KuroSawWhat's activity

After the hatchet job which Disney pulled on Rogue One, I was interested to see whether the lack of emotional investment which I felt toward its characters and the unearned plot beats and payoffs were the fault of their corporate meddling or Gareth Edwards' original directorial choices. After watching The Creator, I do believe that it was Edwards' vision, shining through brightly and blandly.

Without realizing it, I seem to have now viewed Edwards' entire feature filmography--including Godzilla (2014) and Monsters--and I see a common thread between all of his films. He is very focused on achieving key "moments" which he hopes to see in the end film, along with striking imagery to accompany them. However, the connective threads which lead between these key moments, which could be used to add depth to the characters and emotional weight to the subsequent plot beats.. these sections seem like afterthoughts. No finer example can be found than in his breakout film Monsters, which literally did not have a script! The actors in that film were told to ad lib their lines for entire scenes, leading to lots of riveting dialog, such as, "So, uh, what do you think we should do now?"

These problems are on full display in The Creator. In the opening scene, two people are rolling in bed together, whispering about how much they love each other. Who are these people? We don't yet know. But them saying that they love each other is good enough motivation for the entire film, apparently! Then, to set things in motion, our main character shoo's some people out of the room and loudly shouts into a radio, "I'M UNDERCOVER!! [sic]" and is shocked to turn around and see that he was overheard. I nearly laughed out loud in the theater, and we're less than 5-minutes in.

From there, Edwards begins "artistically" transitioning from key scene to key scene with literally no transitions in-between, and characters continue spouting one-dimensional dialog which we are meant to take at face value: "I feel this. Those people did X because of Y." There is a lot of telling rather than showing (breaking film rule #1).

I will admit that Edwards has a very distinctive visual style, but he really needs someone else to be writing the script.

I'm not saying this is a bad film. It's fine. It's competent. It looks great and feels like a lived-in SF universe. It's a good little adventure travelogue. And I'm happy to see a story that is more about how key events impact people on a personal level, rather than being about some world-ending event. I want to see more of that in contemporary mainstream SF.

But when it did come down to how the people in this film were impacted by the events which unfolded, I felt nothing. Not even a tickling of emotion. The desired story payoffs were completely unearned.. just like in Rogue One.

A rather average UFO movie. A scientist lady gets abducted and her boyfriend begins investigating what happened, trying to get people to believe him. There are a lot mystery box setups that keep you interested throughout the runtime and the acting is consistently engaging, but the story ultimately goes nowhere worthwhile.

What little CGI was in the picture was surprising good for a movie which was clearly made on a tight budget, with better compositing than many current Marvel productions. I also appreciated the minimalist computer displays that didn't get carried away with themselves when dealing with the science stuff.

The one song sequence was quite nice. Again, there was clearly no budget involved, but the director did a lot with just the actors and locations.

With a more satisfying conclusion or a more fleshed out story, I would give this a recommendation, but it's just kind of "meh" when you reach the end credits. Watch if you have nothing else to do.

My first Kannada-language film.