There are few better experiences to be had at the cinema than seeing the arrival of a remarkable new talent, seemingly out of nowhere. Doesn't happen very often, of course, which is another reason it feels so special when it does. For me, one of those socks-knocked-off moments came in late 2010 with the appearance of Gareth Edwards' Monsters, a film which felt like it picked the whole SF genre up and gave it a good shake. People clearly took notice, and Edwards was hustled off to Franchise Town for a while – though I'm not really inclined to complain as the two franchises involved are two of my favourites. Whatever else you can say about it, Edwards' take on Godzilla is certainly distinctive, while his stellar-conflict-meets-Blake's-7 film was the most interesting thing to happen in a galaxy far, far away in a long time.

Nevertheless, it is a pleasure to see that Edwards has been out and about again under his own steam, as it were, and the result is The Creator, which has also got a lot of people quite excited. Is it, as the more effulgent reviews have been proclaiming, the best SF movie of the century so far? Well, if we're still talking about the same century that Inception and Interstellar were released in, probably not, but it certainly deserves to be part of the conversation.

Four films in, elements of a recognisable Edwards style are beginning to crystallise – the film starts with some repurposed newsreels, apparently-genuine pieces on the future of domestic robotics. A boxy thing like a cupboard on wheels trundles around uselessly, ha ha, and the montage continues in a similar vein – until there's a clip of a group of medical professionals at work, and – hang on – has that guy in the middle got a toaster for a head? The transition into what I suppose is a sort of alt-history where robots and AIs developed at a faster pace is effortlessly done.

But all is not rosy in this future world. Following a nuclear attack on Los Angeles in the 2050s, the USA (and, one assumes, its allies) have outlawed machine intelligence and declared war on those Asian states where it is still in use. To assist them with this, they have constructed something called NOMAD (North-American Orbital Missile Air Defence) which is effectively a giant sub-orbital drone.

John David Washington plays Joshua Taylor, a veteran of the war against the machines and their allies, who as the story gets going (there is a lengthy, somewhat dense prologue setting everything up) is still recovering from a failed mission to find the fabled AI designer Nirmata, which cost the life of his wife Maya (Gemma Chan). However, army intelligence approaches him (in the forms of Allison Janney and Ralph Ireson) and request his help on one last mission. The machines have constructed a new weapon which potentially has the power to destroy NOMAD and win the war, spelling doom for the human race. They want Taylor to lead an assault team to destroy the development facility – the carrot being that there is evidence that Maya is still alive and present in the area. . .

Naturally Taylor says yes, and the strike gets underway – the array of near-future weapons and vehicles that Edwards and his designers have come up with are wonderfully plausible and convincing – but, as chance would have it, circumstances dictate that he ends up going into the enemy's inner sanctum alone. And there he finds an android child (Madeleine Yuna Voyles). . .

As I say, elements of Edwards' signature style are coming into focus, and in some ways this is very obviously a successor to Monsters – the story is relatively straightforward, concerning a lengthy trek taken by two characters who gradually form a bond in the course of the journey. It is possibly fair to say that narrative is not Edwards' greatest strength as a film-maker – it is widely believed that the final third of his last film, which really elevated it into something special, was largely the result of post-production work undertaken by Tony Gilroy (Edwards himself denies this) – but what he is unparalleled at is creating worlds which are immersive and utterly believable. The Creator is gorgeous to look at, mixing real-world landscapes and images with spectacular SF ideas – there's something of the stellar-conflict world's used-galaxy aesthetic there, but perhaps also something of Neill Blomkamp's Chappie, too. (Someone should rescue Blomkamp from dreadful Landy Bloom films and put him in a room with Edwards; the results should be amazing.) Edwards finds a way to be provocative as well as beautiful – for example, a Buddhist monastery where most of the monks are robots.

The actual story is relatively straightforward – viewers of The Mandalorian won't be alone in guessing how things proceed – but the ideas and images involved keep it engrossing; strong performances help too – Ken Watanabe appears as an android, while Edwards even manages to get a pretty good turn out of Gemma Chan, which I probably wouldn't have expected. In the final act there's a definite sense of the film accelerating towards a climax perhaps slightly more quickly than would be ideal, but the storytelling is sound throughout – credit should probably go to Chris Weitz, another of Edwards' regular collaborators.

Of course the film benefits from being relevant to the current debate on what, if anything, we can or should do about the development of AI in the real world, with many loud voices calling for a pause and some serious discussions on this topic. What's interesting is that in The Creator it's the hybrid human-AI society which is depicted sympathetically, while the Americans are – for the most part – organic fascists, ruthlessly prosecuting a war based on prejudice and ignorance. Possibly Edwards is right and fear of AI is an instinctive response which is really unjustified – but what makes the current situation so notable is that the potential arrival of strong AI is something literally unprecedented in human history. We don't know what will happen – will strong AI prove to be our replacement or the next step in our development? It's still impossible to say.

In any case, I'm going to stick my neck out and suggest that The Creator doesn't really have that much to say on the topic of genuine AI. The film is really about the clash between civilisations with different values – which, if you're reductive, means Asia and the west, in this case. It's about tolerance and diversity coming into conflict with a sort of dogmatic xenophobia; there's an implicit criticism of interventionist American foreign policy, too (perhaps another inheritance from Monsters). It's lazy to say that The Creator is, to some extent, Apocalypse Now meets Blade Runner, but there's an element of truth there. In any case, it's an excellent film and, I suspect, the one a lot of people have been waiting and hoping for Gareth Edwards to make.

Awix

09.10.23 Front Page

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