Gareth Edwards Can Shoot the Hell Out of a Movie

'The Creator' is that ever-elusive non-sequel, not-based-on-pre-existing-IP sci-fi blockbuster. Great movie, if not quite a film.

It was jarring to learn that The Creator isn’t a Star Wars movie, comic book spinoff, or an adaptation of a high-profile YA series or graphic novel. Movies rarely look this “big” anymore unless they’re glorified advertisements for something else (a toy, an expanded universe, some kind of lifestyle brand by other names). A movie that’s just selling a movie? That qualifies as refreshing these days.

The Creator is a throwback in many ways, to things that should probably just be norms. To when movies aspired to be movies, and you could take it for granted that a sci-fi blockbuster would actually look good.

The greatest compliment I can pay The Creator sounds idiotic, but it’s true: to paraphrase Harry Styles, it’s a “proper movie.” Director Gareth Edwards makes the fantastic tactile in a way few others can. His movies are sensually immersive on a level unmatched by just about any director working outside of maybe Denis Villeneuve (as evidenced by the abundance of Creator-Dune comparisons).

They’re also both so capable of awe-inspiring imagery that they can get away with the kind of narrative clunkiness that would doom less gorgeous work. Edwards directed an actual Star Wars movie, Rogue One, in 2016, and while I can’t remember the plot or any of the dialogue, I remember the way the water beaded off of Ben Mendelsohn’s leather cloak on a drizzly planet, to the point that I can almost smell the dirt. His scenes are evocative even when they’re not necessarily exploring the themes or furthering the story — a nice problem to have, though it can be a problem.

The Creator is like that, the rare movie I wish was 20 minutes longer. I don’t know that I wholeheartedly love it, but I was in it. It often feels like a poem or a dream, where the ideas don’t seem to have transitions or fully-fleshed connections, sometimes borrowing imagery without synthesizing it into new ideas, but the passion is so obvious that it makes you want to fill in the blanks yourself. If you take a step back you can sense that The Creator is a sort of an on-the-nose mashup of Blade Runner and Avatar with a dash of The Matrix, and that its cultural analysis doesn’t always hit. The beauty of it is that it makes it hard to take that step back.

Set in the aftermath of a AI-detonated nuclear explosion in Los Angeles (as the inciting event in what becomes a war to eradicate all AI initiated by “The West”) The Creator opens with Joshua (John David Washington) canoodling in bed with his pregnant wife, Maya (Gemma Chan). As they banter and imagine their past, present, and futures together, their beachside bungalow comes under attack. A mixed platoon of humans, androids, and humanoid androids bursts in the door. Led by Ken Watanabe’s character (one of the androids with a human face but a round space between the ears where the hard drive goes) they drag a human hostage inside, beating him for information. They get what they want from the guy and file out, and the next thing you know Joshua is addressing the hostage by name and discussing coordinates. It turns out, Joshua is some kind of human double agent, and, discovering this for the first time, Maya is horrified.

“But these are my friends!”

“It’s just programming, Maya. They’re not real.”

There’s some metaphorical heft here, obviously, articulating the idea that it’s okay to kill sentient beings as long as you keep telling yourself that they’ve been “programmed” (indoctrinated?), and thus aren’t real (a war on fake friends, so to speak). It also flips the script on The Matrix and Terminator, envisioning another AI-vs-humans war, but asking you to examine why you’d just assume the humans are the “good guys.” Which Blade Runner of course did much earlier and in a slightly different way, but to largely the same end of examining consciousness and empathy.

Soon, a massive station floating in the inner atmosphere, something we’ll come to find out is called “NOMAD,” drops a bomb in attempt to kill the androids, with Joshua and Maya as collateral damage. With his background in visual effects (he served as director, cinematographer, and VFX artist on his breakout hit indie, Monster) Edwards stages explosions in such a way that you feel the shockwaves in your chest. Imbuing “air power” with its proper violence is as important as anything The Creator does narratively.

We flash forward five years, to Joshua waking up in some bachelor’s flophouse, probably reeking of stale booze as he reattaches his robotic right arm and right leg prosthetics (no robo-genitals? booo..). He’s visited by Allison Janney, as the no-nonsense Colonel Howell, giving us the extended screen time for Edie-Falco-in-a-mech-suit that Avatar 2 so cruelly teased us with. Trying to coax him out of retirement, she tells Joshua that they’ve finally located “Nirmata,” the mysterious creator of advanced AI who is a folk hero in “New Asia” and hunted in the West as the king of all terrorists. The Colonel tells Joshua they believe Nirmata has created a super weapon capable of taking out the NOMAD, and that Josh might be the only person who can help find him. (Allison Janney mostly only plays this type of character, but she’s so wonderful at it).

