Is The Creator the best science fiction movie of 2023 – or is AI controlling the hype?

Is Gareth Edwards’ The Creator primed to enter the pantheon of great sci-fi movies? Or should we be wary of all the hype? Because – like our future machine overlords – the hype is coming.

Ahead of any official reviews of the AI-centric piece, studio 20th Century has allowed select critics to tweet their opinions, and the consensus seems to be that this could be the discerning sci-fi fan’s movie of the year. To reach that level for me, Edwards would have to deliver a film on a par with Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 (2009), Alex Garland’s Ex-Machina (2014) or Grant Sputore’s I Am Mother (2019). These films were full of vim and verve and imagined future worlds so rich and detailed that you can imagine never-ending sequels spinning off into infinity – perhaps the mark of all great celluloid sci-fi.

In 2010 Edwards announced himself as the coming man of sci-fi with the splendid low-budget effort Monsters. Since then he has hitched his wagon to the studio machine, becoming something of a film-maker for hire on big-budget efforts such as Godzilla in 2014 and 2016’s Rogue One. Neither turned out perfectly, as I discussed in this previous piece. But if all that loyalty to the corporate behemoth has given him licence to deliver something truly esoteric, all will be forgiven.

The Creator is set against the backdrop of a future war between humans and the forces of artificial intelligence, and centres on Joshua (John David Washington), who is described as a “hardened ex-special forces agent grieving the disappearance of his wife … recruited to hunt down and kill the Creator, the elusive architect of advanced AI who has developed a mysterious weapon with the power to end the war … and mankind itself”.

Here are a few early opinions:

Of course, it was not so long ago that a similar early release of critical opinions saw Andy Muschietti’s The Flash pegged as one of the greatest superhero movies of all time. While that multiversal adventure hardly deserved to end up as one of the year’s biggest box office bombs (possibly suffering from a sort-of DC fatigue, as well as the Ezra Miller effect), there were plenty of critics who were inexplicably not invited to early screenings, perhaps because they were less likely to deliver a positive opinion.

Are studios using artificial intelligence to handpick journalists who are statistically more likely to provide positive hype? If it’s not happening already, it almost certainly will be soon. In the meantime, let’s hope Edwards’ film really is the zeitgeist-defining AI flick we’ve all been waiting for. If mankind is going down, the least we can expect is to do so while drinking in the finest tech-inspired entertainment human civilisation has ever delivered.