The Creator – Snapshot
The Creator, set just a few decades in the future, posits a world inhabited by humans, robots, and “simulants” – creatures that seem to be part human and part robot. Since conflict hasn’t disappeared, there are plenty of battle scenes with post-modern technology. While the visual and sound effects are terrific, the movie fundamentally misses an opportunity to deliver a significant science-fiction story. (2.5*)
Where to Watch:
Stream: Hulu
Rent: Prime/Fandango/Google/YouTube ($4); Apple ($6)
The Creator – The Oscar Buzz
Oscar Nominations (2) / Oscar Wins (0) :
Visual Effects (Cooper/Comley/Roberts/Corbould)
Sound (Voigt/Aadahl/Van der Ryn/Ozanich/Zupancic)
It isn’t too surprising that, as a science fiction movie, it received Oscar nominations in Visual Effects and Sound. It comes to us as the brain child of British sci-fi film-maker Gareth Edwards. Edwards started his career in the Visual Effects arena for television twenty years ago. In his first feature film, Monsters (10), he directed, wrote the screenplay, and helmed the visual effects. In his second picture, he directed a budget of $160M in the U.S. version of Godzilla (14) , which ended up making a handsome box office take of $525M. And that is probably the reason studios turned him loose two years later on the Star Wars sequel Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (16), which he directed, but was written by his co-writer on this movie, Chris Weitz. Rogue One was a critical success and scored the same nominations as this film and earned a worldwide box office of more than $1B. Clearly Edwards has a reputation in the science fiction spectacle world.
But, despite his earlier successes, his experience seems to lack depth. It is pretty unusual for someone to rise as fast as he did in the filmmaking world without more creative experience. In the case of The Creator, Edwards was given a budget less than half of Rogue One but it isn’t clear that the film earned back the production costs. This is an unfortunate case where a man’s reach exceeded his grasp and the movie, unfortunately, reflects that. It isn’t clear to me what will happen with Gareth Edwards. (I will have a lot more to say about what I think is the critical weakness of this movie, the script, in the final section.)
For The Creator, Edwards did manage to assemble an Oscar-level team. Cinematographer Grieg Fraser and Film Editor Joe Walker won Oscars for their work on Dune: Part One. Fraser was also nominated for Lion (16) and the editing team has been previously nominated for The Big Short (15), Vice (18), Don’t Look Up (21), Arrival (16), and 12 Years a Slave (13). And the Oscar laureate Hans Zimmer did the musical score, in his first collaboration with Edwards. Zimmer won the Oscar for his scores to Dune (21) and The Lion King (94). And he has 10 other Oscar nominations including Dunkirk (17), Interstellar (14), Inception (10), Gladiator (00) and going all the way back to Rain Man (88). Although the scenes filmed in Indonesia, Cambodia, and the Himalayas were spectacular, nothing else about the cinematography was remarkable; the movie was too long and much of the “action” scenes could have been further edited, and even Zimmer’s music wasn’t really all that exciting, although he deserves credit for implementing western musical themes with Asian instrumentation. Ultimately, this movie lacked inspiration in these areas.
But The Creator’s nominations were in Visual Effects and Sound so let’s focus on those teams. Five members of the sound team were nominated, which I believe is the maximum number the academy allows. For Ian Vogt, this is his first nomination, but Ethan Van der Ryn won the Sound Oscar for both King Kong (05) and The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (02). He and the other Sound nominees have been previously nominated for movies like A Quiet Place (18), Argo (13), Transformers: Dark of the Moon (11), Transformers (07), Maestro (23), Joker (19), A Star is Born (18), and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (05). The sound fields are rich and full and many of the effects associated with the NOMAD weapon are intriguing, if a bit overdone.
You can’t have a cinematic spectacle without some out-of-this-world visual effects and The Creator makes its own contribution. 550 people are credited in the Visual Effects department, but only four were nominated. This is the first nomination for three of them, although they worked on important movies like the Star Wars, Star Trek, and MCU series, Avatar (09), Gravity (13), and Black Panther (18). Neil Corbould, though, won Oscars for his VFX work on Gravity (13) and Gladiator (00) and was nominated for five other films including this year’s Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning (23) and Napoleon (23). Clearly Corbould has an impressive work record.
