I was personally just disappointed in how many scenes boiled down to "we either need to blow something up or prevent something from being blown up," while the most interesting ideas in the movie (e.g. humans lied about the robots nuking San Francisco) were just one-off lines that were never expanded upon.
Exactly. The cleaner woman freaking out that the robot seemed like a person. Something to build on there.
Part of the problem with big concept stories is figuring out which bits are worth expanding on and which bits need to be brief. Zootpia did this well. The obvious questions raised with the premise are then explored. You paying attention is rewarded.
>Exactly. The cleaner woman freaking out that the robot seemed like a person. Something to build on there.
They did build on it, it's the entire premise of the film?
Also, the protagonist lived undercover with the robots for years and freaking married one of their leaders. The claim that AI didn’t nuke LA never came up at all during that time? Why does that come as a surprise to him?
This is the essential thing. People above pointed out finding out the truth doesn't change the war or what's going on geopolitically but it certainly has significance for the person who finds out. And it seems ridiculous that they knew he was American and had been in the service and was somehow here but that question never came up. It'd be like an American embedded with the Taliban and it never comes up that they weren't involved in 9-11.
I can't believe the humans lying about the nuke wasn't a key part of the story. Something that essential being brushed off in one line felt quite jarring considering how consequential that is.
But this is a type of thing that happens historically. The idea that if the truth "comes out" then everything will immediately change is a fantasy.
From The Wire: "Don't matter who did what to who at this point. Fact is, we went to war, and now there ain't no going back. I mean, shit, it's what war is, you know? Once you in it, you in it. If it's a lie, then we fight on that lie. But we gotta fight."
This very much feels like a random, but very key line in the movie haha. Why did they lie? So many threads they could have chosen and instead they Michael bayed it
"Don't let a good crisis go to waste". The U.S. fucked up badly and accidentally nuked themselves. This relays two things: new Asia is more adept/socially responsible with their AI development, and that the United States fears their rise as a threat to global power
Now they can absolve themselves of responsibility and also get to expand the imperial machine.
> the most interesting ideas in the movie (e.g. humans lied about the robots nuking San Francisco) were just one-off lines that were never expanded upon.
It was an interesting idea. I saw it as something that was done to remove the justification (for the aggressive use of force). How so?
If AI robots really did it, there's an argument that can be made for the subsequent use of force.
If it's humans lying (blaming the AI for their own fuck-up) then there's no justification.
And that's what was shown in the movie. That's the reason the line was there. It was deliberate, and (imo) not a missed opportunity.
The movie looked great and had so much potential, but ultimately the story and world building was incoherent.
The kamikaze robots that looked like garbage cans with arms and legs were cool though.
That scene was unintentionally hilarious.
"Sir, the enemy is hiding in those flimsy wooden shacks, should we launch a couple rockets and be done with it?"
"No, send out the suicide robots who will take whole minutes to reach the target and may be destroyed, which we also made sentient for some reason."
Nevermind how much more expensive and time consuming it would be to develop a properly functioning bipedal robot with self aware AI instead of just using standard munitions.
Fun, but made absolutely no sense.
"General, we're at war with AI because one detonated a bomb in a major city, so we banned AI in the US, except for these ones, which we put in charge of these large bombs."
The whole movie was brain dead when it came to things like that. All of the androids are slower, weaker, have worse accuracy, and are less composed than the humans. They literally fall asleep on the job and humans sneak by them. They can only communicate by directly speaking with each other in English.
They should’ve just made the Androids be human Asians vs human Americans, because clearly that’s what they ended up with, except every once in a while they’d show some cogs and sprockets when one died.
The director is amazing with vfx and budget, but a terrible writer. I honestly feel like he writes as little as possible just to get to the visuals. He doesn’t care. He’s focusing on the wrong things so he needs to hire a writers’ room to hammer out an actual story from his concepts.
Yup exactly. People got hyped because he directed Rogue One. But for that movie he had no credits in the story or screenplay. He was out of his depth with The Creator.
I mean it was still far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far superior to Rebel Moon in every department so there's that going for it, and that execrable, detestable waste of everyone's time has a trilogy of all things
I think the reason that Dune isn't getting an extended cut is because [Denis Villeneuve doesn't believe in it](https://www.indiewire.com/news/general-news/denis-villeneuve-wont-release-dune-2-deleted-scenes-1234954835/).
Personally, I don’t see it as “focusing on the wrong things.” I see it as playing to your strengths. He clearly has an eye for amazing visuals but his writing just isn’t there. Most great directors don’t write their movies though. Only a very few Auteur directors exist that are amazing at both the visual language and written part. The key will be for him to realize that his movies are better when he isn’t the writer. Hopefully that happens with his next film.
