Director: Gareth Edwards | Writer: Chris Weitz
Starring: John David Washington, Madeleine Yuna Voyles, Ken Watanabe, Allison Janney
The Creator is about as poorly written a film as you are likely to come across and still enjoy. The framework is great, the story is there, audiences will want to to love it …they just can’t. Gareth Edwards had tremendous success with Rogue One, it’s among the very best Star Wars movies to date, and he was able to translate so much of that here, which is the best thing this movie has going for it. But the rest is, for lack of a better term, a mess, and that’s really, at this point, inexcusable.
AI begins to help mankind in all facets of our daily lives and the future looks bright …until an atomic bomb is dropped on Los Angeles, killing a million people. Humans of the West declare war on all AI, including simulated humanoids, which look & talk like us but are their own artificial consciousness. The East keeps working with the bots, so we attempt to take out AI through sneaky means, and through a hovering space station called Nomad that has the power to precision bomb anywhere anytime. One man is tasked with capturing the AI’s latest weapon, one that could destroy Nomad and tilt the war in the East’s favor. When that weapon turns out to be the first child robot, matters are complicated and the end of the world even more assured.
The plot is awesome, so three cheers for The Creator and for Gareth Edwards for making something so cool and so original. It definitely has a Star Wars feel, just set on Earth, and that’s to its credit too. Had someone written a better screenplay off this story base, I think this could have been the sci-fi event of the year. Instead, it’s a huge letdown, an epic fail, and a film that should serve as an example of what not to do. It’s so repetitive, written so clunkily, with such bad dialogue, and events that just make no sense whatsoever. Any random person off the street could fix 90 problems in 90 minutes were they given an editing pencil; that’s not acceptable for an established filmmaker, to make something this flawed but so easily fixed. Also, Washington is a bad actor, I think it’s time we understood that. Recast him, pare the film down, don’t think Avatar, think Mandalorian, be more simple and more deliberate; The Creator could almost be remade right away and I’m sure it would be 3x better. I just want a movie that I can like as much as I wanted to like it in the first place, and it was so very close, which makes it all the more frustrating.
My rating: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