Gareth Edwards’ THE CREATOR: Solid But Unsurprising Sci-Fi

Opening at a multiplex near you tonight, and tomorrow:

THE CREATOR
(Dir. Gareth Edwards, 2023)

Despite helming such ginormous franchise installments in the GODZILLA (the 2014 reboot), and STAR WARS universes, Gareth Edwards isn’t quite yet an A-List, household name filmmaker. That doubtfully won’t change much with his newest effort, his fourth film, THE CREATOR, as it’s not getting much publicity from its studio, Twentieth Century Fox, and looks like it might not get much attention from movie-goers this coming weekend. 

 

If THE CREATOR does indeed fail to connect with audiences, that will be a damn shame as it’s a fairly solid sci-fi yarn with fine performances, cool visuals, and a thoughtful premise about a war between humans and AI that actually shows soul for both sides. And it’s on par with Edwards’ best work, 2016’s ROGUE ONE: A STAR WARS STORY.

 

A quick newsreel presentation opening, which, by the quality of the video in the clips, heavily implies that this film’s version of Earth adapted to having robots around earlier than our modern times (a year is never identified, but we get the idea that the film is set several decades in the future). Something went wrong with the relations between man and machines, and the AI overlords nuked Los Angeles, and a full-scale war resulted with North America outlawing all of the technology.

 

Our protagonist, an ex-special forces agent named Joshua, whose played by a wide-eyed John David Washington, probably happy that he’s in a sci-fi flick that’s easier to follow than TENET; is recruited to kill what they call “Nirmata,” that is the robotics master of the title. 

 

In a scene we’ve seen many times before, Washington’s Joshua refuses the assignment until military bigwigs Colonel Howell (Allison Janney), and General Andrews (Ralph Ineson) tell him that the mission could re-unite him with his missing wife, Maya (Genna Chan).

 

S0 off Joshua goes with Janney’s Howell, and a crew that includes country music singer/songwriter Sturgill Simpson as Drew to venture behind enemy lines in New Asia, where he finds the threat in the form of a humanoid robot child (Madeleine Yuna Voyles), who Josha names Alphie.

 

The movie becomes a familiar, formulaic road picture up until its race against the clock finale aboard the U.S. superweapon NOMAD, a space station that scarily scans the planet with blue beams – these are among the many cool visuals I was talking about. It’s never boring, but Edwards’ plotting, from a screenplay he wrote with Chris Weitz, never surprises as its story beats all recall its influences from APOCALYPSE NOW to BLADE RUNNER to, its most obvious touchstone, A.I.: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE.

 

There’s also the similarities in the relationship between a warrior carting around a kid with incredible powers that THE CREATOR has with The Mandalorian, and even THE GOLDEN CHILD.

 

So, yeah, not the most original material, but there’s a lot to enjoy in Edwards’ latest starting with Washington’s edgy yet earnest performance, alongside Academy Award®-winning actress Janney as a hard as nails army lifer, who, with this and I, TONYA, has gotten as far from her original breakthrough character of C.J. from The West Wing as she can get.

 

There’s also Ken Watanabe as a Japanese robot who brings gravitas to his somewhat perplexing part as one starts to realize that Edwards has a more sympathetic to the synthetics theme than you might think going in. 

 

This fine cast, the gritty when it needs to be, glimmering the rest of the time cinematography by Greig Fraser, and Oren Soffer; and Han Zimmer’s fitting score (often broken up by rock music cues by the likes of Radiohead, and Deep Purple), are what makes the movie worthwhile.

 

THE CREATOR will be dismissed as too derivative by many (sort of like ROGUE ONE was), but it worked for me, and if movie-goers give it a chance (that is, if they hear about it at all), I bet it’ll function like the best AI for them too.

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ROGUE ONE: A STAR WARS STORY Is EPISODE 3½: AN OLD HOPE

Opening this week at every multiplex from here to a galaxy far, far away:

ROGUE ONE: A STAR WARS STORY

(Dir. Gareth Edwards, 2016)

WARNING: This review contains Spoilers.

This is the first live action STAR WARS movie to not have a crawl, you know, the expository yellow text that ascends to a vanishing point in space, at the beginning.

That is pretty fitting because this film is based on part of the crawl from the original 1977 STAR WARS (still not calling it A NEW HOPE, dammit!), which stated: “Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire. During the battle, Rebel spies managed to steal secret plans to the Empire’s ultimate weapon, the DEATH STAR…”

So it would seem weird to have text giving us any more background to this STAR WARS STORY, a denotation that means this is a stand-alone tale set in the same galaxy far, far away, but not part of the “Skywalker Saga” – i.e. the biggest sci-fi franchise in the history of cinema that I'm betting you've heard of.

