Say it once, say it twice, say it beyond the point of exhaustion, Hollywood has forgotten how to be original, or so the terminally cynical would have you believe. That said, adaptations have been a key source of Tinseltown’s life since the film industry’s inception, and so to point the finger squarely at IP filmmaking is dishonest and, ironically, unoriginal.
That’s not to say it isn’t refreshing when a brand new canon rears its head on the big screen, but those films are nevertheless beholden to the same metric as your Sonic the Hedgehogs and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles; they have to be good. This was the hurdle that led to The Creator‘s downfall; a downfall that it’s attempting to rectify with streaming success.
Per FlixPatrol, The Creator has manifested a sixth-place finish on the United States’ Prime Video film charts at the time of writing. It comes hot on the heels of a fifth-place The Equalizer 2, the Denzel Washington-led action thriller that also features a pre-breakout Pedro Pascal.
Set in the year 2070, The Creator stars John David Washington — the son of Denzel, coincidentally enough — as Joshua Taylor, an undercover operative for the United States military who’s recruited for a mission against an AI-powered army of robots seeking to overthrow mankind. His instructions are to infiltrate the AI compound and destroy a rumored superweapon that could spell humanity’s doom, but he soon discovers that the “weapon” is actually a robotic child. Unable to bring himself to finish the job, Joshua goes rogue while taking the child (who he names Alphie) under his wing, earning himself plenty of enemies.
The Creator earned itself two nods at the 96th Academy Awards for Best Visual Effects and Best Sound, and it’s not difficult to see why. With just an $80 million production budget, The Creator‘s greatest accomplishment is the case it makes for combining practical effects with CGI in the unending quest to make the next piece of science fiction more visually interesting than the last.
The film even tows a somewhat interesting narrative line at first, balancing a moral conundrum in the human-robot conflict that’s entirely functional, albeit way too familiar. But it ends up being all for naught when a single line of dialogue so eloquently informs us that, actually, one side is the good guys and one side is the bad guys.
This completely kneecaps the political tension inherent to the film’s plot, and subsequently undermines the film as a whole, as Joshua’s father-daughter relationship with Alphie isn’t dynamic enough to carry any sort of truly meaningful narrative thrust. From then on, The Creator dissolves into a rather paltry race-against-whatever-so-that-humanity-doesn’t-die situation; a sin so often reserved for the pop culture adaptations that always have just as much potential as The Creator, but just don’t care enough to make good on it.
Even so, props to Gareth Edwards for taking the swing that he did. Between that, his hearty contributions to the Star Wars scene and indie genre circles, and what will hopefully be a return to form for the Jurassic franchise, he’s certainly one filmmaker that just needs to keep going.
Published: Jan 3, 2025 09:02 am