Even with its story hiccups — and by the end, they’re practically contagious — “The Creator” creates images of the future you have not seen before, at least not quite this way. The movie is messy and knotty but co-writer and director Gareth Edwards has yet to make an uninteresting piece of science fiction.
This is his fourth feature, following his scrappy low-budget debut “Monsters” (2010); the grave and highly gratifying 2014 “Godzilla”; and another large-scale franchise entry, also good, the “Star Wars” spinoff “Rogue One” (2016). “The Creator” belongs to no franchise, though certainly it owes a lot to the harsh wonders and narrative devices of many earlier movies, from “Blade Runner” to “Akira.”
Equal parts grit and sentiment, Edwards’ script, co-written by Chris Weitz, begins in 2065 before jumping forward, and then backward. A nuclear strike, made by artificial intelligence creations known as simulants, has left a million dead in greater Los Angeles. In the film’s beautifully edited opening minutes, we’re briefed on the humans’ global war with the simulants, whose human-like emotional wiring (literal wiring, that is) exceeds even that of Haley Joel Osment’s roboboy in the Spielberg/Kubrick collaboration “A.I.” The simulants with human faces are not easy to kill, though the film also features scads of more anonymous and entirely faceless “Clone Wars”-type simulants, designed for quick and easy expiration.
Over in New Asia, humans and simulants are still getting along. But “The Creator” wastes little time in ginning up the havoc and the mass slaughter there, with the U.S. military deploying its fearsome aircraft, the U.S.S. Nomad, to target and destroy the simluants’ villages and their allies’ camps. Recalling the chaotic and often brutal guerrilla combat of his “Rogue One,” Edwards here evokes America’s war in Vietnam, and in particular the Vietnam war fantasia “Apocalypse Now.”