“New Asia” is a fairly unsubtle Orwell reference. And with the Western soldiers stomping through tropical Asia accusing villagers of harboring AI (“they have more heart than you ever will,” says one crying mother about her soon-to-be-executed robot pet), you don’t have to be a genius to grasp the terrorism/communism subtext. (Though insodoing it does also lend itself to a critique of unexamined orientalism, almost as a leftover trope from Blade Runner, which isn’t entirely unwarranted).

Meanwhile, Colonel Howell, the merciless AI hunter, reveals to Joshua — himself orphaned by the bomb and made a widower by the war — that she lost her only two sons to the war. She reveals this as a way to steel Joshua’s resolve to merc some more “evil” droids. That she’s at her most sympathetic while advocating the cruellest methods underlines another of the movie’s big ideas: that it’s impossible to argue with an emotional woman. Oops! I mean it highlights the human capacity for vengeance, to let grief blind us to empathy.

The Creator isn’t the first movie in which the protagonist gradually comes to realize that he’s been fighting on the wrong side of a war (again, Avatar and Blade Runner, to name the most obvious two). When Joshua soon learns that the “superweapon” is a cute little android girl (Madeleine Yuna Voyles), it’s neither the first to use a small child to represent the hope for peace and humanity (ET? Children of Men?). It does nonetheless manage to add some interesting flourishes. There’s no one better than Ken Watanabe at delivering a line like, “Do you know what will happen to the people of the West if they lose this war? …Nothing.”

Good line, about as succinct an encapsulation of the folly of the last 70 years or so of American adventurism as there is.

The Creator’s “big ideas” are strong, if a little vague. It also has intriguing images that go maddeningly unexplored. Sometimes it feels like sloppiness, like it’s recurring device of sticky bombs with delayed fuses, which the characters react to like they’re seeing for the first time every time, even as they’re fighting a decades-long war against advanced AI from a trillion dollar sub-space station.

Other times it feels like Edwards and his co-writer Chris Weitz could’ve written entire other movie out of one tossed off idea. In one scene, Janney’s Colonel downloads a soldier’s consciousness into a humanoid bot, but since he’s been dead for an hour, she can only bring him back for 30 seconds, during which he immediately realizes that he’s dead and is going to die again, leaving her to pump him for information while he tries to leave behind some suitably worthwhile final words for his wife. It’s an incredible scene.

Another memorable ones sees the humans sending out their own suicide bomber drones shaped sort of like little trash cans (as in the banner image above). They jog towards the enemy blissfully unaware of their true purpose, looking uncannily like my toddler when he bounds from room to room. It’s brilliant imagery, though the circumstances surrounding it are so vague that it feels almost like a free-floating idea.

The Creator goes for a “big ending,” the kind of denouement suitable for a film this operatic in scale, but, probably because it’s so loose with some of the details, it’s sort of the only ending possible and so it ends up being a little anticlimactic. It’s like Edwards’s only speed is “epic,” which can sort of numb you to it.

Still, The Creator is a memorable movie that leaves you wanting more, and that counts for a lot these days. It’s also an $80 million movie that looks better than movies that cost double, triple, or quadruple that (The Flash, and to lesser extent, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny come to mind). Edwards and Weitz, could’ve maybe spent a little longer working out the details, but above all Edwards knows how a blockbuster should feel, even if he’s not crystal clear on what should be about.

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Other Stuff

-We had a banger of a Frotcast this week, you should really listen to it. We had on Harley Quinn and Abbott Elementary showrunner Justin Halpern to explain what the writer’s won in the strike, and also to reveal some of the dumb projects he’s been pitched, like a Bored Apes Yacht Club show. James Fritz also guest stars, easily one of our funniest guests. Teaser here, subscribe at the $5 level for the full episode.

-I wrote up the trailer for True Detective season four on GQ. I’m an OG season two defender, but I think it’s less controversial to say that this season looks pretty promising.

-Anyone else f with lahmajoun? They’re these Armenian (…and also insert five other ethnicities that also claim them here) meat pizzas that you can buy in bulk and freeze. I pop them in a cast iron two at a time, with meat side facing meat side, then butter both sides of the crust and bake them at 400 for about 10 minutes. I made the ones below with a little salad I whipped up from things I grew in my garden — mint, cucumbers, Anaheim peppers, lime juice, plus lettuce, tomatoes, red onions and carrots — and then eat them like a taco. A little sauce in there is nice too, like ranch or garlic sauce or tzatziki (raita?).

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I post this partly as a brag, but also partly to ask… is this allowed? Is this how you’re suppose to do it? I’m pretty far from my Armenian roots at this point — my Armenian grandfather died a few years back, but even he was born in Fresno, so I’m not sure how much help he’d be here — so there’s this thing where I play around with Armenian foods without anyone to show me how you’re “supposed” to do it. I guess that’s how immigrant cuisines develop.

Anyway, it was good (the Anaheims turned out to be way spicier than I thought, which wasn’t a bad thing, but definitely made my scalp sweat), and you can use it, but if any #Content Report readers have other lahmajoun ideas I’m all ears/eyes.