The Creator

Gareth Edwards has spent his career putting ordinary people in the foreground and something enormous in the sky behind them. Monsters (2010) did it with two travellers and a cordoned-off Mexico; Godzilla (2014) did it with a lizard the size of a weather system. The Creator does it with an American war against artificial intelligence, fought in the rice fields and temple towns of a place the film calls New Asia, and it is the biggest thing he has built from nothing. The world is remarkable. The story he has walked through it is one we have seen many times, and by the end the pictures are doing nearly all the work.

Start with what James Clyne has designed, because it is the reason to see the film. The American weapon hangs in orbit and moves across the sky as a cross of blue light, so that every scene of village life has a slow crucifix crawling above it. The robots come in two kinds: workers with turbines for heads, and simulants with human faces and a neat hole drilled straight through the back of the skull, which the film keeps showing us in profile and which never stopped being unsettling. Monks in saffron have circuitry where their ears should be. Greig Fraser and Oren Soffer shoot all of it in what look like real paddies and real beaches, with haze in the air and grain on the image, and the effects sit inside the frame rather than on top of it.

Three editors are credited, Joe Walker, Scott Morris and Hank Corwin, and the film moves like a thing cut by three people. The first hour is brisk and fragmented, with Joshua’s memories of Maya slipping into the present a few frames at a time, and it works; it gives a stock character a grief we can see. The second half stops for a speech, starts again, stops for another. Hans Zimmer and Jo Goldsmith-Eteson score the war with low drones and a distant choir, and they are at their best in the raid on the village, where the music drops almost to nothing and the screaming is left to do it.

John David Washington plays Joshua as a man who has closed every door he owns, which is honest and also a problem, because the film asks us to watch him open them and he gives us little to watch. Madeleine Yuna Voyles, as Alphie, is the real lead: solemn, curious, a child who has just learned what a lie is. Ken Watanabe gives Harun a tiredness that suggests he has been fighting this war for longer than the humans have. Allison Janney’s Colonel Howell has a single expression and a short fuse, and the soldiers around her have been written as if the script wanted us to cheer their deaths. Gemma Chan is mostly in flashback, and Sturgill Simpson does a warm ten minutes as Drew.

Here is what got to us. In the village a farming robot is ordered to carry a bomb into a building, and it goes, and it counts down out loud, and it is polite about it. Robots put their hands up and are shot anyway. We were horrified, and we were meant to be, and it is the film’s one clear argument: these things ask for nothing and we kill them regardless. Then the last forty minutes arrive, an assault on a very large machine with a great many corridors, and we found ourselves admiring the light on the metal and checking how long was left.

The trouble is the script, by Edwards and Chris Weitz. The soldier and the powerful child are borrowed from Lone Wolf and Cub and Children of Men; the Americans dropping fire on villages are borrowed from every Vietnam film; the robots are good because the film has decided they are good, and nobody on screen makes the case against them well enough to be worth answering. New Asia is a place where things happen to people, and the people are mostly extras. The reviews so far split almost down the middle, and we understand both halves.

Edwards is a filmmaker who is best when he is hiding something, and here he has nothing to hide. See it on the biggest screen you can find, for Clyne’s world, for Fraser and Soffer’s light, and for Voyles, and keep your expectations at the level of the pictures rather than the plot. It runs 134 minutes and carries a 12A.