The Creator Footage Reaction: Gareth Edwards Is Bringing Humanity Back To Sci-Fi

It's a rare thing these days to have a big genre movie come out that isn't attached to some existing, already-proven IP. Gareth Edwards' "The Creator" is bucking that trend, however, and bringing a film that has been billed as a cross between "Blade Runner" and "Apocalypse Now."

I had the chance to see three sequences from the upcoming movie on IMAX (different footage, it seems, from what was shown to folks at CinemaCon earlier this year), and what I saw not only confirmed the retrofuturistic vibe given off by the trailer, but also hints at a blockbuster genre film that — wait for it — has a well thought-out story with fully developed characters who go on an emotional journey over the course of the movie's 133-minute runtime.

It's that emotional aspect that struck me; even though I only saw three scenes plucked out of the film, I already felt for Joshua (John David Washington), his wife Maya (Gemma Chan), and the AI child/potential destroyer of humanity, Alphie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles). I also felt quite a lot for more than one robot who has a head that looks like a toaster, which is a testament to the emotional machinations that Edwards is bringing to the big screen.

Read on for more of my reaction to the footage, including my first impression of the movie's unique approach to visual effects, its cinematography (led by none other than "Dune" director of photography Greig Fraser), and its score (crafted by none other than Hans Zimmer who has too many credits to mention, including "Dune" as well).

Without getting too specific on plot points that haven't already been revealed in one of the trailers or the synopsis, the first scene I saw takes place early on in the film and has Joshua with his pregnant wife Maya on a beach in Thailand. Unbeknownst to both of them, U.S. armed forces are invading the AI enclave where they live in search of a so-called weapon purported to be a threat to humanity. Over the course of the attack, Maya finds out that Joshua is an undercover U.S. agent. She flees from him with her AI family, and Joshua sees her most likely killed by a bomb.

The sequence not only sets up the agonizing event that sets Joshua on a course he takes in the rest of the film, but it also gives a sense of the movie's visual effects aesthetic, which Gareth Edwards described as trying to imagine what technology would look like if the Sony Walkman beat out Apple in the technology design wars. Edwards shot the film in 80 different locations across the world and laid the VFX over real-life landscapes. The result is a movie that feels more lived-in, more realistic, and more gritty than what we've seen in cinema from many sci-fi features as of late (a feel that is only compounded by the fact much of it was shot on 1970s anamorphic lenses), and it's a refreshing change.

The second sequence from "The Creator" was an expansion of what we've seen in the trailer, where Joshua — five years after he lost his wife on that Thai beach — walks through a very well-locked door only to find a young AI child watching television while sitting on a sofa chair wreathed by well-loved stuffed animals. The sequence expands from what we see in the trailer to show how that child and Joshua ultimately escape, though not before the AI's secret base (whose location in our world is a working particle accelerator facility in Thailand) is bombed by the U.S. military. The battle scene evokes "Apocalypse Now" and other war films, a sense that is only enhanced by expansive shots of these rich locales and the thrumming beats of Zimmer's score.

The third sequence I won't spoil the details of, because it was so heart-rending to see even out of sequence that I don't want to take away people's experience of seeing it play out in the movie as a whole. I will say, however, that it has Joshua and Alphie now together (side note: Edwards said that an unexpected movie that was an inspiration for him was "Rain Man") in a Southeast Asian village that comes under vicious attack by the U.S. army. The robots (and at least one macaque monkey) act in ways that make it pretty incontrovertible that they are sentient creatures who care about others, and there's a powerful scene on a bridge with Joshua, Alphie, and a robot that is not unlike what a brainwashed R2-D2 would be like on steroids. It is, in short, a big action sequence that also made me feel things. What else can one want from a cinematic experience?

"The Creator" premieres in theaters on September 29, 2023.