The Creator's Alphie Gave The VFX Team A Run For Their Money

The "Lone Wolf and Cub" formula has really taken over pop culture of late. It makes sense enough: the premise of writer Kazuo Koike and artist Goseki Kojima's original '70s manga — a wandering loner becomes the caretaker of an extraordinary youngster — is endlessly malleable. It can just as easily work in a comparatively realistic future where society has collapsed ("The Last of Us") as it can in a fantasy world completely removed from our own ("The Witcher") or even long ago in a galaxy far, far away ("The Mandalorian").

Director Gareth Edward's 2023 sci-fi film "The Creator" transposes that template onto the latter half of the 21st century, where a war between humanity and AI robots rages on 15 years after the nuclear destruction of Los Angeles. Edwards heavily evokes the iconography of Vietnam War cinema for the movie's depiction of New Asia, an amalgamation of several Asian countries that finds itself subjected to the evils of Western imperialism upon becoming a sanctuary for AI lifeforms. This is how we come to meet our "Lone Wolf," Joshua Tyler (John David Washington), an ex-operative for the U.S. army who once led a mission to find and kill the mysterious "Creator" responsible for the continued advancement of AI. Instead, he ends up adopting and protecting a "Cub" in the shape of a powerful AI being known as Alpha-O or "Alphie."

Alphie, played by Madeleine Yuna Voyles, is everything you would expect from the "Cub" trope. She possesses abilities that could change the balance of this world, putting a giant bullseye on her back. She also looks and acts like an adorable human child, save for the unhidden portions of her mechanical interior. It's the latter aspect of the character that posed a real challenge for the film's visual effects team.

Say what you will about his artistry, but there's no denying Edwards knows how to be thrifty. His first feature, 2010's "Monsters," is a sci-fi road trip drama set in an area near the Mexico-U.S. border that's been overrun by giant tentacled aliens. It cost a mere $500,000 ("mere" in the Hollywood sense, anyway), but looks better than a lot of pictures with budgets 100-plus times that. Some of that can be chalked up to Edwards taking on several hats; he was the movie's director, writer, cinematographer, and production designer, and he oversaw the visual effects. Be that as it may, he used a similar approach on "The Creator," shooting in real locations and minimizing the size of his crew. This allowed him to keep the budget down to $80 million, which is pretty astonishing considering it looks like it could've easily cost north of $200 million.

Explaining to The Hollywood Reporter how they managed this impressive feat in February 2024, visual effects supervisor Jay Cooper revealed that Alphie herself was a far more complicated special effect than you might assume. Since Voyles was only seven years old at the time and wasn't allowed to spend long hours filming (and reasonably so), Edwards and his team realized it would take too long to create her appearance with practical makeup and elected to do it all in post-production instead. However, with Alphie being an essential element of the film's emotional core, that meant Voyles could only have "a few tracking markers on her face" to avoid impinging on her performance, "which makes the work that much more difficult," Cooper noted.

One of the keys to making the whole "Lone Wolf and Cub" premise work is ensuring your "Cub" is properly precious. They can be constantly scowling and prone to murder like Laura in "Logan" or rebellious and juvenile like Ellie in "The Last of Us," but you have to believe they're just too friggin' lovable for the hardened, cynical "Lone Wolf" to not risk life and limb to keep them safe. When it came to Alphie, Edwards and his collaborators initially considered leaving more of her robotic components exposed and treating her face like a mask that she'd strapped on (a little like Ava in "Ex Machina"). Unfortunately, while this would've make things easier for the film's VFX artists, it also made Alphie too scary-looking. As Edwards observed:

"We need to connect the skin from the throat down into the clothing, and then suddenly they're more lovable. And that probably made everything twice as difficult."

"The Creator" is far from the strongest "Lone Wolf and Cub" riff in recent memory, but that's chiefly down to Joshua and Alphie's relationship being a tad too thinly-sketched for its own good. Still, despite the faults of its script (which Edwards co-penned with his "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story" scribe Chris Weitz), the movie makes for a thematically captivating sci-fi anti-war allegory, and one that fully delivers on a spectacle level. Even smaller CG details, like Alphie's mechanical appendages, are flawlessly incorporated into the real-world scenery and do their part to service the larger story being woven here. As hard as it was, the film's VFX artists should feel great about what they pulled off.