The Creator Is a Shockingly Good Sci-Fi Riff on Vietnam War Movies

There’s a particularly American flavor to the violence done in the name of saving the world in Gareth Edwards’s tenderhearted The Creator. Photo: Oren Soffer/20th Century Studios

To make a movie in which artificially intelligent characters are the disenfranchised minority is certainly a choice at a time when people are battling to prevent corporations from turning their work into grist for the generative mill and replacing them with digital substitutes. But it doesn’t take long for The Creator, a shockingly good new movie from Gareth Edwards, to establish that its AI framing is just bait. Joshua (John David Washington, an unreliable lead who’s as good as he’s ever been in this role), a former special-forces operative who’s embittered and grief-stricken after an undercover operation gone wrong, is now living near what used to be Los Angeles. As he dons a protective suit to clean up radioactive waste in the walled-off crater left behind by the explosion that killed his family and nearly a million others, work so wretched that it doubles as an act of self-flagellation, a colleague informs him that AIs nuked the city in order to take their jobs — she knows because she saw it in a video online.

That conspiratorial murmur may be a bleak punchline, but it also evokes fearmongering refrains about immigrants more than it does the discussions we’ve been having about ChatGPT. The Creator, which takes place in a world at war over the AI-fueled robots that were introduced back in the ’50s, isn’t actually interested in the effects the technology had on labor. It doesn’t explore whether the androids, some of whom look traditionally mechanical and others of whom have the faces of humans who’ve donated their likenesses, have a consciousness either — it’s evident that they do. The AIs of The Creator instead serve as a multifaceted symbol of otherness, and the focus of the movie is not on them, but on the people committed to exterminating them, and the ways those people justify and rationalize their acts of brutality. Is it still called dehumanization when it’s being done to robots? Either way, there’s a particularly American flavor to the violence done in the name of saving the world.

Edwards worked in digital effects before moving into directing, and made his 2010 debut Monsters on a shoestring budget, creating its professional-grade CGI creatures himself. His films have been unfailingly impressive looking, weaving together the otherworldly with the lived-in — it’s the character side of the equation that’s his weakness. His 2014 reboot of Godzilla stunned when the kaiju were onscreen and ground to a halt whenever the humans came into the forefront. The acclaim that Andor has received may have cast a retrospective halo over the Edwards Star Wars entry that spawned it, but Rogue One itself is a lot flatter, its ragtag crew barely distinguishable as individuals before they meet their chronologically ordained doom. The Creator is the first of Edwards’s movies to have an effective emotional core, and it’s one enabled by how blinkered its main character is. Joshua was a cog in the military machine, and he didn’t struggle with any cognitive dissonance when befriending AI rebels and falling in love with their human leader, Maya (Gemma Chan), all the while intending to betray them. Five years out from the raid that appeared to cost Maya her life, Joshua is wracked with regret on a personal level, but doesn’t seem to have done any serious rethinking of the conflict he once participated in and the motivations behind it.

It’s only when he’s given a chance to return to the front in search of Nimrata, the mysterious leader behind the AI forces, that he gets his worldview pried right open by renewed exposure to his countrymen’s actions abroad. As a portrayal of a regular person becoming radicalized, The Creator is actually closer in spirit to Andor than Edwards’s own Rogue One is. After the disaster of Los Angeles, AI was banned in the Western world but continued in the Republic of New Asia, leading the U.S. to wage war — not, the powers that be insist, on the country’s human population, which nevertheless sees heavy casualties, but on its synthetic ones. Most of The Creator takes place in the fictional Republic, a richly rendered polyglot nation filmed over locations in Cambodia, Indonesia, Japan, and Nepal. The movie owes an obvious thematic debt to Blade Runner, and its breathtaking sci-fi Southeast Asia, in which brutalist towers loom over paddy fields and clusters of corrugated metal houses, feels like a response to and rebuke of the techno-Orientalism of that 1982 classic, with its Asian-inflected cyberpunk cityscape featuring few actual Asian residents.

There are other science-fiction standards The Creator riffs on. A hard-charging squad of soldiers, lead by a brawny Allison Janney, are a nightmare version of the space Marines in Aliens. A massive American airship called the U.S.S. Nomad, which scans the terrain from the stratosphere in preparation for raining down missiles, is right out of a murderous MCU. Meanwhile, amid all of this flipping of heroic big-screen iconography, the weapon Joshua’s supposed to help locate — the one that Nimrata built to take down the Nomad — takes the form of a 6-year-old robot girl (Madeleine Yuna Voyles) who loves cartoons. It’s a discovery that Joshua initially seems to register as a dare: If the AIs can’t feel, if their reactions are only programming, then the obliteration of one in child form shouldn’t be any different, right? But the films The Creator turns out to have the strongest relationship with are ones about the Vietnam War, something made unmistakable by the early shots of futuristic hovercraft gliding over rice plants and the scenes of U.S. troops threatening weeping villagers at gunpoint. No longer able to buy into the message that they’re just doing what’s necessary for the salvation of humankind, Joshua finds himself adrift, fleeing through a war zone on impulse with a child destroyer in tow. The Creator may be an effective interrogation of American imperiousness and imperialism, but it also has a tender, anguished heart.