Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Creator’ on Hulu, a Modestly Compelling Sci-Fi Outing About AI and its Implications

The Creator (now streaming on Hulu) is a somewhat ambitious sci-fi yarn featuring a few notable names: Director Gareth Edwards (who helmed 2014’s badass, underappreciated Godzilla) co-writes with Chris Weitz, who previously teamed up on Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, with Tenet star John David Washington taking the lead role. It’s somewhat novel to see original sci-fi get much traction in this era of megafranchises and rampant IP, so my inclination is to force myself to like The Creator purely on principle – but it’s also a struggle not to be derivative of those megafranchises, so let’s find out if it’s original enough to warrant praise. 

THE CREATOR: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: DON’T CALL THEM REPLICANTS, thank you. They’re simulants. Simulants, I says. I know naming artificially intelligent humanoids with the suffix -ants is a slippery patch of sidewalk, but please, walk slowly and do your best to remain upright. It’s 2065, and AI has been fully integrated into global society. You got your robot boxers, you got your robot cops who beat on protesters. Some simulants look like robots, while others look pretty much human save for the backs of their heads, which are shiny and metal and have a cylindrical hole right through their skulls. So right there, you don’t have much question as to who is what around here, unlike the replicants, who could sneak around pretending to be human even when they’re not, although maybe they were pretty much human, whatever it means to be “human,” right? Yeah, I think so. 

Joshua Taylor (Washington) is one of the purely human humans born of a womb, although at this point, he’s a cyborg with a robot-prosthetic arm and leg. He was injured, and his family killed, when AI actors detonated a nuke on Los Angeles 10 years prior, killing a million people and prompting a global war between American military forces and “New Asia,” which still supports and harbors AI. Taylor is an undercover agent for the Americans, assigned to sniff out “Nirmata,” the entity/person/whatever mastermind-leader of the AI population. He’s married to Maya (Gemma Chan), who’s pregnant, which makes it even more tragic when his job results in her being exploded to bits by NOMAD, a massive American don’t-call-it-a-Star-Destroyer designed to eliminate AI strongholds with, well, the phrase “extreme prejudice” doesn’t quite seem extreme enough.

Five years pass. As Taylor works a lowly gig cleaning up the L.A. crater, we sit here and wonder if a movie would kill off Gemma Chan so quickly. As you’d expect, he’s deeply depressed, heartbroken, having nightmares, etc. He’s approached by Col. Howell (Alison Janney) to aid the cause, and his retort is, “I lost a child that night, so I don’t give a shit about becoming extinct. Now I’ve got TV to watch.” (They should’ve offered him a new title: General Anxiety rimshot!) But Howell knows how to pry the remote from his hand – with a hologram proving Maya isn’t dead. (Aha! They wouldn’t kill off Gemma Chan so quickly!) There’s a new weapon they wanna take out, and sure enough, Taylor finds it: It’s a little simulant girl he calls Alphie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles), because no kid that looks like a cross between him and his supposedly dead wife can go without a name handed out with confused affection. I mean, he could’ve called her MacGuffin, but she seems to experience true emotion, which would disqualify her from being labeled such. Oh, and she has the power to remotely deactivate technology, which is pretty neat. So now what? Well, Taylor isn’t sure if AI is worthy of being defined as “life” or needs to be systematically destroyed, and as various violent things continue to happen, he and you and I can’t help but wonder, What Is A Person? 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: To name a few: The Matrix, District 9, Aliens, Avatar, Chappie, Blade Runner, Ex Machina… am I missing any? But it perhaps compares less superficially and more philosophically with Danny Boyle’s underrated Sunshine, which composited many sci-fi classics before it, but superseded comparisons by being intense, fully committed to its premise and expertly executed. Note: The Creator isn’t as good as Sunshine, but it’s at least respectable.

Performance Worth Watching: One of the disappointing components of the movie is its apparent disinterest in engaging the full firepower of its cast – I haven’t previously mentioned Ken Watanabe as a simulant rebel because he’s forgettable at no fault of his own. So I guess this acknowledgment goes to Janney, who doesn’t go full Tommy Lee Jones (or Stephen Lang in Avatar) as a mean-as-hell gonzo-military character, but still manages to deliver a convincing bad-guy snarl. 

Memorable Dialogue: A translator gizmo doesn’t quite seem to be directly translating a vindictive directed at an American soldier from a New Asian person: “Please make love to yourself. And also make love to your mother.” 

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: “It’s just programming,” Taylor insists many times. OR IS IT? No surprise then, that our protag begins developing a fresh perspective on the idea of what “being alive” means, as he develops feelings for Alphie, and is caught in the middle of a war, wondering who has the ethical 

upper hand. And his situation is sympathetic, for sure, as we contemplate whether AI technology is all doom and gloom, or if there’s the possibility that not all “people” who aren’t “born” in the normal way may be benevolent and respectful of living things and, even though some of them look like cold unfeeling robots, they almost certainly enjoy petting cats as they purr in their laps, as one passing scene illustrates so adorably. 

So The Creator boasts its share of semi-provocative core ideas that are reasonably fleshed out amidst a bevy of elements that don’t work as well – mopey flashbacks, a child as catalyst for moral redemption, the question as to why anyone in 2065 is still using walkie-talkies (is anyone in 2023 still using walkie-talkies?). Tonally, Edwards takes early, ill-informed stabs at comedy which he abandons for maudlin overtures rooted in Taylor’s forlorn lost-love story, which is never particularly deep or convincing. That primary character’s emotional arc feels like afterthoughts as we lickety-split from plot point to plot point, which suffer from murky convolution but eventually, stubbornly, after a lapse in logic or three, almost add up. 

The film is ultimately saved by Edwards’ visual M.O. – this is quite the handsome-looking film, the director employing the scope and vision he exhibited in Godzilla and Rogue One to convey the spectacle of conflict, exemplified by kamikaze-bomb bots and massive trawling fortress-tanks. It never ceases to be stylish, or give us a tactile sense of setting. Edwards is less successful at sustaining tension, building to a meh of a climax that’s predictable and vaguely satisfying at best. The movie’s execution doesn’t match its ambition, but that’s not quite enough to write it off as another derivative sci-fi outing. 

Our Call: The Creator is good – as in “pretty good,” good enough to warrant a lukewarm recommendation. STREAM IT but keep your expectations modest.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.