Director Edwards and his VFX team attempted something a little different in The Creator. Most CGI films are done with the actors working in front of a “green screen” which then allows the VFX people to superimpose the CGI effects somewhat seamlessly against the background. When that happens the background must be entirely generated by computer. With this movie, though, the decision was made to film “on location” in places like Indonesia, Cambodia, and the Himalayas. The result is that the backgrounds are not computer generated but are strikingly real. The movie succeeds there and one of the strengths of the film are those rich, natural backgrounds.
But that means that the CGI overlays have to be created on top of highly natural environments. Perhaps we need to look at the CGI efforts in The Creator as pioneering efforts because, frequently, I felt like the added visual effects were somewhat obviously “layered on”. The film suggested almost a retrograde quality to the CGI like we were, indeed, going back to the technology of the 20th century. (An interesting CGI effect is the ear-to-ear hole in the heads of the simulants. I guess that is the site of most of their non-visual sensory mechanisms, but the movie never does explain much of anything.). Hopefully, as our technology develops, we will be better able to combine natural and computer-generated visual images.
The two key actors in this film are John David Washington and Madeleine Voyles. Miss Voyles, who is only ten years old this year, made her acting debut in this film and she is, appropriately for her role, a product of Asian and German-American genes. In The Creator she plays a very precocious and extremely important artificial intelligence simulant, Alphie. How the movie-makers were able to produce such stunningly prescient emotional and cognitive gestures and language from such a young person is an unanswered question.
Part of the answer might be in her partnering with the main protagonist in the movie, Joshua, played by John David Washington. We have seen Washington before in films like Tenet (20), BlacKkKlansman (18), and Monsters and Men (18). Reportedly, he developed a special on-set relationship with Voyles and they were often seen holding hands even when the cameras weren’t rolling. The relationship between Joshua and Alphie is one of the film’s highlights.
The Creator – Related Movies
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (16) (Direction/Screenplay/Cinematography/Visual Effects)
Godzilla (14) (Direction/Sound)
Monsters (10) (Direction/Screenplay/Visual Effects/Washington)
Dune: Part One (21) (Musical Score/Cinematography/Film Editing/Costumes)
Interstellar (14)/ Inception (10)/ Dunkirk (17) (Musical Score)
Don’t Look Up (21)/ Vice (18)/Arrival (16) (Film Editing)
A Quiet Place (18)/Argo (13)/Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (02)/Maestro (23)/Joker (19)/A Star is Born (18) (Sound)
Gravity (13)/Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning (23)/Napoleon (23)/Gladiator (00) (Visual Effects)
Tenet (20)/BlacKkKlansman (18) (Washington)
Crazy Rich Asians (18) (Chan)
I, Tonya (17) (Janney)
The Last Samurai (03) (Watanabe)
The Creator – What Others Think
The Creator is not a well received movie. Viewer comments favorably noted the visual and sonic characteristics, but found the story very lacking. Comment headlines include “Stunning visuals/ Garbage script”; “State of the art effects, but more holes than Swiss cheese”; and “Beautiful visual and sound, great acting, but feels like written by a 10yo”! Ouch! Audience rankings put this movie in the bottom four or five of both the 24 general interest films and all 38 of this year’s nominees. Those ratings are consistent across two different measurement systems and based on more than 175,000 ratings.
This is also a case where critics agreed almost exactly with the audience rankings. Christy Lemire (RogerEbert) wrote about The Creator “Rich in atmosphere but short on substance…ends up feeling empty as it recycles images and ideas from many influential predecessors.” MaryAnn Johanson (the FlickFilosopher) notes that it “Looks great, but the plot falls apart if you poke it and makes no attempt to grapple with AI’s potential….with the possibilities, either positive or negative, of artificial intelligence.” Nicolas Rapold (New York Times) found “The film’s tone is uneven: Edward’s pushes the relatable ordinariness of the androids and human “simulants”, but the potential menace of AI inescapably looms.”
