If there’s one man we can trust to make a sci-fi blockbuster that’s not only based on a completely original script, but actually quite good, it’s probably the guy who made the one Star Wars movie in the last decade that hasn’t (rightly or wrongly) received any substantial flak. And indeed, those bets would be well-placed if the early critical forecast for The Creator is any indicator of what the audience response will be like.
One can only hope that Gareth Edwards’ latest blockbuster will be a benchmark for a more consistent line of richly-crafted genre fiction spectaculars that go the extra distance to understand themselves as stories, and both break and adhere to convention for anything but the sake of doing so.
Such is to say that The Creator is bound to have whispers of familiar sci-fi tropes baked into parts of it, but judging by how one particular banality was blacklisted right out of the gate, none of them came about without careful consideration for how it would affect Edwards’ worldbuilding and narrative. In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Edwards named the one bit of genre territory that The Creator was never going to tread on, specifically any reveals/fakeouts of a human character actually being an AI-controlled robot.
The most important thing was that, when you see an A.I., there’s no doubt about it, We don’t play the trick in this movie of revealing someone you thought was human turning out to be A.I. We take that off the table straight away. So, if we were going to the trouble of doing this, there had to be something about them that was impossible to get with a normal human actor. Punching a hole right through their head was one of the clearest ways to do that.
It would have been an all-too-easy path to go down, especially considering how Joshua’s apparent parent-child-esque relationship with the robot child Alphie quite blatantly teases a moral question or two about what makes someone human—an ethos that a more covert android could have bolstered quite a bit. Of course, Edwards probably didn’t want those Blade Runner inspirations falling too deeply into The Creator’s DNA, and considering how stubborn he is about making his own unique mark, it’s no surprise he imposed such a restriction on himself.
Here’s hoping it all pays off when The Creator releases to theaters on Sept. 29.
(featured image: 20th Century Studios)
