This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labour of the actors currently on strike, the movie being covered here wouldn't exist.

It isn't often that we get a brand new, fairly big-budget, sci-fi movie that isn't part of a pre-existing franchise. In fact, if you're in the mood to support such a film at the box office this year, then it'll have to be The Creator. There aren't any others. All of our hopes and wishes for what a modern genre blockbuster can be are pinned firmly on a single film. It could be a lot worse though. It could've been one that isn't anywhere near as thoughtful or refreshing as this one, or one that hasn't come from a place of such adoration for sci-fi of the past.

Incredibly, it's already been seven years since Gareth Edwards made his directorial contribution to the Star Wars universe with Rogue One. Even more incredibly, it was only his third feature film as a director. Despite his relative inexperience, he was given enough freedom to create something stylistically and tonally different within a huge franchise that we're all so familiar with. Taking a sideways step away from the typical romanticised fantasy of Star Wars, Rogue One was more akin to a war film that just so happened to tell the story of the Death Star and its construction.

The Creator, from a standing start, isn't far off. It's the story of a near-future war between humans and the AI beings that live among us. On one hand, it takes its lead from Apocalypse Now – a marginalised group battling for survival against a superpower that is imposing itself on foreign lands. On the other, it shares just as much connective tissue with Blade Runner – the artificial lifeforms that are living among us seem just as human as we are, and that's the moral battle of it all.

It all seems terribly convenient timing that a film pitting humans against AI should come along now, but it wasn't planned that way. The reason it's taken seven years for Gareth Edwards to release another film into the world since Rogue One is that it's just that difficult to have a studio green-light an original blockbuster. That means it would have started development long before the debate around AI had become such a populist topic.

As much as The Creator fits into the cultural landscape of today, it also fits firmly into the sci-fi landscape of the past. George Lucas has always been very open about how he was inspired by Akira Kurosawa's films – most notably Seven Samurai and The Hidden Fortress. Just as Star Wars was initially based around concepts and ideas that originally came from Samurai cinema, The Creator seems to be too. In this case, though, it's the Lone Wolf and Cub series. John David Washington plays Joshua in the role of the high-ranking wandering soldier, while Madeline Yuna Voyles is Alfie, the child he must protect along the way.

It all amounts to a feeling of nostalgia, even if The Creator is a brand-new film. So much respect has been paid to the past of sci-fi, and so many cues are taken from it, that it naturally has a warmth of familiarity to it. Even with its up-to-the-minute theme of Humans vs. AI, it's a film from another time in a number of ways. Perhaps most so visually.

There would have been a strong temptation to follow suit with the average modern franchise blockbuster using an abundance of green screen and CGI. The Creator doesn't. In fact, so much of it is shot out in the real world that it apparently set a new record for having used the most different locations from Thailand in a single film – around eighty. Whether anyone was keeping count for a previous record to exist beforehand is up for debate, but it's an impressive number nonetheless. The result is that it creates a realness and authenticity that, really, has gone amiss since the days when practical effects ruled the VFX world.

The Creator is a breath of fresh air that satisfies a craving for something new, but also calls back and pays homage to the sci-fi that's paved the way for its existence. In taking the old with the new, it produces something with a distinctive visual style wrapped around a captivating story. What its legacy will become is hard to predict, but if The Creator were to kick start a new era of original sci-fi in cinemas, it would certainly be a worthy catalyst.