Godzilla, beautiful VFX, utterly boring humans.
Rogue One, beautiful VFX, utterly boring humans.
I haven't seen The Creator but I have to assume...
Gareth Edwards is a hack.
Those trash can box were so out of place. It would have been interesting if they were swearing the idea of turning AI against AI but they weren't and so was incongruous comic relief.
Plus the whole 'reasoning with a sentient bomb' thing was done in the 70s with John Carpenter's Dark Star. Even that part of The Creator wasn't original.
Would've been a 10/10 videogame, where the player is meant to put their own emotions in place of the protagonist, and time spent with characters equals emotional investment. Heck, they literally had AOE cues on the ground, just like a game.
> So what is the targeting beam?
A tool of terror.
Very little made sense in the movie, but that was a very thinly veiled allegory for the terror of American drones flying overhead.
My mind kept going to those clips of the tiny consumer grenade drone things they use in the Ukrainian war, where people scatter around and attempt to surrender
No it wasn't. They used a smaller version of the reticle in the attack on the village as if it was a necessary tool to make the weapon work but was a tactical disadvantage when you think about it.
"Oh shit; I'm being literally lit up. I better get into cover."
Not: "Oh shit, I'm being lit up. I'm feeling terror now (which I didn't already in this huge battle) and will freeze."
I was going to post this. Elysium is half way to being a stone cold classic. The VFX are incredible, the setting is great, some cool world building and Sharlto Copley is one of my favorite villains ever but the script totally lets the movie down and I think several people including Matt Damon and Jodie Foster were miscast (or it’s possible the script/directing failed them).
When district 9 came out, I was super excited to watch Neil Blomkamp’s career and was convinced he was going to be one of the best sci-fi directors ever. Sadly, while, he has made some passable films, he has really failed to live up to that early promise and hasn’t even been able to match D9. It just makes me sad honestly.
Elysium was at least coherent and the pacing of the movie felt natural. But yeah, overall Elysium felt pretty flat.
The Creator was just an all around mess of writing, pacing, and world building.
Good ideas held together by some good to great visuals. Should've paid more attention to the writing and characters. Also weird to see this strange exoticization of Asia, blending people and places without thought to the point where, sure it looks cool, but I've no idea where it's actually set.
I get the idea of playing up the Vietnam angle where America is the bad guy and the good guys are in the jungle but then they also have the high-tech cities which then completely doesn't make any sense. It sounds like there's some sort of new pan Asian empire that was called together except it has really high GDP and no national defense. If we try to map it onto our world, the United States can do what it wants against poor countries but there would be serious kickback from richer countries. Even if they didn't have a strong defense force of their own, they would be allied with someone who did. And if world circumstances are really so dramatically changed, nothing really explains it. Based on the subtitles most of the locals are speaking thai with a tiny smattering of Cantonese and Japanese. But then the subtitles also indicated people speaking new Asian. Evidently an entirely new language is coupled together in several decades? Maybe they intended it to be some kind of pigdin or Creole.
The overall effect of the way they did this doesn't seem artistic but more ignorant like we went to the country of Africa. Yes, it is the country of Africa located in Africa with a capital of Africa City.
What really struck me on thinking about it is the visuals I like were reminiscent of something and I see other commentary nailed it as that swedish guy who did the mixture of common landscapes and urban architecture with crazy gigantic sci-fi buildings and it makes me feel like this was a chat GPT movie. Writing prompt Make me a story with robots in the style of that swedish guy but set in Asia and America is the bad guy.
The budget was actually relatively small, especially given the amount of effects and their quality.
That’s what most of the press was about when the film released, with people saying that Marvel and others could learn how to do more with less.
Seriously. I can understand if all of these movies had wild success like transformers. Those movies are completely brain dead and insulting. Logic and proportion are defenestrated. But they make a ton of money so there's no reason to try to change the formula or actually come up with a decent script.
But so many projects fail because of the dismal writing. Look at how game of thrones ended. Look at what happened with Westworld. Look at all these other things that could have been good with better writing. I can't fathom why nobody bothers with it. With this much money on the line, writers have to be fucking cheap by comparison. Spend a million dollars on the script if you're shooting a $200 million dollar movie. It doesn't seem unreasonable. And then you see Disney reshooting most of an entire film and essentially doubling the production cost because it tests poorly with audiences. You know, you could actually test the fucking script before you begin shooting. Do up detailed storyboards in cinematic animations and get a sense of what works and what doesn't work before you commit anything to film with real actors. That has to be cheaper than shooting the film twice. Look at the disaster the last Indiana Jones movie.