Still, ROGUE ONE may be touted as a stand-alone story, but it’s entirely tied to the events in the first film with tons of call backs (call forwards?), reprised characters, and familiar elements that show that director Edwards and his crew know the “Star Wars: The Complete Visual Dictionary” from front to back and beyond.

This entry is set between the end of the prequels and the beginning of the original, and I mean the very beginning of the original as it ends mere moments before Episode IV begins. I won’t spoil it, but the very last shot of this film is going to be put through the ringer by fans – forget the iconic shot of Luke Skywalker at the end of THE FORCE AWAKENS, this moment will be the stuff of a million memes.

But let’s go back to the start of this film, which opens with a stellar scene involving a family of farmers living on yet another desert planet (there are captions stating the names of a bunch of planets throughout the movie, but I have forgotten all of them). We learn that farmer Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen) used to work for the Empire as a scientist who helped design the Death Star, but was conflicted about it so he deserted the project.

An Imperior Officer named Orson Krennic played with terrific Australian smarm by Ben Mendelsohn shows up with a squad of Death Troopers to try to coax Galen back to work, but he refuses so they kill his wife Lyra (Valene Kane), while his daughter Jyn (Beau Gadsdon) goes into hiding.

Jyn, who grows up to be Felicity Jones, is the heroine here who gets arrested by the Rebel Alliance because of her father’s crimes, and is forced to track down her former mentor/father figure Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker). She learns from Gerrera, via a hologram of her father that he deliberately placed a flaw in the Death Star * so that it could be easily blown up (that explains that!), but she can’t convince the Rebellion to go after the plans.

Jyn rebels against the Rebellion with a team made up of Diego Luna as the rebel captain Cassian Andor, a wise-cracking robot named K-2SO (voiced by Alan Tudyk, who seems to be the film's sole source of comic relief), a Force believing warrior named Chirrut Îmwe played by Donnie Yen, and Jiang Wen as Chirrut’s partner, the heavily armed assassin Baze Malbus to travel to the tropical planet Scarif (okay, I had to look that one up), where the Death Star was constructed, and steal the movie’s MacGuffin.

Of course, the adventure is augmented with the expected blaster battles that result in piles of dead Stormtroopers, dogfights between old school X-Wings and Tie Fighters, and the sure to be fanboy-gasm inducing return of the AT-AT Walkers, you know – the giant four-legged combat vehicles from THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK.

Jones carries the caper with a strong determined performance, and she has chemistry with her co-star Luna, but I really didn't connect with them or any of the other characters enough to be genuinely invested in their fates. They were mainly just pretty, young cogs caught up in story mechanics that I watched like I'd watch avatars in a video game that someone else was playing.

One of the most surprising choices made here is that they brought Peter Cushing back from the dead through CGI to once again embody the villainous Grand Moff Tarkin with his voice provided by a superb sound alike. This digital effects works in brief instances, but they rely on it a bit too much in this film so there are glaring moments in which it looks like grotesque animation instead of a convincing Cushing.

They should of stayed more with Mendelsohn, who really sinks his teeth into his role, being the central villain of the piece with Tarkin sparingly hovering in the background.

But despite that and a few other distractions, overall the visuals in this film are largely eye-poppingly spectacular particularly in the climax which juggles a few scenerios deftly without clutter. There are some brilliant moments in which the vast ILM computer graphics department succeed in making mass destruction cinematically poetic. Star destroyers crash together in a more realistic looking way these days too.

On another spoilery front, folks wanting to spend a little time with Darth Vader (thankfully again voiced by James Earl Jones) will likely be satisfied with his appearance as well.

I enjoyed large chunks of ROGUE ONE, but I didn’t have as much fun with it as I did THE FORCE AWAKENS. Sure, many validly dissed Episode VII for being little more than a loving retread of the original ’77 formula, but it had such a great gusto going in bringing back the tone, and ole timey space opera magic that was severely lacking in the prequels (plus I loved running around with Han Solo through Imperior corridors one last time).

This prequel though is a lot better than any of the trilogy of prequels that George Lucas made (and it's a lot better than Edwards' GODZILLA), owing to it having much sharper writing (courtesy of Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy who wrote ABOUT A BOY, and MICHAEL CLAYTON), and it’s a fine sci-fi action film in most regards, but I can’t really say that it contains a story that was necessary to tell.

A lot of critics don’t feel that most sequels or prequels are necessary at all, but there can be worthy ones (the aforementioned THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK immediately comes to mind as it’s considered by many people, myself included, to be the best in the series), so I still go into just about every new entry, episode, or chapter of just about every movie series with hope.

But with how overwhelmingly devoted to every pre-existing detail this film is, I bet in the future I'll think of this STAR WARS STORY as nothing more than EPISODE 3½: AN OLD HOPE.

