What do you get when you combine elements from the Star Wars, Elysium, and Terminator movies while also throwing the lead from Christopher Nolan's Tenet into the heart of proceedings? You get The Creator, a new sci-fi action thriller (and original IP, huzzah!) from Gareth Edwards-director of Godzilla and Rogue One-that looks like it might succeed where recent genre fare from the increasingly stale Marvel and Star Wars franchises has failed. Now, with an exciting new trailer, we've well and truly set the countdown timer for the film's September 28 release as this has shot up our list of most-anticipated films for 2023 faster than a blaster bolt.
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Image: 20th Century Studios
Promising spectacular visuals, intense action and weighty themes around what it means to be human, The Creator stars John David Washington (Denzel's son) as Joshua, a hardened ex-special forces agent caught up in a war between humans and AI. When he's recruited to hunt down and kill the Creator-the elusive AI architect who's developed a weapon with the power to end the war and all of mankind-things don't go as planned and he finds himself protecting a little girl who makes him question how we define 'person'.
To describe The Creator's new trailer as a feast of remarkable imagery feels like we're selling it short. Edwards and his team appear to have built a world that looks futuristic, yet lived in, hitting on the kind of seamless combination of high-tech futurism and grounded, real-world grit that we haven't seen since Neill Blomkamp's early films (District 9 and the aforementioned Elysium).
Image: 20th Century Studios
Plus, inhabiting this world alongside Washington is one of the finest casts you'll see all year, featuring Ken Watanabe, Ralph Ineson, Gemma Chan, Allison Janney, Amar Chadha-Patel, Veronica Ngo, and Marc Menchaca. We also need to give a special shout out to Madeleine Yuna Voyles, the very young actress playing opposite Washington who appears to carry so much of the film's emotional weight.
While we try not to get our hopes up too much about these kind of films-we've been burned before-we're struggling to keep our excitement in check on this one. Edwards has shown he can do gritty yet large-scale sci-fi right, even within a failing franchise (Rogue One), and Washington has proved time and again that he's one of the most compelling leading men around (check out BlacKkKlansman if you haven't already). If that's not worth paying to see it on the biggest screen you can find when September rolls around, well, we don't know what is. Check out the trailer above.
Image: 20th Century Studios
Image: 20th Century Studios