In a future where very little is what it seems but all the surprises can be seen coming a mile away, Joshua (John David Washington) is a man on a mission. The development of artificial intelligence (presented via an opening retro faux-newsreel) was going fine until a nuke destroyed LA: having seen The Terminator, the US military assumed computers were making a move to wipe out humanity and decided to fight back, with Joshua at the pointy end of the spear.
While the US binned their AI (though they kept their unintelligent machines handy), New Asia became a haven for thinking software, though most of it seems to be walking around in robot bodies - there's no talking cars or smart houses. Seeing AI as a global threat, the US declared war. While they mostly fire off drone strikes from a giant suborbital platform called NOMAD, there's still room for boots on the ground - such as Joshua, who we meet on an undercover mission to ferret out the human brain behind the AI revolution.
Things go wrong, Joshua fails both at his mission and at keeping the woman he loves alive, and five years later he's a washed up drunk until the military comes calling with an offer he can't refuse. If the New Asia struggle is a Vietnam War analogue, it's Apocalypse Now time. Well, for a few minutes at least, as Joshua leads a team to a secret jungle lab where they will a): take out a ultimate AI weapon, b): kill its creator, and c): hopefully find his dead love. The twist? The ultimate weapon is (in the form of) a child, Alphie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles), who can shut machines down with their mind.
The road trip that follows makes up in incident what it lacks in originality: there's always something happening, even if not much of it lingers. And Edwards does serve up a lot of great visuals, though they rarely generate much of a sense of the world behind them. One or two of these big background images deployed in a short film would make for powerful world-building; here they just pile up one atop the other without ever coming together to create a plausible New Asia.
That said, there are times where the haphazard approach does click. Despite being at war with the US - NOMAD is just drifting through their airspace dropping missiles, while giant US ARMY-branded tanks crush villages - New Asia doesn't seem to have any military of their own. As Joshua and Alphie flee the remains of his former team (who haven't given up on dropping Alphie into a trash compactor) and hit the road, the only obstacles are local robot cops and some Vietcong-style robot rebels, while in the cyberpunk cities life goes on. The idea that the US declared a war and the other side went "whatever" feels more futuristic than any number of hollow-headed, human-faced robots walking around.
Mash-ups can be satisfying in their own right, and eventually the emotional through-line of the story kicks in hard enough to clarify that the striking backdrops are just meant to be striking backdrops. The world of The Creator rarely feels more than 2D (the robots too often look like humans in dress up, which they are), but Washington gives a battered performance that's almost enough to make everything around him feel real through sheer gravity.
His performance comes direct from a smaller, better film, but those big science-fiction backdrops he's standing in front of definitely have an appeal of their own.
- Anthony Morris
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