Honestly, a lot of whether or not you’re going to like this is movie is based on whether you think the projections from the NOMAD station are cool. Why are they painting every target with a big glowy X? Shut the fuck up and eat your popcorn. Oh, you already had a big dinner? Have you been wanting to see a biracial love story that sort of reads like the first volume of Saga but space? Did you think country music singer Sturgill Simpson should be in more parables about Vietnam? Has it been a while since you’ve sat in those tiny airplane IMAX seats? Maybe this is the movie for you!
Among the Friends I went to see this with, The Creator was divisive. Divisive in the sense that we were divided along the lines of people who were having a good day and a bad day and the people having a bad day didn’t like it, I think. There aren’t a lot of things that Gemma Chan and John David Washington can do together that I would object to, and so honestly they didn’t need to talk at all in this movie for me to be on board with a love story and some explosions, a little detective work that turns into a real serious heist. The plot is pretty tumbly, as one can imagine when a dude who’s been grieving a loss for years is suddenly handed a surrogate son to raise while also trying to avoid being shot in the back behind enemy lines, which is to say being a new dad feels a lot like trying to learn Vietnamese and driving standard at the same time while trying to get away from a bunch of people who want to kill you. The number of times that JDW squeezes his gun threateningly is probably a drinking game by now, and if it’s not it will be soon. Robot child actors are almost designed to fail, so let’s all agree that anything said by a ten year old on screen with a serious voice is forgettable, okay?
It reminds me a little bit of if my favorite sci-fi book from this year, Station Eternity, crossed with District Nine while on its way to play Scythe (Jakob Rozalski’s art is mesmerizing and you should stop to look at it even if you don’t see this movie). 
There are these scenes with animals that are so perfect and wonderful that I won’t say more about them except to say that every time they happen they will take you on a rollercoaster of emotion. There’s some excellent double (and triple) casting of characters, which isn’t that common in movies these days–if anyone can give me some good recommendations for movies where this is being done well right now, I’m very interested in that bit of trivia.
The most jarring thing about this movie truly is the scene in the opening sequence when a retro-looking documentary takes a sharp turn in an alternate history direction and you start seeing all sorts of advanced tech doing retro things. At one point, inexplicably, there’s this fully formed android making hamburgers and it totally took me out of it.
We as the human race have developed the capacity to create humanoid robots, and presumably all of our problems are solved, so we can now turn our attention to the very real problem of how to eliminate the notoriously high labor costs of the fast food industry’s fry cooks??? Actually, there’s a scene in the third act that I think is supposed to be played straight and maybe even a little heartwarming, but as the caretaker of a tiny emotional terrorist it just made me so confused and angry. So, it’s not even essential to the plot, but basically in this remote village somewhere you catch a glimpse of an AI unwrapping a candy bar for a toddler, which is just like, where do I start? What an irresponsible robot? I thought there were design laws in effect to stop AI from causing harm to humans, but apparently we don’t need teeth?
