134 min | PG-13 | September 29, 2023 | 20th Century Studios
A nuke wipes out Los Angeles and America declares total war on artificial intelligence. An ex-soldier gets sent to destroy the ultimate AI weapon and finds a child. The future has never looked this good or thought this small.
A nuclear detonation levels Los Angeles. The United States blames artificial intelligence and wages total war against it. Joshua is a special forces operative sent to find and destroy a weapon built by the elusive architect known as the Creator. The weapon turns out to be a child. The movie poses one question and stages it across a divided world where the West exterminates AI and a region called New Asia shelters it. It asks whether a machine that loves and fears and wants to live deserves to be hunted to extinction.
John David Washington plays Joshua as a man hollowed out by loss. He spends most of the film grieving a wife he believes is dead and protecting the child he was sent to kill. Madeleine Yuna Voyles plays Alphie, the AI child, with an unforced calm that the film leans on heavily. Voyles carries scenes that depend entirely on whether the audience accepts a robot as a person. Gemma Chan plays Maya, Joshua’s wife, in fragments and flashbacks that the script keeps just out of reach. Allison Janney plays Colonel Howell with cold conviction, and Ken Watanabe gives Harun a weariness the screenplay never fully earns.
Gareth Edwards directs from a script he writes with Chris Weitz, and the filmmaking outpaces the writing at every turn. Edwards shoots on real locations across Asia with small cameras and adds the future in post, and the method shows. The aircraft carriers and orbital platforms feel photographed rather than rendered, grounded in mud and rice paddies and weather. The production design imagines AI as serene figures with hollow cylinders bored through their heads, a single image that does more world-building than pages of dialogue. The sound design gives the orbiting NOMAD weapons platform a low mechanical dread every time it crosses the sky. The screenplay cannot match the images, and it recycles Blade Runner and Apocalypse Now and a dozen other films without adding to them.
The Creator wants to be a war film about the people we decide are not people. It has the images for that film and the visual confidence to sell a world. It does not have the script. Joshua’s arc moves on rails, the emotional beats arrive on schedule, and the big ideas stay at the level of slogans. Edwards has made something gorgeous and derivative, a movie that looks like the future and thinks like the past.