The Creator is pretty and almost insultingly dumb

A planet-altering international conflict that pits Americans against their most topical villain since the Cold War. A sweeping sci-fi epic with stunning visual effects, created on a dime. An original story bursting to the surface in an endless sea of franchises and IP that still retains all the action, vaguely militaristic space ships and explosions you'd expect from anything Marvel could muster.

With all that in his back pocket, director Gareth Edwards probably had no trouble selling 20th Century Studios on The Creator: a voguish used-futureaction-thriller that pits John David Washington as a renegade soldier in humanity's war against AI (or in pre-2023 lingo, just robots).

That's likely becauseon the surface, it appears to be a breath of fresh airwith just about everything going for it. But just like our real-world AI, you've been sold a bill of goods. And, after only a few minutes watching aluddite version of Pocahontas' John Smith or Avatar's Jake Sullylabour over whether to side with the colonizersor the colonized,it's evident there's far less going on under the hood here than The Creator would care for you to consider.

Posingas a deep allegory on the realities of xenophobia and a speculative examination of our AI-panicked future, it's actually a dull, simplistic fable with all the moral complexity of a fourth grader's anti-bullying Instagram post.

Stunning world on a budget

The Creator is a story that has been done to death, then resurrected and done to death a few more times. But worse than all that, it becomes what no film should ever be: boring.

That is, if you actually are looking under the hood. Because, as expected from a visual-effects artist turned occasionally-visionary director, The Creator's bodywork truly does shine.

Made through a run-and-gun, stripped-down filming setup similar to indie productions like his earlier thriller Monster, Edwards manages to create a stunning (if slightly generic) futuristic world for under $100 million US peanuts when compared to other films of this scale.

And we get a blitzkrieg tour of it as we follow Washington's Joshua a washed up and disaffectedspecial forces agent whore-enlisted after his wife's death to track down both the AI army's war-ending weapon and its "creator."

There are stilt houses blown to smithereens by self-detonating androids; mech-suit fire fights barrelling through rural farming villages; and evocative (though tactically impractical) spinning hard disks tunneling right through themechanized skulls of the"simulants."

It's a lived-in, fantastical-but-realistic kind of setting that wouldn't look out of place in Simon Stlenhag's Tales From the Loop or Fiona Staples' Saga. Coupled with those surroundings,we're treated to a barely interrupted sequence of tightly choreographed action scenesand chases probably more than enough to carry a story that didn't take itself so quite so seriously through to the finish line.

After the sixth or seventh actionsequencewhizzes by, you start to realize the over-emotional structure they all hang from reads like an AI-written pastiche of other sci-fi stories; stories that, whether they're good or bad themselves, were at least slightly more original.

Instead of developing and exploring the existential conflict between humankind and machineslike in theX-Men comic book seriesHouse of X, conflicts are boiled down to Allison Janney doing her best Duke Nukem impersonation and generic soldiers unironically shouting painful lines like,"We've got company!"

Strong actingovershadowed by clunky exposition

And as Joshua begins to identify with Alphie, the immature yet powerful robot soon in his charge,The Creator angles more toward Will Smith's sterile I, Robot than it does Jeff Lemire's ascendant Descender.

Far from being nuanced or (dareto dream) interesting, the central conflict sleepwalks into the obvious resolution of "racism is bad" so transparently you can predict every plot pointabout five minutes in.

The generally strong acting performances are completely overshadowed by clunky, poorly handled exposition and underdevelopedplot points. More than once Joshua's adventure hits a logical and physical dead end, only for a past mystery and his next goal to be explained point blank and ad nauseam by Sturgill Simpson, of all people.

And while I'm a fan of the particular and oddly pervasive genreI've taken to calling "sad men stealing sad kids," here, the necessary reasons for Joshua to start caring for his little robot buddy are ignored.

Instead of having an initially indifferent adult bewon over by the actions ofa child with a clearly defined personality like inHunt for the Wilderpeople, Upor even Brother Bear The Creator buildsJoshua and Alphie's relationship simply byputting them near one another.

A vapid message

It's a symptom of the safe writing hiding behind pretty set design, perhaps slightly to be expected by co-writer Chris Weitz who previously opted to cut the dark second half of Nick Hornby'sbook About a Boy in his more feel-goodadaptation. The result here is an imaginative, but not creative film that has about as much sustained excitement as a flash fire.

But even worse is thepaper-thin messageThe Creator attempts to wrap itself in with acentral themeso simple and self-evident it feels vaguely insulting to be preached tobyit.

It'ssimilar to the ones found in Neill Blomkamp's District 9 and Elysium. These areall movies wherehigh-paced action and whip-fast camera movements are meant to distract from the fact that their seemingly impactful statementsboildown to "don't kill people because they're different."

Here, it'sexpressed with alevel of insight that wouldn't feel out of place on PBS Kids.Which still pales in comparison to The Creator's worst fault: that it is just straight up boring.