The Creator

The Creator (2023)

67% on Rotten Tomatoes (out of 284 reviews)

Runtime: 133 minutes

Directed by: Gareth Edwards

Starring: John David Washington, Madeleine Yuna Voyles, Gemma Chan, Allison Janney, Ken Watanabe

From: 20^th Century Studios

 
Seeing this before the Swifties invade the cinemas come Thursday was my key priority. I know how big that concert film will be as it will be on most screens and a lot of those are sold out. I have zero interest in that personally and I’ll avoid the cineplexes until that run has subsided.

My schedule has prevented me from seeing The Creator sooner. I dug the Gareth Edwards version of Godzilla and I loved his Rogue One… even with the knowledge after the fact that there was post-production work done after the fact which may or may not have involved Edwards. I’d like to think (or at least hope) that much of the last worthwhile anything from Star Wars was from Ol’ Gareth. A shame that he hadn’t made another film until this one. I’m more than happy to give attention to an original story shot using effects that made it look nice without breaking the bank. Of course, I get why various people did not swoon over the plot and how it contained various cliches that happen to be put together in a different order. However, I’ll explain why I enjoyed this more than most.

From the trailers, you should know that the plot revolves around a war in the future between humanity and artificial intelligence. John David Washington is Joshua, who is recruited to find the titular entity which has created a powerful weapon… which is actually a robot that looks like a little girl. Joshua has trauma in the past (shown in the opening) and I won’t elaborate upon the rest except that most of the film is set in “New Asia”, meaning Thailand in this case and that provided great natural scenery. Wiki and other sites can elaborate upon how guerilla filmmaking techniques and a $4,000 were used to film a big release, but anyone can be fooled to thinking the film must have had a budget of at least 200 mil or so instead of just 80 unless they knew already. Visually, it was at times breathtaking and usually a delight.

As for the plot, I get why many would want something bolder or crazier. Me, I’m not mad that it contains various cliches as heck, some of my all-time favorites from the past could be labeled as such… even Star Wars. I don’t know why this had several chapters or why that gimmick went away in the second half of the picture; otherwise, this contained none of the bad tropes of modern filmmaking. No one does an obvious death only for it to be a swerve and they somehow come back later, for example. Thank heavens this does not “subvert expectations” either, and I use that phrase in the most pejorative sense. Instead, the story was easy enough to follow and personally, I got invested in the relationship between Joshua and “Alphie,” the little girl.

Perhaps it is because The Creator took a risk or two that you’re far more likely to see in a film of old than one modern. Maybe it is because the last film I saw (The Exorcist: Believer) was staggeringly bad. It could be that I realized John David Washington really sounds like his dad. In any case, I really do appreciate an original story that feels modern due to the inclusion of AI as a threat yet they’re humanized throughout. The cast did a swell job, especially Washington and Madeleine Yuna Voyles as Alphie.

Without doubt, the Southeast Asia setting-rural and urban-the action beats, the aspect ratio of 2:76.1 because they attempted to make an epic and unexpectedly seeing footage from the Japanese serial Super Giant (next month I’ll do a review where I’ll elaborate more on that) are among the reasons-admittedly, on the esoteric side-why I happened to enjoy the film more than many.