The Creator (2023)

[AngieBee1]

Directed by Garth Edwards (Godzilla(2014), Rogue One: A Star Wars Story) and written by Edwards and Chris Weitz(About a Boy, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story), THE CREATOR is a tale of a future of which humans are in a civil war with artificial intelligence, with the fate of either sides' chances for victory leaning on an unlikely savior.

I'm not big on sci-fi, but what I loved about "Rogue One" is that if felt more interested in the characters and human connection, versus spectacle.  This film is the same. The world building is impressive; the vfx is superb, but it's the story - the fight for survival and the knowledge that we are more similar than not, if we just open our hearts to see it. 

Gorgeous and gripping film. I think this is John David Washington's best work yet, and his co-lead Madeleine Yuna Voyles is impressive. 

[arc]

+ great vibes

+ incredible production value, esp for an $80M film. A couple of slightly bad CGI moments but overall it looked great

+ interesting world building

- but it doesn't fully hang together. In some ways the Americans are full on anti-synthetic zealots, but on the other hand Alison Janney's character (Col Howell) was happy to use the sapient running bombs.

- also, there's no reason to make those bombs bipedal, or even sapient.

- as with Captain America 2, sinking all your money into one (or three, in CATWS's case) megaweapon is a poor allocation of resources.

- Simulants having that big hollow zone in their heads doesn't make a lot of sense. There's no compelling aesthetic reason for simulants not to have fully human-looking heads.

- it felt underexplained why the Americans couldn't have destroyed Alphie and let Joshua enact his "standby, not off" plan.

- the monkey activating the detonator was cool, but honestly once that explosive was planted it should have just been on a timer.

- So did Drew just flip sides? How was he an American combatant but five years later he was living free in New Asia? And Joshua knew where he was and that he'd be an ally, but the Americans like Howell didn't?

[neither a plus nor a minus] Hans Zimmer's score was fine but I don't think it was iconic like his most famous scores.

+ the Vietnam allusion/allegory was solid and I was pleased it wasn't outrageously jingoistic pro-American.

+ the art design evoked Syd Mead a lot, esp with those 45 degree angles in the buildings and NOMAD.

- surely the Buddhist (?) synthetics could have recruited some human local to turn off Maya's life support long before Joshua happened to arrive.

- I couldn't buy that multi-thousand tons of NOMAD chunks could crash into land and sea from a few kilometers up and it wasn't a major catastrophe on its own. Instead people were running towards the wreckages immediately.

 

All those negatives above are just my usual plot nitpicks, but specifically about what the film was trying to achieve, I think:

* the film under-executed on drawing a more concrete father-daughter connection between Joshua and Alphie, who is the child of Maya.

* I saw a review say that Joshua gradually becomes radicalized over the course of this film, but for me that doesn't feel fully fleshed out, in that I never felt like I could see Joshua's convictions changing. What little motivation I got was that he was trying to do right by Alphie and Maya. And it's nice to have a personal connection to the fight, but this is a case where I wanted him to have an opinion (or a more obviously drawn one) about the war.

[arc]

... correction, "NOT let Joshua enact his "standby, not off" plan."

[ZoqFotPik]

22 hours ago, arc said:

- it felt underexplained why the Americans couldn't have destroyed Alphie and let Joshua enact his "standby, not off" plan.

There was a quick line about how she would only allow Joshua to kill her. The implication being she was deactivating any weapon they tried to use to kill her. Now why they couldn't just bash her head in with a sledgehammer or an axe or something.

I thought visually the movie was excellent, but the story was very cliche. I also felt it was very poorly edited. I thought there were times that left me wondering "Wait, how did they get from where they were to where they are now?" And there were other times where I thought scenes could have trimmed. 

Also, one of the largest cities in the US is attacked. In response the US goes to war against an enemy that is being sheltered and supported by East Asian governments. Combat is asymmetrical, relying heavily on special forces raids and drone strikes with blase attitude towards collateral damage. I can't imagine what that could possibly be an allegory to.