Is The Creator the first (or last) in a new wave of sci-fi movies about AI?

The trailer for Gareth Edwards' new film shows humanity being outsmarted by AI - and is released just as our overlords-to-be are rearing their terrifying heads

It's been a while since we had a truly great movie about devious, dystopian AIs priming themselves to take over the world, in which the key choices made by mere humans will decide whether we end up as just an organic footnote in histories written by our machine conquerors. Alex Garland's Ex-Machina (2014) springs to mind, while 2015's Avengers: Age of Ultron was a fun comic book romp, if lacking the spiky gravitas and sly intellectual thrust of Garland's debut. Grant Sputore's I Am Mother explored similar territory in 2019 with a rather more claustrophobic, yet devastatingly incisive touch. Now there's Gareth Edwards' The Creator, the first trailer for which debuted this week, arriving just as very real concerns about the ability of artificial intelligence to really muck things up for us humans are rearing their terrifying digital heads.

At first glance, it looks as if Edwards has thrown in all our favourite sci-fi tropes. The basic scenario - tooled up military man fails in mission to wipe out robot child because she is just too cute - reminds us of kind-hearted Din Djarin's inability to bounty hunt Grogu in early episodes of The Mandalorian.