The Creator
👁 127
Hackers That Viewed This Page
Gareth Edwards is a type of writer / director that I can relate to. I remember watching the Star Wars movie that he directed Rogue One back when it came out and feeling like I know what this guy is doing. Like I myself want to be that guy. Back in 2016 ( when Rogue One came out ) I still didn't quite give up the Wrong Hate project and what he showed was the stuff that I was aiming for.
Probably because Edwards was a visual effects artist, he understand the technology very well. He kind of reminds James Cameron in this regard. And some critics already pointed out that The Creator reminded them of James Cameron. When a director is oblivious to how effects are being actually made, they tend to give the visual effects people unnecessary work. And also usually not enough time. And expect a very good result. This leads to some atrocious effects movies. On the other hand there are directors like Cameron, Spielberg, Nolan or Edwards that actually understand the process so well that they can produce insane results.
The visual effects in The Creator are fucking amazing! But more than just making stuff look good Edwards understands the point of selling the effects. There is a lot of effects that just happen in a shot kind of in a matter of fact. Casually just being there because if the camera would point that way, you would see it. Like for example, the humanoid robot child from the trailers has a hole though the head. And at one scene she is wearing a hat that is meant to conceal that hole. For any other director it would be a good excuse to not do visual effects there at all. But Edwards points the camera in ways that will actually make you peep under the hat, which actually makes you see the mechanical parts of the robot. But it's so matter of factly, like the shot is not even about it, so you are buying that she is a robot. It becomes instinctual instead of just visual.
Edwards also is a fan of everything being as epic as possible. The movie had only 80 million dollars in the budget. But it looks like it's 200 million. Edwards knows how to position the camera and how to frame the shot just right, to make everything look big and awesome. While also looking very realistic. He employs in this movie the kind of free, hand held camera style, which makes you feel like you are watching something more real than just a movie. And then in these hand held shots you would casually see a huge ship, or an army of robots. Or other little visual effects things that sell the film. It feels like a real place.
Plot-wise there is a good deal of ironic scenes in the film. Most blog-basters establish the villain and the hero. And the plot is - the hero needs to defeat the villain. This movie is way more complex. The hero is attacked by villains which are his partners, so he is a villain himself. But then he is actually a hero and he was working with the villains. And so now he is a hero working with heroes to stop the villains. But the heroes are the villains, so he now needs to find the true heroes. While they think that he is a villain, until they recognize that he is a hero. And yes, I made it intentionally confusing so not to spoil everything. In the movie is all makes total sense. But all of this weird plotting contributes to a lot of irony and drama that otherwise wouldn't be there.
The movie tries to ask questions of whether AI is actually real consciousness or not. The early title for the movie was True Love suggesting an idea of actual love experienced by AI. If you look at the human brain and the way it works. You can argue that a human is not too far away from being just a complex machine. And therefor a machine of similar complexity is possible to re-create artificially.
Also we probably have to talk about the current AI situation in the world. And people loosing jobs to AI. This movie uses this to it's advantage. To make you side with the humans at first. But it flips sides between AI and humans in a plot dance, so you feel properly conflicted between the two ideas. To be honest, I believe the film is a bit too naive about how terrible AI can turn out to be. It's not The Terminator. The movie views the problem of AI as a kind of racism in a way. AI in this movie lives in Asia. And Americans are there to kill it.
To be frank, Spielberg's AI: Artificial Intelligence dealt with those themes, in my opinion a bit better. There Spielberg made visuals reminiscent of Holocaust to provoke the same questions. Here it's more an international war type thing. And perhaps The Creator is too much of an action film, for the message to be clear.
There are cheesy moments. This movie was attacking such a large canvas that sometimes some stuff was probably glossed over. The ending was a bit cheesy. I was hoping for something a little bit more thought provoking, but he wanted an epic sentimental note instead. And it almost worked. If not a glaring plot hole that was right in your face in that scene.
Spoiler
The scene I'm talking about is the Hollywood kiss between the hero and his wife. There was a far more thought provoking and emotionally devastating scene with her before that where he had to kill her, but conveniently, people's minds in this movie could be downloaded into a USB drive, which can be put into robots. And conveniently the place that was designed as a defense against robots ended up having a bunch of new robots inside of it. One of which looks exactly like the main hero's wife.
And I'm not even talking about the fact that people that are resurrected like this usually continue their stream of consciousness from the same moment when they died. And her last conscious moment was filled with hate towards him. Why the hell is she running towards him to hug and kiss? What the actual fuck?
But I think this is probably the only bad plotting in the entire movie.
There is also sometimes cheesy dialogue. But John David Washington and Madeleine Yuna Voyles are such skilled actors that it didn't bother me at all. They pulled it off.
Also while we know John David is good, because it's not his first big film, it's Madeleine's first movie. Like literally, if you look for her online, all you find is pictures of her as the robot child in The Creator. And damn she a good actress. Like holly shit!
To summarize and close this review, when I came back I looked at the Rotten Tomatoes score of the movie. And it's a rather accurate representation of the film. It's very good at what it is good at. But it's somewhat cheesy in other aspects. It feels like a proper epic film. But then sometimes it felt like Edwards just didn't know how to tie things up so he hoped nobody will notice the cheese.
Happy Hacking!!!
Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 4.0 International License
So please share!
Share
💬 Opinions:
Blender Dumbass does not endorse any of the opinions listed below. The website allows for Anonymous users to send opinions. So some of them could be quite repulsive to read. You have been warned.
If you have no account and want to send an anonymous opinion, you can just ignore the username and password fields. Your anonymous opinion will be reviewed by the registered users. And if they decide that it's good, it will be posted for everyone.