The Creator: Looks astonishing, but clumsily written

The Creator (2023), Dir. Gareth Edwards, 135 mins, 4K UHD

Lets be clear on one thing: Gareth Edward’s The Creator looks pretty damned spectacular for an $80 million movie; it puts to shame many $150 million, or even $250 million blockbusters kicked out by Hollywood. My jaw was on the floor for most of the film. This is one incredibly beautiful, astonishingly visualised sci-fi spectacle that often makes you mutter ” how DID they do THAT?”. 

Bear in mind, I’m forever Old School in my head- as this Blog’s name suggests, I was a kid of the 1970s/1980s, growing up on with Star Trek, UFO, Space: 1999, Star Wars and yes, Blade Runner – the era of miniatures, matte paintings on glass, bluescreens, optical printers.  Matte-lines, bluescreen bleed… those things haven’t been a thing in, like, decades. Films like we get nowadays, particularly something as fairly low-budget but high-concept as The Creator, still rock my world in ways which millennials today, accustomed to or even blasé regards CGI, will probably never understand. What film-makers can do now, with visual effects… its really some kind of damn sorcery to me sometimes.  They were able to shoot this film on the fly, so to speak, with handheld cameras, with ordinary actors in, say, crowds, and then choose to replace random individuals with robots/sims, add mechanical limbs, put in buildings and hardware, basically transform the filmed footage dramatically into something else entirely, all in post. I may be wrong, but as far as I can tell, make-up and prosthetics were minimal, if used at all. Its all in post. I’m still used to the days of locked-down cameras and rigid,  process photography- feels like I’m from the analogue Stone Age.

The irony of The Creator, though, is that while it replicates the visuals of ‘bigger’ blockbusters it bizarrely mimics their narrative shortcomings too, something a lower-budgeted project should have been able to avoid, I’d have thought. Take a few more risks, be a bit more daring, offer something new. So it turns out that the problem, such as it is,  with The Creator is not its production values, for all its comparatively limited budget- the imagination in its art direction and world building is mightily impressive . The scope and detail of the whole thing… Disney should get this Edwards guy to make a Star Wars movie… oh, wait….

No, the problem with The Creator is that old chestnut; its the script, which veers from enthralling to mediocre almost on a whim. Its not just that the film is wildly generic, because while it obviously is- this film wears its influences/inspirations openly and makes it an easy target for some- because I don’t really mind that so much after so many decades of people mimicking Blade Runner etc.  The ‘special one’ is a tired gambit particularly over-used by Disney in pretty much everything it does, but its a standard plot device. The child in distress/ reluctant protector is also a well-worn premise now, in this case probably mostly reminding viewers of Children of Men (now THERE’s a film I’d like to see on 4K disc someday).  And of course, the philosophising regards  ‘what is human’ is very Blade Runner (the film even quotes “more human than human” in the opening prologue) and the A.I./ enslaved robots/rebellion thing is very much an echo of the reboot of Battlestar Galactica and many others. So sure, there’s plenty over-familiar about the plot, but surely that’s no deal-breaker; just look how derivative the Avatar films are, and that doesn’t seem to have hurt James Cameron’s film saga (although to be fair, maybe it HAS hurt them as far as being iconic pop-culture is concerned).

No, the real issue for The Creator is some very sloppy writing when tying those various ‘inspirations’ together , leaving some irritating plot holes just hanging there… or at the very least expecting audiences not to think too much about what’s going on  when some of the leaps of logic suddenly land. The thing is, I can rather accept (albeit grumble at) contrivances and coincidences in a big blockbuster more interested in entertaining than enlightening, but I’d like to expect more from what is a fairly low-budget film. Aha, I know- only in Hollywood could  $80 million be considered ‘low budget’ (actually, I did an inflation calculator query and funnily enough, Blade Runner‘s $25 million in 1982 equates to $79 million in 2023 so adjusted for inflation they drop about the same, which is interesting comparing the scale of the two).

There is also a problem regards pacing; the film is so hectic during its last third that one could be forgiven for thinking its a three-hour movie whose last third has been drastically cut down in order t get the film down to 135 minutes, with bridging scenes being so increasingly cut near the end that it feels like we’re missing transitions, leaving it feeling rather disjointed, almost veering into the nonsensical, damaging some of the finale’s impact.

But for all that,  I enjoyed the film very much. Clearly it isn’t as great as film as it should be, or it wants to be. There’s ambition there, certainly, so that should be applauded but the film may be chiefly remembered for its technical aspects: shooting something with relatively cheap digital cameras with a reduced crew and somehow replicating a big blockbuster so well you’d think Dr Tyrell was involved. I suppose all that A.I./technology philosophising in the muddled narrative regards threatening human extinction is right up my street considering I am such a huge fan of Blade Runner, the Battlestar Galactica reboot (one day people will be asking ‘which one?’ to that statement, alas) and of course tangential stuff like The Matrix. Am I saying its okay for a film to lift from other movies/television shows as long as its ones I love? Hmm, maybe I am.

One day, someone will make a film as visually astonishing as The Creator but it will also have a script as mysterious and challenging and bold as that of 2001: A Space Odyssey. It will enthral, confuse and entertain and will be like nothing anyone has ever seen or heard. I have to believe that one day that film will come, the alternative is too depressing a notion by far when James Cameron is making Avatar 3, 4 and 5 and Disney keeps throwing up Star Wars projects hoping something might stick. The fact that The Creator failed at the box-office possibly makes the wait a bit longer, but then again, it wasn’t really aiming that high, and at least its technical achievement/low budget offers a tantalising alternative to the sky-high budgets of something like those Avatars.