THE CREATOR
Cert 12A ★★★
In cinemas now
British filmmaker Gareth Edwards shot to fame with 2010 sci-fi horror Monsters. It wasn’t the plot that caught Hollywood’s attention but the story of its production.
The former visual effects technician shot his debut feature in real locations using consumer equipment and a six-person crew. Then, he digitally added the tentacled beasts and post-apocalyptic landscapes on his bedroom computer.
It was a Hollywood-quality movie, made with equipment you could source from Curry’s.
After directing franchise movies Godzilla and Star Wars: Rogue One, Edwards may have started another revolution with The Creator, an epic
sci-fi about a future war between humans and AI robots.
Upscaling his Monsters set-up meant Edwards could deliver a standalone sci-fi epic on the tiny (for Hollywood) budget of $80million.
The film looks amazing, serving up visions of robot suicide bombers and US tanks the size of shopping centres mowing through Vietnamese villages.
Real locations in Thailand and Vietnam anchor the special effects in a way you don’t see in more expensive studio-based productions.
Sadly, again, the plot isn’t quite as compelling.
It’s set mostly in the year 2070, 15 years after America blamed AI for a nuclear disaster in LA and persuaded its allies to outlaw the technology.
But Vietnam (here renamed New
Asia) refused to join in, producing smarter androids with friendly human faces.
So now America is conducting
Platoon-style raids on New Asia’s AI labs. Our hero is former undercover agent Joshua (John David Washington) who joins a lab raid so he
can search for his android collaborator wife Maya (Gemma Chan). There, he meets disarmingly cute android kid Alphie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles) who can turn off any piece of tech with its mind.
As our hero bonds with the walking remote control, he begins to worry if he’s on the wrong side.
And he begins to feel protective of Alphie when he’s ordered to stop it from disarming a Death Starry US superweapon called Nomad.
It all feels a little familiar and the characters and performances needed to be a lot less one-dimensional for the ending to deliver its intended emotional punch.
Still, The Creator isn’t just good value for money for its backers. Despite its flaws, the eye-popping visual effects make it well worth the price of a cinema ticket.