The Creator: Is It a Riveting Robot Revolution?

I feel like I need to blow the dust off of this thing.  It's been a while.  A lot's been going on recently, so I haven't been able to use this as much as I'd like.  I actually saw this movie about a week ago, but I got a new job recently so I didn't get to write the review as soon as I wanted to.  Don't worry, I've still been seeing movies, I'm not crazy.  I just didn't write anything about them because I saw them a week (or more) after they were initially released.  By the time I got a review out, I feel like the interest would've been down.  With all of that being said, I'm still keeping the site going!  It's just going to be a little hectic for the time being.  With all of that being said, let's get started!

The Creator is directed by Gareth Edwards and stars John David Washington, Madeleine Yuna Voyles, Gemma Chan, Ken Watanabe, and Allison Janney.  During a war between man and robots, ex-soldier Joshua (Washington) is tasked with finding a weapon that can turn the tide.  When he finds that it's actually a robotic little girl (Voyle), he must decide what to do with her.  With all of that out of the way, let's dive into the review!

I've been interested in this movie ever since I saw the first trailer.  It looked unique and I was really interested in the fact that it was an original story.  This isn't a sequel, reboot, and it isn't based on a book.  So how does it hold up?  Well, for the most part it's pretty good.  I was really impressed with Madeleine Yuna Voyles, who plays Alphie.  This was her first movie she's been in and she knocked it out of the park.  I'm really excited to see where her career goes.  For me, she's one of the best parts of the movie.  Alphie is a simulant, which is a robot who appears human.  For her whole life, she's been locked in a faciltiy, hidden away from the war.  Because of this, she's completely innocent and has no idea what the outside world is like.  Voyles did a great job making you feel for this character.  Her chemistry with John David Washington is really good.  Washington plays Joshua, who, as I mentioned earlier, is an ex-soldier who is convinced to come back into the fight.  He did a good job, for the most part.  It was sort of hard to see where his loyalties lied in the beginning of the movie.  Without giving away too many spoilers, he really doesn't care for the human cause or the robot one.  He's just doing his own thing.  He is the complete opposite of Alphie.  While she is fascinated with the world and people, he could care less.  This sets up an interesting dynamic between the two of them, which is kind of similar to the relationship between Joel and Ellie in The Last of Us.  What I also loved about this movie was the look of it.  It is absolutely gorgeous.  One would think it had a giant budget, but it's actually the complete opposite.  It only cost $80 million, yet still looked better than most blockbusters this year (each one costing hundreds of millions of dollars).  It's an extremely impressive achievement.  Everything looks real, as if Gareth Edwards was visiting these locations and just filming the robots.  There are a few rough patches (mainly towards the end), but other than that I was completely immersed.  It also helps that one of the Directors of Photography was Greig Fraser (who previously worked on Dune, The Batman, and Zero Dark Thirty).  Fraser and the other DP, Oren Soffer, did an amzing job making this feel like a real world.  It was breathtaking.  I also really liked the designs in The Creator.  There are two forms of artificial intelligence in this movie: Robots and simulants.  Robots are pretty self-explanatory, but simulants are robots with human faces.  What gives them away is the big hole on the side of their heads.  The look of these characters is just really cool.  Everything feels lived-in and gritty.  It isn't your stereotypical future where everything is shiny and clean.  What I liked about the robots was just how human they felt.  They don't look like us, but they move and talk just like people.  There was one sequence I really liked that highlighted this but first I have to give some backstory.  The reason there is a war between man and AI in this movie is because the robots launched a nuke into Los Angeles.  As a response, the U.S. and its allies decided to eradicate the machines.  However,  a place called New Asia is against this idea and serves as a safe haven for the robots.  Going back to the scene I mentioned, Josh works as part of a cleanup crew at ground-zero in LA.  This site is pretty much a giant crater.  There's a robot in there and it starts screaming.  Josh has to shut it down and it's freaking out as he does this.  The girl he was with gets pretty disturbed by the whole situation and even starts repeating something like, "It sounded like a human."  It then cuts to a giant trash compactor that's full of robots and they're trying to escape.  It was a pretty eerie scene.  What helped was that the robots sounded and moved like people.  Their voices aren't too synthesized like in other robot movies.  I just thought it was an interesting touch.  The action is also really good too.  Like the rest of the movie, it wasn't polished.  There was a gritty feel to it.  At the same time, it was easy to tell where everything was and it felt just big.  That's where Gareth Edwards excels in his movies: With scale.  Whether it be with 2014's Godzilla, or Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (I movie that I don't love like everyone else), he always does a fantastic job showing the audience just how big the threat is.  We feel puny, which is a skill, I think, a lot of filmmakers don't have.  I also really liked the sound effects of the movie.  They were unique.  Every time a shot was fired off, I felt the impact.  It was really well done.  The Creator also has a ton of interesting ideas.  As I mentioned earlier, I loved that scene in the crater because it established that, while these machines aren't technically living, they do feel (at least I think?).  That was a story I wanted more of.  It's also revealed that people sell their likenesses to AI to provide the faces of the simulants.  In a twisted way, it's sort of an interesting parallel to what's going on today because that's a huge part of why the actors are striking.  This sort of ties into the negatives though.

