Movie reviews

THE CREATOR AT IMAX AND Q&A WITH DIRECTOR GARETH EDWARDS

Watchable. Written and directed by Gareth Edwards, the plot is simplistic, ballistic and doesn't make sense, virtually every minute of it is nonsense, visually it's quite derivative. It's basically reverse "Terminator" - here the humans want to exterminate the AI. Visually it's hardware-heavy like in "District 9", with "Blade Runner"-like cities. Few futuristically-altered landscapes are a nice change. There's little background to the plot, just a brief chronicle of preceding social and political events. The leading protagonist is an AI kid so the movie's on the sappy side. Dogs and monkeys' actions constitute brief nice touches in the constant warfare. In addition, warfare defying logic. The robots, called 'simulants', can be shot like humans or can't - hard to work out, anyway that constant mindless shooting must make the NRA happy. People can donate their likeness to simulants. The robots worship their creator. The 'ultimate weapon' robot is stupid even for a human child, let alone AI. Burning robots on funeral pyres is religious nonsense, especially with metal creatures. A code error caused an atomic bomb detonation. Improbabilities and stupidity just pile up. The futuristic architecture has its style but is fairly uniform all over the world. Most of what you see is just lots of machinery and robots. The flying objects are visibly superimposed on natural backgrounds. Clumsy dialogue makes you cringe further. The sexist look even at cyborgs: "she was beautiful" (as an erotic dancer) perpetuates earlier sexism of movies peddling go-go dancers as objects of love and makes you wonder if Cronenberg had been right with his excitement over tech. There are occasional attempts at references to famous blockbusters or well-publicised real life incidents, e.g. the dead soldier will go to "Valhalla" and the black protagonist utters: "I can't breathe" although in a different context altogether. Luckily the movie's just over 2 hours long. But at Imax the ludicrousness is just greater.

The interview (rather than a Q&A it was supposed to be) was more interesting than the picture. The director says he just hopes his movie, which took him 7 years to make and was going to be both independent and a blockbuster, "isn't shit" - poor guy, it is. He's conducted "loads of research". The idea came to him after hearing of an experiment with animatronic rabbits where people were first playing with them for 15 minutes, then offered a $100 to kill it. No one did. He himself says "Please" and "Thank you" even to Siri in his phone.

His inspirations were plentiful, e.g. the robots' design came from "Ex-Machina", another visual from a few hours' drive through the US where he saw a Japanese factory among fields, "Apocalypse Now" and a handful of obscure movies. He says it was all serendipity. He made his first movie at 35 when he reached a point where his fear of failure was overtaken by the fear of non-achievement. He had been nervously checking at what age e.g. Steven Spielberg or others made their first film. The movie was being made during the pandemic and back to front: first shooting on location, next adding the machinery etc. Someone painted over it and it was passed on to Industrial Light and Magic to "make it look real because that's what they do". They used 8 locations, e.g. Cambodia, Indonesia, Thailand - sadly I failed to spot that many or any natural beauty in the film. In Phuket they saw a temple  with a statue which he decided to replace with a robot. Madeleine, impersonating the AI kid, was 7 years old at the time of shooting. The original version was just under 5 hours and it took 3 months to cut it down to a 2-hour movie.