Gemma Chan, Allison Janney and Ken Watanabe also star in the postapocalyptic action thriller, which pits U.S. military against a robot menace 10 years after a nuclear explosion levels Los Angeles.

A big, brawny original sci-fi movie is a rare thing in the age of franchise branding, which makes you root for Gareth Edwards’ The Creator, an admirably ambitious endeavor, stuffed with imposing visuals, impressive design work and nifty tech hardware. But this future-world action thriller about a war between humankind and artificial intelligence feels like a lot of movies scrunched together, most of them familiar. A dull lead, a wishy-washy vein of ersatz spirituality, racial optics by turns uneasy and pandering and the usual chaotic plotting don’t help. Even the charm of an enigmatic robo-kid only goes so far.

The broad-strokes story depicts America as a military-industrial complex whose aggressively interventionist foreign policies are supposedly driven by the greater good and yet, duh, ultimately proven clueless when it comes to their xenophobic lack of empathy. The demonized “other” in this case applies to all manner of advanced A.I. creations, still being produced in 2065 by a continent now known as New Asia that refuses to play by U.S.-imposed rules.

Joshua’s epiphany is nudged along by his evolving rapport with a mystical child he calls Alphie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles), a superweapon with the power to remotely control technology. She’s one of many simulants in New Asia with human features and robotic innards, plus a bunch of visible rear-cranial gear. That includes cylindrical head-hole mechanisms that look disturbingly like those earlobe tunnel piercings you see on guys stacking shelves at Whole Foods.

Despite all its blustery warfare and its very elaborate tech trappings, The Creator is a movie about humanity, interspecies harmony and technological advances as a force for good, not fear. Which makes it an interesting counter-perspective to so much current thinking about the perils of A.I. But Edwards and Weitz telegraph the soulfulness and profundity with such insistence that those aspects end up feeling fabricated.

No less artificial is the goopy sentiment evident almost from the outset as Joshua and his wife, Maya (Gemma Chan), joyfully await the birth of their child in a tucked-away Asian seaside paradise. (Cue countless Hallmark-moment flashbacks throughout to the two of them on the beach in romantic bliss.)

Five years later, Joshua bluntly declines the overtures of military brass General Andrews (Ralph Ineson, doing his best American Lurch thing behind dark aviator shades) and Colonel Howell (Allison Janney, doing stuff she could do in her sleep) to draw him back into the game. New leads have surfaced concerning Nirmata’s whereabouts, and Joshua’s experience makes him uniquely qualified to go behind enemy lines in New Asia. Digital footage indicating that Maya is still alive convinces the amputee to strap on his robotic limb replacements and board a plane full of swaggering grunts led by Howell.

The state-of-the-art underground tech lab they uncover is hidden beneath humble farmland, all of which gets razed by Nomad. Whether it’s a crass allegory or just an unintended visual association, the evocation of Operation Rolling Thunder in Vietnam leaves a sour taste as we watch great swaths of pastural countryside and villages destroyed while peasant farmers scream their hatred at the American invaders.

But the movie is almost as jarring when it shifts gears to show bolt-headed lama-bots in saffron Buddhist robes, basically peddling a stereotype of transcendent Asian serenity to point up gung-ho American wrongheadedness.