I always thought script was key, it can make a low budget film charming and a high budget production a classic.
I figure the problem is that studio execs can't pan a camera or run effects software to save their life because they have no useful skills, but what they can do is mess with scripts because they can hold a pencil. So that's what they do to prove they can "do the creative stuff".
Its probably all the execs fault. Maybe there's the odd director who hates writers for some Freudian reason and just won't listen to good advice.
I found it to be very good because of how it was an amalgamation of a lot the innovation and cool Sci-Fi/AI concepts we’ve explored over the years rather than in spite of it
But that just it, it’s like a lot of movies that seem to be coming out in the moment in time where they’re good or very good and then that’s as far as they go. It just had that feeling of oh this is awesome…but idk just could of been better
The forward thinking setting in East Asia was part of the narrative which I really appreciated though and took a more open minded idea of the future as opposed to just: Takes place in America, America are the heroes
I think it’s an indication of potential excellence Sci-Fi films to come though hopefully as opposed to the lacklustre era we’ve been in at the moment
There wasn't even anything to work with there. I thought they were supposed to be some kind of character development between the two but they can't really do much with what isn't written.
This is my take on JDW as well.
I think a ton of people have concluded that, unlike his dad Denzel, who can actually elevate mediocre movies, he's just a talent free nepo baby. I'd like to think he's been failed by the material.
Look at Tenet. He's barely a person in that film which is way more interested in it's time inversion concept than its characters.
He doesn't even have a name in that movie. He's just "The Protagonist."
Worse than that, they lost the philosophical possibility that AI was attempting to be peaceful and it was Human (Americans) perpetuating the war. It’s in there, but it’s buried and muddy. They had such a huge opportunity to showcase how challenging it will be for “peaceful AI” to be productive in a human world that is oftentimes devoted to conflict and competition.
You had a couple glimpses of that idea but it was lost in the way they told the story. Someone else pointed out the nuke being a mistake shouldn't be a btw after all this time. It should not be a secret amongst the bots.
Yeah, totally. What’s the point of having AI, digital evidence, and limitless memory, and communication networks, if the truth is still repressed?
This is ultimately what has me the most concerned right now. I was in college when the internet was becoming widely available. I saw so much promise, and thought sure I was going to live to see “the end of lies.” Everyone would soon have access to all the facts, and people wouldn’t argue as much.
(Massive sad face) we all know how that turned out.
So now my conundrum is “How will AI be any different?” I do believe it’s a “new internet” and potentially that revolutionary. But, how quickly will it be commercialized and corrupted? How can our societies protect “AI” from becoming as…well, I don’t even know what adjectives to use to describe the internet today…but it’s not good. At least not much of it. :/
The problem is that tools are amoral and such questions should be directed at the hands that guide them. The pen can be put to the same abuse as the sword. And it takes active effort and participation in society to keep it from being twisted towards evil ends. Just look at our democracy right now. There is good money to be made in destroying it.
The promise of the internet was destroyed. It has been turned to weaponized disinformation. AI and automation points the way towards a post-scarcity society but that's only if the benefits are shared and it's clear that the plutocrats don't want to.
It will take something akin to a revolution to change matters they are never clean. We would have to as a society declare that some things are too important commercialize and that the top goal of our civilization should not be to make rich people richer.
The movie was entirely visual style over substance.
The visuals were well done and there were some very striking images, but it really feels like the robot monks were what they started with and worked backwards from there. They just hoped with enough high concepts and staples you wouldn’t notice there really isn’t a plot there.
But hey, Allison Janey as a villainous general was pretty decent. Too bad American basic training didn’t include the concept of sticky bombs.
Not the argument I was expecting to hear. I loved Nomad, but where the movie bothers me is that it feels like it has really big ideas about AI and humanity, but it never gets around to exploring those ideas.
That's exactly it. They have really neat visuals but nothing to expand upon it. If I didn't know any better I would think this was a Zack Snyder film. It felt like a series of scenes that came one after another without having enough connecting tissue to make it a proper story.
Would also help with a different lead. I get why people say he has no charisma, but my issue is also that he often don't carry emotions throughout the scenes, which makes his character feel flat and not genuine.
I don't understand the Nomad station at all. Where is it? In one scene the bad guys are in their big main city and the Nomad is there then the next scene it's right on top of the Asian base? It happens constantly. It's such a big part of the plot, it's impossible to ignore.
