This past weekend, the new film The Creator, from Rogue One director Gareth Edwards, opened to $14 million in North America—a less than stellar number for a studio film (albeit a vastly under-marketed one, released during an actors strike) that cost around $80 million to make. Not a total failure—especially when you consider its healthier receipts overseas—but still too low a number for what is a sophisticated bit of popcorn filmmaking. 

The Creator, co-written by Edwards and Rogue One’s Chris Weitz, is original in the most basic of senses. It is not based on a comic book, nor a video game, nor any of the android-human slash fiction I frequently post on Wattpad. (Though, I am willing to talk adaptations, Hollywood.) The film is sprung entirely from the minds of Edwards and Weitz, a solemn and occasionally soaring piece of science fiction that swaddles tricky ideas in dazzling visuals.

In its details, though, The Creator is a little less than original. The film, which takes place during a 2065 war between humans and advanced A.I., brings to mind the Terminator series, District 9 , and, perhaps most immediately, Avatar. Edwards blends his dark speculative fiction with the sweeping sentiment of an old-fashioned epic. Like Avatar, The Creator is a stranger-in-a-strange-land movie in which the villainized are gradually humanized—or at least understood as unfairly maligned, brutally oppressed non-human entities. 

This is an old storytelling form for a reason: it’s an effectively adaptable one. The Creator could be read as a trans narrative, as a pushback against the anti-migrant animus currently gripping half the planet, as a damning reconsideration of the American wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam (perhaps especially Vietnam), and beyond. It’s a film about the marginalized Other, whoever that may be, punished for the sins of self-advocacy and, when it comes to it, self-defense.

The Creator is not subtle in that messaging, and its plotting can be clunky. (Exposition dumps are quite common.) But it is, like Avatar, rousing nonetheless, the engrossing tale of a human soldier (John David Washington) who begins to doubt, while deep behind enemy lines, the nobility of his mission. In a less artistically assured film, that story might play as a forgettable rehash of hoary cliché. But Edwards is an inventive, thorough filmmaker, one who keenly understands how judiciously (and economically) applied aesthetics can be used to enrich a film’s purpose, rather than drown it out—or cover up flaws. 

Edwards first came to prominence with the 2010 film Monsters, a sci-fi thriller about a near-future in which enormous aliens stalk the globe. With “enormous aliens” in the plot description, one might expect the film’s budget to be, at the very least, in the tens of millions dollars. But Edwards made the film for a reported $500,000. Monsters is a marvelous example of restraint’s power—it proves far more evocative to behold these aliens lumbering at a distance, in sharply rendered CGI and gorgeous, hazy lighting, than it would to be confronted by a digital flurry flying relentlessly in our faces. 

Though he had many more resources at his disposal for The Creator, Edwards hasn’t lost his sense of frugal balance. He creates spectacular images of android settlements in the riverlands and mountains of Asia, of looming warships, of fierce robot-human battles with twice the flare and half the money of so many contemporary studio tentpoles. He dexterously uses space and distance to conjure awe, then zooms in close to show the grimy, quotidian mechanics of his invented technology. The Creator is sleek, but thoughtfully so. It’s impressive, but humble. The film is, to risk hyperbole, a true vision, a filmmaker reasserting their unique talent for spectacle. (Ridley Scott could be an elder-statesman analog.) 

Which is all to say, The Creator is well worth seeing while it’s in theaters. The film’s plotting may be derivative, its twists and emotional beats predictable. But there is still something rare and special in its execution; it’s Denis Villeneuve without the cold fussiness, the lacquered preening. Now that Edwards is free of Star Wars (though his Star Wars movie is a good one), he is a filmmaker to be fostered and encouraged, so that he might make ever more arresting entertainments like The Creator. Once the franchise era has finally been laid to rest (or, hell, before), we’ll need directors like Edwards to remind us of what new and thrilling things the big screen can show us. Go support that cause, if you can.