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In Gareth Edwards’ “The Creator,” humans are offered the chance to share their face with artificially intelligent creatures. “Donate Your Likeness,” billboards proclaim, as half-human, half-AI robots mill about busy streets beneath them.

It’s a fitting motif, in that this film is wearing another movie’s face. Willingly or not, “Blade Runner” donated its likeness to “The Creator.”

The sci-fi epic, directed and co-written (with Chris Weitz) by Edwards, follows embittered soldier Joshua (John David Washington) as he sets off on a perilous quest to win a war against the robots. That’s what the military wants him to do, anyway; as the oft-funny Colonel Howell (Allison Janney) sees it, non-human beings are responsible for a nuclear attack on Los Angeles and must be eradicated.

Joshua, however, is in it to find his wife (Gemma Chan), a figure of some import to the AI rebels whom he thought had been killed years ago. (There’s a twist about her identity coming, but you’ll figure it out long before Joshua does.) Along the way, he’ll pick up a superpowered child (Madeleine Yuna Voyles) who just might be the key to ending the war.

You know — just like every other sci-fi epic. There’s a golden child with mysterious powers, a sinister empire and a reluctant protagonist drawn into the fray. There are clear metaphors about global power and conflict, of course, and just enough pseudo-magic to keep the effects shots coming.

Edwards, who directed the solid Star Wars spinoff “Rogue One” and relaunched the Godzilla franchise a few years before that, is visually imaginative and a decent world builder (or at least decent at cribbing from good world builders). He does not, however, appear to be a font of story; he traffics mostly in cliche and well-worn tropes that might be effective if they weren’t used so frequently in science-fiction passion projects exactly like “The Creator.”

The film is left to teeter on the strength of its visuals, then, which are sufficiently impressive to keep you intermittently engaged. In the end, copying “Blade Runner” was a wise move; the grungy, weather-worn futurism of that film is a rich and engaging palette, worth revisiting even without the resonance of the classic film.

That is, if you forget that we just saw that exact palette a few years back in “Blade Runner 2049.” Every director, it seems, gets a chance to take a big swing at this type of dystopia; while most of the results, like “The Creator,” are perfectly fine, few are all that memorable.

My Rating: 6/10

“The Creator” is now playing in theaters.