The Creator builds a hollow, beautiful world. At least it looks pretty?

Courtesy 20th Century Studios

This is part of our coverage of new genre films premiering at Austin’s Fantastic Fest. 

Since 2010’s Monsters, Gareth Edwards has become a go-to for science fiction franchises. He may have started out with an original independent feature, but in the years following, he’s been knee-deep in Star Wars and Godzilla projects. With his latest, The Creator, Edwards is again making an original story for the first time in years, this time with a studio budget. For the most part, he nails the necessary spectacle and emotional splendor, but The Creator ultimately falls victim to the curse of Frankenstein’s monster. It’s stitched together from all manner of sci-fi properties from the last 70 years but doesn’t have much to say of its own.

In an alternate future, humanity dug deep into their AI obsession. Small worker robots gave way to larger humanoid versions that could assist with surgeries, drive cars, and even join the police. This is all courtesy of a revolutionary AI developed by Nirmata (Nepalese for “Creator”), the entity responsible for giving these beings independent thought. What at first seemed like a godsend quickly devolved into yet another race to be exploited, segregated, and looked down on. 

After an accident caused by a non-human drops a nuclear bomb on Los Angeles, the fallout leads to America’s “war on the bots.” Covert soldiers are sent deep undercover within the pro-bot resistance, with the simple mission to find and take out Nirmata. One such soldier, Joshua (John David Washington) falls in love and marries underground leader Maya (Gemma Chan). 

Joshua is devastated years later when a catastrophe kills his wife and most of the resistance, and he’s called back into action by Colonel Howell (Allison Janney). The Nirmata still at large, and now wields a super weapon that could change all AI and computer systems for the worse. That weapon is Alphie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles), an advanced child robot, whom Joshua stumbles upon in the bowels of a massive laboratory.

The worldbuilding in The Creator is its strongest point, with a fully-realized and functional society formed by decades of growth and strife. Los Angeles is a Hiroshima analog, building up from the brink of annihilation. The film’s cities are vibrant hubs of business both aboveboard and shady, with robots and simulants tensely co-mingling with humans.

Unfortunately, the movie loses narrative focus as the road trip aspect of the story takes hold, and the more interesting parts of the story grind to a halt. Think Netflix’s Extraction with a lot more robots. Joshua and Alphie traipse from small town to small town getting brief respites before the laser guns come out and blow up everything. It works for a bit, thanks to the natural charismatic bond that Washington and Voyles share, but it gets old quick. 

The Creator’s main issue is a story that lacks originality and doesn’t really go beyond surface-level. There are plenty of other small-budget films, several of which also played at this year’s Fantastic Fest (see the Czech sci-fi thriller Restore Point) that hit on big concepts and feature exquisite worlds but have a metric ton more vision and depth than Edwards’ studio spectacle.

At least The Creator gets a boost from its visuals. The last several years have seen studios shoveling cash into Star Trek, Star Wars, upwards of $200-$300 million, most of which are crammed with shoddy or incomplete-looking CGI they never justify the cost. That isn’t the case here. With only a fraction of a Star Wars budget ($80 million in this case), Edwards’ film sets a new standard for what genre epics should look like, with every nook and cranny stuffed with abundant detail. This is one future world you won’t forget anytime soon — if only the same could be said about the story surrounding it.