* So if this explains the original Death Star’s weakness – i.e. why it had a flaw in which one torpedo in the small thermal exhaust port hole would cause the whole station to explode – what explains why the super-sized Death Star, Starkiller Base, in THE FORCE AWAKENS was built with the same flaw? (Han Solo: “Okay, how do we blow it up? There’s always a way to do that”).

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GODZILLA: Not Godawful Like The '98 One So There's That

Opening today at a multiplex near you:

GODZILLA (Dir.Gareth Edwards, 2014)

When I was a kid I loved GODZILLA movies. Well, I loved laughing at them. 

It was the '70s run of the series, so it was the iconic overgrown fire-breathing creature at its cheesiest. The gigantic lizard (a stunt actor in a rubber suit) was portrayed as a friend to the people who'd save Toyko or whatever Japanese city from an attacking monster, then wave to the cheering masses and head back into the sea. Even toddlers could tell how ridiculous those movies were. 

This new American remake/re-boot/re-imagining/re-whatever wisely acts like the godawful 1998 Roland Emmerich version never happened. Max Borenstein's screenplay neatly builds upon Godzilla's atomic age origin story from the 1954 original, with a  set-up featuring an intense Bryan Cranston as a Nuclear Power Plant supervisor in Japan convinced that there's a cover-up surrounding a massive meltdown that took the life of his wife (Juliette Binoche).

As Cranston's Navy officer son, and the movie's real protagonist, Aaron Taylor-Johnson flies to Japan, leaving behind his nurse wife (Elizabeth Olsen) and young son (Carson Bolde), to bail out his now thought to be crazy father after he was arrested for trespassing in the quarantined are where they lived when the tragic accident occurred in 1999 - hey, that's not far off from when the tragic accident that was the '98 GODZILLA happened but I digress.

Cranston and Taylor Johnson trespass on the property again and are taken into custody to some sort of secret installation where the plant was, which now has an insanely large chrysalis pod being studied by scientists played by Ken Watanbe and Sally Hawkins. Watanbe seems to have only been hired so that he can dramatically say “Godzilla” (or “Gojira”) in his thick Japanese accent.

There's all this layered plotting to get through before we even catch a glimpse of Godzilla, but the build-up has a lot of genuine suspense and Cranston's great emotional gravitas going for it. 

However, once Godzilla finally rears his spiky, scaly reptilian head and roars his trademark roar in an in-your-face close-up (one of the many times I was glad I wasn't seeing it in 3D), the movie is all about the big battle scenes with the human element and the science whatnot taking a backseat.

So a terrifically thrilling first half bleeds into a tiresomely bombastic second hour that apparently has the sole goal of outdoing MAN OF STEEL in the amount of devastating destruction it can fill the screen with.

Godzilla chases the Winged Muto (I think that's right) that hatched from the pod at the plant site across the ocean from Japan so we get to see Honolulu, San Francisco (Jesus, how many times do I have to see the Golden Gate Bridge getting destroyed in the movies?), and Las Vegas get destroyed. Like usual we don't see many people get killed, because this is a popcorn picture and that would bum us out I suppose.

It is a major improvement over the '98 one, and I like that this American film by a British director based on a Japanese commodity takes its source so seriously, but I was bored to tears by the messy, noisy battles. 

I'll give them that they succeeded in wringing some instances of excitement out of CGI creatures wailing on each other, but I think I had more fun in my youth watching men in bulky costumes with obvious zippers slugging it out with tacky backgrounds covered with unconvincing miniatures and models.

But here, the cluttered visuals here looked so much like every other event films' visuals that I kept expecting a superhero to show up.

There's also the attempt at a Spielbergian sense of awe that director Edwards, whose modest low budget debut film MONSTERS was a dry run for this ginormous genre exercise, cinematographer Seamus McGarvey (THE AVENGERS), and thousands of special effects artists just can't pull off.

It could be that beyond the campiness I enjoyed back then, I never really cared much for the whole Godzilla thing. I mean, I appreciate the anti-nuclear subtext of Ishirō Honda 60-year old original - perhaps the only essential entry of the series - but can anyone claim that any of the nearly 30 sequels that followed is quality cinema?

I know, I know - they're not supposed to be high art, they're supposed to be big ass popcorn movies with monsters mashing, buildings being smashed, missiles exploding (or getting eaten), and mass hysteria.

This has all that in spades, so Godzilla fans and audiences seeking mindless thrills will eat it up, but, in my case, I'm going to borrow the words of Butthead (of Beavis and Butthead fame, of course) commenting on a long forgotten video: “Usually, demolition and destruction is pretty cool, too, but I don't know, like here, it's like, here it just, it falls flat.”

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