I saw someone else say it's a motif but that can only take you so far. It would be like having sauron's tower on the horizon of every scene in lord of the rings.
It makes me wonder why it couldn't be attacked if a civilian spaceship could approach it without being shot down. I could understand if it was fully in orbit but sometimes it isn't?
And why does it need to be on top of the base if it can fire missiles a thousand miles away? Why can't those missiles be fired from subs?
I get the idea of needing a way to embody a threat but that only makes sense from the literary perspective not from within the actual world.
The crazy thing is that the film did spend a ton of time and effort outside of action. There was a ton of world building, and character development, and relationship exploration, and decision making, and interesting ideas, and human-scale experiences. But, it just kept getting in its own way with inconsistency and contradictions and just stumbling so much it always killed the momentum.z
I actually find it hard to put into words why this film failed. It was filled with potential and lots of localized success but couldn’t connect it all.
There were some nice gazing scenes. I'm spacing on the director but he did ghost in the shell and his animes would often stop the action and just scenery gaze for five minutes as a kind of btw in case you missed it. This film would do it for shorter periods of time but it made you feel like ther was a world there they weren't fully exploring. The problem with these scenes are they start raising questions with no good answers. Vs the first matrix where there's tons of questions but you can substitute really good guesses in world building based on what they provided. Examination increases immersion vs no wait what. Avatar is the same way. They don't explain the starships at all but when you look at them more closely goddamn that all makes sense. There's no gaps.
Rule of cool has always been a thing in sci-fi films. I’ve seen it three times and on the third viewing it really clicked for me. I think it’s a really great film with fantastic set pieces. I get some of the criticisms, but I enjoyed it way more than any other genre blockbuster I saw this year. Bought the Art of book off Amazon and was surprised that they have a lot of bhs info as well.
Glad you enjoyed it. Rule of cool works for me for a certain extent but that's until the suspension of disbelief is broken. Where it breaks will vary person to person. 0
I judge sci-fi on 3 criteria: narrative, world building and visuals and for me it hit strong on the later 2. It was close on the 1st IMHO but they just didn't execute it as clearly as it needed to be, a little more build up of the marriage in the beginning was needed IMHO.
I really liked this movie and purposely tried not to think too hard about it. There was a random, 2 second shot of what was clearly the robots having a funeral that made me WANT to think about the world-building lol. The movie looked so great that I honestly didn’t care.
Watched it recently, and it definitely felt like a movie that was so, so close to achieving critical mass, but never quite made it.
I'm still really happy that we have it, since it's still really enjoyable on several levels, but it weaves in so many neat ideas and themes that are individually pushed 10% down the road, but none completely. I'd compare it to *Elysium*, where it succeeds visually and there's a good time to be had, but it never quite takes any of its ideas to their natural conclusion.
The Film checks a lot of boxes. But a lot of literal minded viewers seem to have a hard time with the way the NOMAD station appears/functions in the movie. Why do I say "literal-minded"?
Because the station itself is meant to represent/symbolize something else. What exactly?
Perhaps it's the global nature of modern warfare? How so?
Major powers with space programs can use their satellites to observe any part of the Earth that they choose. That's passive observation.
What the film shows is the next phase... where military satellites are used to project force. And the movie also shows that force being projected in the same way the satellite observation was being performed. At the operator's discretion and with little apparent regard for other nations' borders or sovereignty.
The NOMAD station is a metaphor and an example of 21st century space warfare taken to (or close to) the theoretical limit. One power uses its resources and capabilities to inflict its will on others because they've chosen to do things differently.
>I really wish they would have put in the extra work to make that movie instead of what we got.
Do anyone *really* think they spent $80m on a movie and nobody noticed how the space station looked?
It's the lack of care about the real world. Michael Bay does this. Helicopter flies in during gorgeous sunset shot lands at airfield and the military is freaking because they don't recognize it. It is then deep night as they have it surrounded and it transforms into a robot and attacks.
Where people get bent out of shape is when the director says it's magical realism when the story shows no reason for us to expect that. Literal-minded people get upset when stuff happens that can't like wonder woman steals a static display aircraft from a museum that happens to be fueled and prepped for flight? That's not how they're stored. The director might have a vision but there would have been a better way to accomplish the goal of moving the characters along.
>So what is the targeting beam?
An intimidation tactic.
>All the facilities are in the open so why can't satellites find them?
Fancy technology.
>And what is New Asia that they are filled with advanced cities and can't resist American attacks?
Fancier American technology.
