Film Review: The Creator – 4.5/10

‘Go make love to yourself. Go make love to your mother...’

I think it’s time to accept that I don’t like sci-fi. Interstellar did nothing for me. I didn’t care for Arrival. Hell, even Blade Runner is a film that I have admired from afar rather than something I actively enjoyed watching. Against this backdrop, I’m here to say that The Creator is a dull movie…

Here is as much of the plot as I can make sense of. Joshua (John David Washington) is working undercover to infiltrate the leader of an army of AI rebels. His cover is so deep that he is engaged to AI sympathiser Maya (Gemma Chan), who is also pregnant with their child. When something goes wrong, Joshua spends the rest of the film attempting to reunite with Maya whilst also shadowing a small robot child (Madeleine Yuna Voyles) who has the capability to control all machines on earth and therefore destroy the human race forever. Also, C.J, Cregg from The West Wing (Allison Janney) is also trying to erm… destroy the robots? I think? Who cares.

The unnecessarily convoluted plot is not the only issue with The Creator. The cast is bland and forgettable – I’ve seen John David Washington in loads of films now and I’ve not seen a compelling performance from him yet – the dialogue is tedious and robotic (even when it’s not meant to be) and the whole thing is derivative of other sci-fi films that were also pretty dull in the first place. While I get that I’m not the target audience for these movies, this really is a drab and dreary affair. Rogue One director Gareth Evans does provide some aesthetically wonderful moments but everything else wrong with this movie drags it down so much that it barely matters. None of this matters.

I’m sure there are people reading this that loved this movie. Good on you. I’m glad someone got something out of it. Me? I never want to think about this piece of shit ever again. A monotonous mess.