The Creator is pretty — and almost insultingly dumb

A planet-altering international conflict that pits Americans against their most topical villain since the Cold War. A sweeping sci-fi epic with stunning visual effects, created on a dime. An original story bursting to the surface in an endless sea of franchises and IP — that still retains all the action, vaguely militaristic space ships and explosions you'd expect from anything Marvel could muster.

With all that in his back pocket, director Gareth Edwards probably had no trouble selling 20th Century Studios on The Creator: a voguish used-future action-thriller that pits John David Washington as a renegade soldier in humanity's war against AI (or in pre-2023 lingo, just robots). 

That's likely because on the surface, it appears to be a breath of fresh air with just about everything going for it. But just like our real-world AI, you've been sold a bill of goods. And, after only a few minutes watching a luddite version of Pocahontas' John Smith or Avatar's Jake Sully labour over whether to side with the colonizers or the colonized, it's evident there's far less going on under the hood here than The Creator would care for you to consider. 

Posing as a deep allegory on the realities of xenophobia and a speculative examination of our AI-panicked future, it's actually a dull, simplistic fable with all the moral complexity of a fourth grader's anti-bullying Instagram post. 

Stunning world on a budget

The Creator is a story that has been done to death, then resurrected and done to death a few more times. But worse than all that, it becomes what no film should ever be: boring. 

That is, if you actually are looking under the hood. Because, as expected from a visual-effects artist turned occasionally-visionary director, The Creator's bodywork truly does shine.

Made through a run-and-gun, stripped-down filming setup similar to indie productions like his earlier thriller Monster, Edwards manages to create a stunning (if slightly generic) futuristic world for under $100 million US — peanuts when compared to other films of this scale.      

And we get a blitzkrieg tour of it as we follow Washington's Joshua — a washed up and disaffected special forces agent who re-enlisted after his wife's death to track down both the AI army's war-ending weapon and its "creator." 

There are stilt houses blown to smithereens by self-detonating androids; mech-suit fire fights barrelling through rural farming villages; and evocative (though tactically impractical) spinning hard disks tunneling right through the mechanized skulls of the "simulants."

It's a lived-in, fantastical-but-realistic kind of setting that wouldn't look out of place in Simon Stålenhag's Tales From the Loop or Fiona Staples' Saga. Coupled with those surroundings, we're treated to a barely interrupted sequence of tightly choreographed action scenes and chases — probably more than enough to carry a story that didn't take itself so quite so seriously through to the finish line. 

After the sixth or seventh action sequence whizzes by, you start to realize the over-emotional structure they all hang from reads like an AI-written pastiche of other sci-fi stories; stories that, whether they're good or bad themselves, were at least slightly more original.  

Instead of developing and exploring the existential conflict between humankind and machines like in the X-Men comic book series House of X, conflicts are boiled down to Allison Janney doing her best Duke Nukem impersonation and generic soldiers unironically shouting painful lines like, "We've got company!"

Strong acting overshadowed by clunky exposition

And as Joshua begins to identify with Alphie, the immature yet powerful robot soon in his charge, The Creator angles more toward Will Smith's sterile I, Robot than it does Jeff Lemire's ascendant Descender. 

Far from being nuanced or (dare to dream) interesting, the central conflict sleepwalks into the obvious resolution of "racism is bad" so transparently you can predict every plot point about five minutes in.

The generally strong acting performances are completely overshadowed by clunky, poorly handled exposition and underdeveloped plot points. More than once Joshua's adventure hits a logical and physical dead end, only for a past mystery and his next goal to be explained point blank and ad nauseam — by Sturgill Simpson, of all people. 

And while I'm a fan of the particular and oddly pervasive genre I've taken to calling "sad men stealing sad kids," here, the necessary reasons for Joshua to start caring for his little robot buddy are ignored. 

Instead of having an initially indifferent adult be won over by the actions of a child with a clearly defined personality — like in Hunt for the Wilderpeople, Up or even Brother Bear — The Creator builds Joshua and Alphie's relationship simply by putting them near one another.

A vapid message

It's a symptom of the safe writing hiding behind pretty set design, perhaps slightly to be expected by co-writer Chris Weitz — who previously opted to cut the dark second half of Nick Hornby's book About a Boy in his more feel-good adaptation. The result here is an imaginative, but not creative film that has about as much sustained excitement as a flash fire.

But even worse is the paper-thin message The Creator attempts to wrap itself in — with a central theme so simple and self-evident it feels vaguely insulting to be preached to by it. 

It's similar to the ones found in Neill Blomkamp's District 9 and Elysium. These are all movies where high-paced action and whip-fast camera movements are meant to distract from the fact that their seemingly impactful statements boil down to "don't kill people because they're different." 

Here, it's expressed with a level of insight that wouldn't feel out of place on PBS Kids. Which still pales in comparison to The Creator's worst fault: that it is just straight up boring.