Metacritic reviews

The moving and eye-popping thriller, starring a never-better John David Washington, dives into the hot-button topic of artificial intelligence but more importantly mankind's tendency toward war and how we treat those different than us.

It’s an intriguing, stimulating, exhilarating movie, which really does address – with both head and heart – the great issue of our age, AI.

Even in a crowded AI-movie market, Edwards’s stellar sci-fi is a terrific achievement. See it on the largest, loudest screen possible.

With The Creator, Gareth Edwards finally finds the balance between arresting images and grounded emotional stakes.

But the most fundamental reason why “The Creator,” for all of its shortcomings and clichés, ultimately sold me on its optimism is that it succeeds as a blueprint where it fails as a movie.

As pretty as The Creator looks, and however well-considered its world may be, it feels like all sizzle and no steak. AI is an extremely prevalent issue facing us in the real world, but Edwards seems disinterested in exploring beyond its aesthetic surface (e.g. borrowing real people’s voices and likenesses in perpetuity) in favor of a warmed-over critique of American imperialism in the global East.

The script might have glaring flaws and painfully ambiguous morals, but The Creator is a truly remarkable piece of original science fiction storytelling. Even when it borrows from ideas established in films that preceded it, Edwards manages to make it feel fresh and new. The Creator is a beautifully crafted, albeit imperfect, science-fiction thriller that tries to unravel what it means to be a good human in a bad world.

For a designated last great hope of original sci-fi, this is a surprisingly programmatic picture.

Overloaded with incidents, effects and explosions, “The Creator” fails to develop the personalities and relationships that would give its central characters an affecting humanity. The movie’s attempt to touch the heart comes off as, well, artificial.

This is a movie that, its many strengths notwithstanding, seems split between the desire to do something original and an imagination tethered to better movies from the past. That makes it a nostalgic patchwork, not the bold new vision it aims to be.