The timing could not be more perfect for a thriller flipping the current AI debate on its head, an updating of everything “Blade Runner,””A.I.” and “The Terminator” wrestled with in action epic form.

“The Creator” is derivative, but inventively so, a dazzling platform for state-of-the-art sci-fi tech impressively parked in a post-nuclear Los Angeles, or the terraces, future cities and rice paddies of Southeast Asia.

The director, Gareth Edwards, did my favorite of the recent “Star Wars” installments, “Rogue One.” And co-screenwriter Chris Weitz once wrote “About a Boy.”

But somewhere around the time we see metallic robotic refugees from the “Star Wars” design studio warming their articulated metal, wire and gears “fingers” over a campfire, I muttered my first “WTF?”

Why...never mind.

Right about the moment when one of these two-legged vacuum cleaners talks through pointlessly flanged and hinged lips covering an equally pointless machine-tooled mouth, “The Creator” started to feel like the dumbest AI movie since “Short Circuit.”

The humans have no trouble tracking, chasing down and surprising their AI foes on the battlefield. It’s as if the machines are all operating on Windows 95.

In an alternate future set up with a vintage “robots and you” styled newsreel opening (robots on the Space Shuttle, etc.), America is leading the West in the fight against artificial intelligence which the East has embraced, and apparently allowed to nuke Los Angeles.

John David Washington plays Joshua, a man whose seemingly idyllic life with his very pregnant wife (Gemma Chan) is interrupted by an attack from the NOMAD (North American Orbital Mobile Air Defense) combat platform on their corner of New Asia (Southeast Asia, judging from the Thai islands and Vietnamese fields and rice paddies).

It turns out Joshua is a sergeant working undercover in search of the Nirmata, the brilliant Asian creator of much of the new AI that’s coming out. They’re packaged as “Simulants,” sentient robots with human features and skulls with visible holes through them (For…ventilation?). The US Army in the persons of Gen. Andrews (Ralph Ineson) and Col. Howell (Oscar winner Allison Janney) want this creator dead.

The raid is premature and a debacle, leaving Joshua embittered and widowed. But years and many fruitless debriefings later, he is ordered on a new mission to find this Nimrata, the creator’s new superweapon, and perhaps the missing wife Joshua was sure was dead.

A new team is NOMAD delivered to a new strike zone because the East is helpless against the giant, IUD-shaped “Avengers” aircraft carrier in the sky. All that AI tech and the robots and Simulants living in harmony amongst the simple, happy natives can’t even spot armed commando teams marching down ridgelines, lit up with flashlights and assorted mobile assault vehicles in the pitch dark.

You’ve seen the trailers to the film. You know that the “secret weapon” is a Simulant in the form of an adorable, seemingly omnipotent child (Madeleine Yuna Voyles Alphie), and that Joshua finds himself trying to smuggle her to his bosses, to get her to lead him to his long-lost wife, or to a future where “robots can be free.”

It’s kind of clever, putting the ultimate threat to human civilization in the form of a little girl. Awww, who’d want to hurt her? She’s harmless and helpless and cute. I guess making her a cocker spaniel would have been too on-the-nose.

But among the script’s many lapses in logic, her omnipotence has its limits. And even so, it’s hard to feel for her, identify with her and root for her despite how cute this “Alpha O” (“Alphie” for short) is.

Joshua is stuck babysitting this “Little Sim,” explaining “death” and its electronic equivalent (“On,” “Off” and “Standby”) to a computerized child who wonders about heaven and if robots can be free there?

It’s all just too precious. Throw in hilariously illogical (talking suicide robots shaped like oil drums) bomb-delivery systems and tech, the undermotivated expectation that we’ll “root” for AI, and the under-explained heedless Asian embrace of this tech future.

OK, maybe that last one makes sense in a racially stereotypical way.

Director Edwards imagines this as a clumsy Vietnam War analogy, with armed and murderously heavy-handed America imposing its bloody will on foreigners who don’t “look like us.” There are hints of “Apocalypse Now” in a few sequences.

But the nonsensical nature of much of this took me right out of the movie. It’s one thing for “Star Wars” to see the need for gold-played British butler robots that look like walking Oscar statuettes. It’s another to think computered-assisted efficient design wouldn’t see the need for moving lips (there are no “eyes” on the metallic ones), for hand-held radios (comms would be built in) or hand-held laser rifles (ditto).

As the picture careens around towards its anti-climactic climax, one really does wonder about the point of it all.

If you aren’t reading the words “John David Washington” with an involuntary “Uh oh” on your lips these days, you haven’t been paying attention to the parade of piffle this most famous of “nepo babies” has turned up in since “BlackKklansman.” He’s not a bad actor, no matter how little training he got. He’s just a consistently uninteresting one, no matter how handsome he might be.

If he’s starring in the movie, it means they couldn’t get anybody better to take the lead.

And here he is, giving another colorless leading man turn in a movie that desperately could use a big dose of charisma, which only mean-Ms. Janney and noble-but-underwritten “Sim” leader Ken Watanabe provide.

Clumsy efforts like make one wonder if AI editing software wouldn’t have asked a lot of questions and demanded better results than this screenplay delivers.

Rating: PG-13 (Strong Language|Some Bloody Images|Violence)

Cast: John David Washington, Gemma Chan, Madeleine Yuna Voyles Alphie, Ken Watanabe and Allison Janney.

Credits: Directed by Gareth Edwards, scripted by  Gareth Edwards and Chris Weitz A 20th Century release.

Running time: 2:13