Rogue One).
The Creator should have been his Star Wars. Instead, something has gone wrong in the editing. Vital lines are delivered in scenes so truncated it is as though the actors are explaining the film directly to the audience. Every few minutes, tears run down Washington鈥檚 face, Voyles鈥檚 chin trembles, and we have no idea what brought them to their latest crescendo 鈥� and, ooh look, that goofy running bomb! That reminds me of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow鈥�
The Creator is a fine spectacle. What we needed, though, was a film with something to say.
Simon also recommends鈥�
Geoff Ryman (Gollancz)
In this London of the future, biology is politics. Learning is viral. Sedition is treatable. Bodies photosynthesise and rice paddies feed the 鈥渃hild gardens鈥�. Ryman mashes together cultures to create a future as strange as it is true.
Walter Tevis (Gateway)
Humans are dying out, not because the robots turned against them, but because one has grown too tired to serve. A sly take on machine logic and its consequences.
Simon Ings is a novelist and science writer. Follow him on聽Instagram @simon_ings
