I've been agonising over writing this, primarily because I want these reviews to be about films I've thoroughly enjoyed. As a director I know only too well the Herculean effort required to make any movie, and resent film critics who take insensitive shots from a safe, opinionated distance. These critics do incredible damage to filmmakers and the industry alike.
Because of the stranglehold the majors have on distribution, independent cinema has it that much harder. The same goes for directors' first films, which I believe need to be critiqued in an entirely different category. But THE CREATOR is neither — it's far from the endangered species list — so I feel it's deserving of my humble two cents.
Regarding the film's merits, Edwards' visual spectacle doesn't disappoint — he is a technical wizard. His $86 million budget was modest for its visual scale, thanks to a brilliantly organic technical approach: he avoided green screens, shot on location with a skeleton crew using a prosumer ($3,000) camera and minimal lighting, then fully edited the film before unleashing the 3D artists. This approach gave it grittiness and authenticity, while looking as though it cost four times as much.
That said, suspension of disbelief should require no effort when it comes to movies, especially sci-fi. But even the first few shots of The Creator's opening scene stop making sense —
navy seals carry out a surreptitious approach while accompanied by a twenty-mile-wide doomsday skycraft with a huge beacon of light. It's one or the other, but not both. Act I hadn't finished by the time I'd tired of giving the script a pass.
In light of Hollywood's writers' strike about the threat A.I. poses to their livelihoods, rogerebert.com noted the irony of the timing of The Creator's release, given that the film's theme is a lesson in ethics for humanity by A.I. I find the irony more ominous still: considering how The Creator's plot twists, character arcs and dialogue are so often far-fetched or predictable, Edwards may have inadvertently fuelled the studios' argument in favour of using A.I. for creative writing.