The critics and the paying audiences all agree – some great visual and sonic experiences, but a story that falls flat. Overall, The Creator comes in just third from the bottom of all 38 of this year’s nominees – not a good showing.
The Creator – Special Mention
Artificial Intelligence (AI) – It is of minor coincidence that this film is concerned with artificial intelligence and the production was interrupted by a strike by writers and actors against the studios, partly because of the perception that AI could result in less work and less compensation. I can’t say for sure what the impact of the strike actually was on this particular movie, but it might have something to do with a script that seems weak and way underdeveloped.
The Creator is set in the not too distant future – forty years or so – and with the speed that technology has changed in my own lifetime, I suppose it is possible that this future is a real possibility. As the first five minutes of the film relates, humans first developed robots which were still recognized as machines and performed all kinds of repetitive and dangerous tasks. As we are all aware, AI emerges quickly and becomes embedded in many of our machines.
What is slightly challenging in this film, however, is the explicit merging of artificial intelligence and human-like robots that become known as ‘simulants’. Whether we are on track to develop that kind of technology, merging biological and mechanical hardware with artificial intelligence, is an open and intriguing question.
The Creator – Michael’s Moments
The Creator is a huge disappointment. The visual and sonic creations in this film are – at least initially – of moderate interest and they do keep your attention. I must admit that seeing human-like creatures with two-inch holes in their head running ‘ear-to-ear’ gives a new meaning to the phrase ‘open minded’. And, yes, when they turn their heads, the visuals behind them are definitely in-synch with the background we are supposed to see. But we never get an explanation as to what these holes are actually for? If you are going to create an artificial being that looks like us but has a hole going all the way through their head, then presumably, there is a reason. But what is it?
The hole-in-the-head problem is an apt example of what is wrong with the entire movie: What,really, is the big story the filmmakers are trying to tell? Good science fiction always works at multiple levels. Sure there is a human story involving relationships between people and the world they find themselves in. (Actually, all films have some version of that story!). In The Creator, there is a sympathetic father-daughter thing in the increasingly emotional attachment between Joshua (Washington), and the young, half-human, half-machine simulant Alphie (von Voyles). If there is any notable acting in this film, it is between these two characters.
But science fiction attempts to go at least one more step in trying to project a bigger story about where humankind might be headed and why it might be headed there. Just in this year’s crop of sci-fi movies, Godzilla Minus One reflects on the impacts of environmental degradation. The monster is a recurring symbol for man’s misunderstood capacity to quickly and severely change our living environment usually not to our advantage. Poor Things posits a surreal, alternative understanding of how half of our humanity – women – might understand the world and how sex is so intrinsically important to almost everything we do.
Artificial intelligence is, perhaps, the next big influence on human life. Like most things, it will likely have both positive and negative effects. But it seems very clear that they will be huge. So any film that wants to look at the issues of AI has a fundamental obligation to dig deep. The Creator had an opportunity to raise some really important questions: How does AI “feel” emotions? What does “pleasure” mean to AI? Aside from some version of Star Trek’s Prime Directive, how does AI actually think about humanity? What does an AI entity want to achieve during its existence?
The Creator fails to go anywhere with these questions. Instead it creates interest and tension by lazily borrowing from movies like Apocalypse Now, Blade Runner 2049, Avatar, and the Star Wars series. Instead of striking out on new, and possibly more relevant, ground, the script dances around issues and fills out the story with basic re-runs from older films.
The Creator was nominated for Visual Effects and Sound and it does an effective, although not award-winning, job in those technical fields. But I have argued in multiple reviews that the purpose of a movie is to tell a significant story and everything else must be in service to that story. This film is overly infatuated with its own special effects and misses a huge opportunity to actually say something important. See this film ONLY if you are a special effects buff. (2.5*)