While this movie is original and not based on a pre-existing property, it did feel like a bunch of other sci-fi movies that I've seen.  It felt like Gareth Edwards saw District 9, Elysium, and Chappie and blended them together. He even threw in a dash of Terminator and Avatar, too.   Now it's pretty common for movies to borrow elements from others, but they usually make up for it somehow.  I'm not saying that The Creator doesn't (the visuals are gorgeous), but it just felt kind of empty.  I found myself rooting for the machines more than the humans.  I knew I wasn't supposed to because the AI were the ones who launched the nuke.  Not all of the AI is bad, though.  Actually, most of the robots we see in New Asia don't have a problem with humans.  Some of them even raise people who were orphaned and work side by side with people.  The thing that really got me I can't even talk about becuase it's kind of a spoiler.  Let's just say something is said (or at least alluded to) that's a pretty big deal, and the movie kind of just skims over it.  When I saw big deal, I mean it's a major driving force in the war.  It is never referenced again.    While I liked Washington's performance as Josh, he was kind of a boring character.  I was a little conflicted rooting for him because he's sort of using Alphie to find his wife (Chan), who he thought was dead.  Sorry for the minor spoiler.  There's quite a few things I want to get into, but I really can't because of spoilers.  Allison Janney plays Colonel Howell, the woman who recruits Josh for the mission.  Janney does a really good job in the role, but the story doesn't give her a ton to do.  She's just the villain who hates AI.  I was hoping for a little more.  I've seen a lot of people really praise the third act of this movie, but I was kind of the opposite.  Visually, it's great and there's some really neat stuff going on, but it felt a little all over the place.   It also just...ends.  We go through all of this stuff and we don't get to see the repercussions.  There was also something that happens that kind of backpedaled on a really heartfelt scene that happened earlier, but, again, I can't get into it because it's spoiler-related.  There were also a few times when things got to be a little predictable.  Characters are introduced just to die and it's pretty obvious.  This isn't a major gripe but it's just something that bugged me a little.

To wrap everything up, The Creator is a solid sci-fi movie.  Madeleine Yuna Voyles steals the show, her relationship with John David Washington is pretty interesting, the visuals are absolutely gorgeous along with the cinematography, the action is exciting, and the movie has a lot of interesting ideas.  What holds this film back, though, is that it feels like a bunch of sci-fi movies we've seen before, important things are just skimmed over, Josh isn't really that interesting a character, the villain was lackluster, the third act is a little shakey, and it can be a little predictable.  With all of that being said, I still think that this is a good movie and worth a trip to the theater.  People always say they want original ideas out of Hollywood, but they don't support these movies when they come out.  If I were to rate it, I'd give The Creator a 7.5-8/10.  If you get a chance to see it, be sure to tell me what you think!