The Creator’s beautiful sci-fi world deserves a better movie

polygon.com:

I would read a book set in The Creator’s world. I’d play a tabletop role-playing game, flip through a comic book built around its setting, or play a video game anchored in its world. Its vision of a war between AI robots and humans is rich with story potential. It’s more philosophical than existential, contemplating spiritual ideas about humanity’s capacity for creation and destruction, and what we are willing to sacrifice to exercise it. And yet I’m not sure I’d watch The Creator again.

The latest film from Rogue One and Godzilla director Gareth Edwards, The Creator invites heady thoughts with its grandiose name and religious inclinations, but they buttress an overly familiar, almost archetypal premise. Following a nuclear disaster blamed on artificial intelligence, AI robots and androids (called “Sims”) are outlawed in the United States, which launches a War on Terror-esque crusade against AI and any nation that harbors it.

Tenet star John David Washington plays Joshua, an American soldier on a mission to end that war by finding and killing what he’s told is an all-powerful weapon made by Nimrata, creator of the advanced AI that powers all robots and Sims. Joshua begins to doubt his mission when he discovers that the weapon is actually an android child (Madeleine Yuna Voyles). Alphie is the first of her kind, and she has the power to control all electronics remotely — potentially a devastating weapon against the flying fortress America is using to bomb AI-friendly countries.

It’s very easy to break down The Creator into a list of influences, a Pinterest board for modern science fiction cinema. Propping up its Dances with Wolves plot is a bit of Ghost in the Shell, a healthy amount of Simon Stålenhag, some Neill