As a fan of director Gareth Edwards, I saw The Creator on a whim a few days back. Edwards’ ability to tell a large-scale, fantastical story whilst maintaining a human centre can be regarded as his greatest skill; this is some- thing he demonstrated in his 2014 blockbuster Godzilla, his first big-budget film. This film displays this talent once again.

John David Washington takes the lead as Joshua, an ex-special forces agent whose prior experience, shown to us through flashbacks, draws him back into the war America is raging against Artificial Intelligence. Joshua and his team have been tasked with finding a superweapon built by the so-called terrorist or freedom fighter ‘Nirmata’, but upon discovering it, a moral complication arises.‘Nirmata’, through AI, has taken the form of a young girl. At a loss for what to do, Joshua decides to take her with him on an odyssey across the battlefield. Despite the war being a rather obvious metaphor for American Imperialism, the film does a good job of not being too heavy-handed with the topics it discusses.

The question of how real AI is takes a personal angle; the American characters continually remind each other that the AI ‘don’t feel anything’, yet the film makes sure to dwell on this, often juxtaposing inhumane action from the human military with acts of humanity from their robotic foe. With the current debates on AI with the Writer’s Guild in Hollywood, the film comes at a poignant timeshowing how quickly AI has been integrated into society. Edwards made a film showing how entrenched something as cur- rently alien as AI could become.

The director locates the film in ‘New Asia’, a Vietnam stand-in to wrestle with ideas of American imperialism. The contrast between the massive power of America’s NOMAD space station and the AI rebel’s ramshackle bases is stark. A scene taking place in a small village, with American soldiers threatening locals echoes Vietnam war films. But it creates a real and thriving civilization of humans and AI living together in the beautifully shot island society, the screen filled with the red and gold sunsets of travel brochures and bright green hills.

All the beauty is underscored by a derivative Blade Runner-esque soundtrack by Hans Zimmer. Yet it is missing something; it doesn’t manage to convincingly express the ideas of its creator. While it lightly touches on the ideas mentioned above, what is humanity and American military dominance, it doesn’t delve into them as thoroughly as I felt the film could.

Its message was clear, but felt almost hollow, not grabbing me in the way I had hoped. Part of the problem for me was the score. The music was undeniably good, but it sounded a little similar to almost every new sci-fi film to come out of Hollywood in the last decade. So, I went and saw the film again. But did this change my opinion of it? Well, yes. To start, I was too harsh on the use of music in this film. Edwards primarily uses diegetic music, most memorably in a scene reminiscent of Vietnam films (the Fortunate Son of the future war is Radiohead’s ‘Everything in its Right Place’), but this means Zimmer’s simple score isn’t used often. I took particular notice this time around of Edwards’ opening, which catches us up on the con- text of the film through a collection of fake commercials and news clips. These two aspects, along with the rugged set and costume designs really give the world a lived-in feeling.

Coming to what I started this review with (the idea of the film being a personal tale), I think it really does this brilliantly with Joshua (John David Washington) and Madeline Yuna  Voyles’ Alphie. Their relationship is something similar to that of a father and daughter, which really was the emotional core of the feature. It is also through this relationship that the film explores its main question of how human is AI. How these two act towards each other and how that progresses through the film is what Edwards implores us to focus on, and it is worth your time to do that.