Gareth Edwards’ The Creator, just opened in cinemas, is a notable return from the director of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and Godzilla (2014). Reviews have ranged from mixed to very positive; critics have generally praised its world building and effects, while suggesting that story-wise it doesn’t do anything new. Even if that’s fair (I think it’s a bit grudging myself, having greatly enjoyed seeing it this weekend), the real importance of the film might be in how it was made and what this could mean for the future of filmmaking, including science fiction.

It's true that The Creator evinces a set of sci-fi tropes (Edwards himself has described the film as “Blade Runner meets Apocalypse Now”). It’s 2070, and the world is split between a United States waging war on artificial intelligence and a ‘New Asia’ where A.I. peacefully co-exists with humans. Ex-special forces agent Joshua (John David Washington) is recruited to hunt down and kill an elusive figure known as Nirmata (Hindi for ‘creator’), the architect of an advanced A.I. that could make a decisive difference in the conflict. Joshua reluctantly journeys into the dark heart of A.I.-occupied territory (the most humanoid of which are called ‘simulants’ in the story), only to discover that the weapon he’s been instructed to destroy is in the form of a young child…

Certainly, you can anticipate some of the key plot developments and even how it all resolves, and there’s a fair critique that the film falls into a familiar cyberpunk-style (and ironically somewhat dehumanizing) ‘techno-Orientalism.’ But appropriately from the director of Rogue One, rather than an exploration of artificial intelligence, really The Creator is an anti-imperial(ism), anti-War (on Terror) story. Edwards has acknowledged that Star Wars’ ‘used future’ aesthetic is amongst its sci-fi inspirations (there’s even a looming, all-powerful Death Star that must be destroyed), but there are many other influences and references that genre fans can enjoy identifying, if they want to.

Yet focusing on these influences risks overlooking what might be most original, and potentially game-changing, about The Creator, which is how it was, well, created.

Edwards’ background is in VFX. As is well-known, he basically single-handedly crafted the impressive special effects in his debut feature Monsters (2010) – well-worth catching up on if you haven’t seen, and which shares several themes with his latest film.

Monsters was made for less than $500,000; The Creator reportedly cost $80 million but looks like something typically made by Hollywood for $250 million or more. While the storied ILM did most of the effects, Edwards was able to achieve his vision by effectively reverse engineering the typical (sci-fi) filmmaking process. Rather than relying on expensive studio sets and green screen work, he deployed a small crew and was able to travel to (it’s said) 80 locations to give The Creator an expansive, epic scope, only adding in the effects after the film had been fully edited (places used included Nepal, the Himalayas, Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Tokyo, and across Thailand). He even shot on a Sony FX3 – a prosumer camera – with some beautiful and spectacular results.

This is where The Creator really distinguishes itself, in being an original (meaning, not based on some existing intellectual property), non-sequel/non-franchise, theatrically released serious sci-fi film – here in the 2020s when arguably we need sci-fi more than ever to help us anticipate some potential dark futures ahead of us.

Of course, there’s a long history of inventive, low-budget sci-fi (and genre movies generally), but ironically even with (or partly because of) the CGI revolution, what we’ve been losing are the kinds of mid-budget, challenging, socially critical sci-fi movies that flourished from the end of the 1960s and into the 1970s (the kinds of films I discuss in my forthcoming book). When you’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars, commercial logic dictates that you must veer towards crowd-pleasing acceptability (but which ultimately probably ends up pleasing no-one). The Creator – certainly in its realization, if arguably less so in its revelations – shows how it’s once again possible to produce serious science fiction on film and still (hopefully) make money. In this respect at least, it presages a bright future.

Come With Me If You Want To Live: The Future as Foretold in Classic Sci-Fi Films is published in November 2023 from Lexington Books.