The Creator is a 2023 science-fiction film directed and co-written by Gareth Edwards, the man behind Rogue One and the 2014 Godzilla, with John David Washington, Gemma Chan, Allison Janney, Ken Watanabe, and newcomer Madeleine Yuna Voyles. Set in a future where a war rages between humanity and artificial intelligence, it follows a grieving soldier sent to destroy the AI's ultimate weapon, only to discover that weapon is a synthetic child. I came out of it sitting in a very particular headspace: somewhere between "why did this make me cry" and "humans might genuinely be the worst part of existence."

Let me start with the thing that lingered longest. The Creator belongs on the same shelf as Avatar, District 9, and Planet of the Apes, films where I find myself fully, unapologetically not on the side of my own species. And what makes this one land is not the spectacle of the war, it's the recognition underneath it. Watching humanity in this film behave as the cruel, hopeless aggressor, there was almost no part of me that doubted we would actually be like this. That's the quiet horror of it. There's a moment where the human forces threaten a man's dog to get him to talk, and rather than being shocked, I just felt a grim certainty that yes, that's exactly how we'd do it. A film that can make you despair at your own species that efficiently is doing something right.

Then there's the craft, which genuinely floored me. This movie is beautiful, and I was astonished to learn it was made for eighty million dollars. That figure matters, because there are blockbusters out there costing three times as much that look like someone flailing in front of a bedsheet. Edwards reportedly shot on location all over the world with small crews and compact cameras, then layered the science-fiction in afterward, and that backwards approach gives the entire film a grounded, tactile realism that most modern effects-heavy spectacles can't buy at any price. It's a masterclass in resourcefulness.

The performances hold it together. John David Washington does strong work as Joshua, and the cast around him delivers across the board. The characters I was meant to root for, I rooted for hard, and the ones designed to be detestable were thoroughly detestable. That clarity helps, because the emotional core of the film, the bond between Joshua and the AI child Alphie, is what everything ultimately rests on.

I'll be balanced about its weaknesses, because it has them. This isn't going to feel groundbreaking to anyone, and the storyline hits familiar beats you'll recognise from plenty of other sci-fi. But I'd push back on that being fatal, because a story can follow the same path others have walked and still feel distinct through the strength of its execution, and that's precisely what happens here. My two genuine gripes are the runtime and the ending. The film is long, and there are stretches where you feel every minute of it. And the conclusion, where Joshua sacrifices himself to save Alphie, reached for an emotional weight I'm not sure it fully earned. The feeling was there, but I don't think quite enough had happened to justify landing it the way they did.