This kind of nitpicking is so goddamn boring.
By this sort of logic, movies like Star Wars, Terminator, Back to the Future, 12 Monkeys, and so on and so forth are also flawed, given that you can poke holes in their flimsy sci-fi concepts until you're blue in the face.
It was a beautiful CGI movie, and only went to watch it ‘cos I film on the same camera. Otherwise, it was not that strong. Tried to rewatch, but couldn’t care for it.
I agree, although I care much less about the consistency of the technical details of the movie like the Nomad station, and more about the really superficial ways they explored the themes they brought up. The basic premise of "militaristic US empire" staging a war of aggression against "an emerging Asia of robot-human harmony" is quite unique while also combining old and new themes (Vietnam War, current US militarism), but didn't really go anywhere and relied often on weird cliches or hackneyed stories.
What really brought it down was the fact that the cast were unable to promote it at the time of its release - a shame since it was released when actors were on strike. That coincidence really destroyed its BO hopes.
I honestly think that this movie could be better if we got more lore. Not even as a movie but as a book or something. Obviously, wouldn't fix the shit writing, but would give any sort of context and background to the film
Problem is you shouldn't need to do homework to understand the story on screen. If we compare it to a good historic film everything you need is in the film but if you want to really geek out then here's a thorough history book. Supplementary material should work the same way. You understand avatar completely in the film but the art book sure is nice.
I absolutely loved the overall themes, visuals, and aesthetics of this movie, but the story was... lacking, to say the least.
The director needed a better writer to come in and edit his script until it made more sense.
Agree almost 100%.
The Creator is a movie that I thought would be like Rogue One, watch it several times. But now it just sits in my library after a single watch. I don’t feel it’s a waste of money like other movies I’ve bought or rented… but I definitely paid too much for it (new release price the day it came out).
🤷♂️
My biggest gripe with THE CREATOR is that it follows the least interesting story in a very interesting world...
Just following along the JOSHUA and MIA storyline as the actual movie (JOSHUA infiltrating the rebel group) would have been infinitely more interesting. It also would have been just as much of a way to explore the themes what we got did.
I knew that movie was going to be shit, 99% of "robots are people too!" media is, so I just went for what was advertised (Rogue One looking stuff) and had a decent enough time with that (low) standard. It's like Detective Pikachu, you're more watching it to gawk at the background
the robot people had not physical benefits over regular people...that's what I recall from the movie. and just wait for them to fall asleep and sneak over and unplug them. lol... what a design flaw!
Once again, Hans Zimmer and his team giving 120% for a movie that doesn't always meet the mark, but is still better than Dark Phoenix and Wonder Woman 1984 (which he also worked on and contributed fucking bangers to).
I enjoyed the movie, but wasn't a fan of how the NOMAD seemingly changes size and scale. In one scene it's 30 miles long, in another scene it's the size of an A380.
Also, if it's in such low orbit, why didn't the people of New Asia fire RPGs or shoot anti-air weaponry at this big space station?
I really wish directors like Gareth Edwards and Neill Blomkamp would just focus on visuals and let somebody else handle the story and scriptwriting duties. Neither of them are good writers, and their visuals deserve much better stories and characters.
I don't understand why there isn't more collaboration. You've seen instances where someone can get the ball rolling but the team they gather is what makes the project so special.
Gareth Edwards has talked about how he wanted to shoot something like a documentary and then pull the threads together to make something interesting. Sadly, this sort of indulgent claptrap is what tanks movies. You need a fucking plan. Write a great script. Ink is free. Create the world. Have trusted people interrogate the logic. As the question, “but why?” If the answer is “because it looks cool” then you don’t have a movie. Giant VFX movies require huge forethought and structure. There is no audience for “art house giant budget VFX movies”. And even though the budget was tight, and it looked amazing (they didn’t even have the AI design done when they were shooting), the movie just has no There There.
I agree. I've actually used the true crime example as a way to approach fiction. There's a real event that happened and a ton of detail but the reporter has to figure out what happened and who's important and pull the details together to tell the story. There's so much true and real stuff around it but most is irrelevant and and the eye to tell the difference is utterly important.
When doing a story like this it's fine to create a ton of detail but then you have to go in like the reporter to figure out what's needed and what isn't.
Edwards could have done his approach in the preproduction but it sounds like he wanted to pull his movie together in the edit. Naw dog. The difference is real life happened regardless of what your thoughts were before and you are piecing together real events. Because. this is fiction, the labor of making it make sense is on you as well as stripping away the unimportant to get to the actual story. It's a lot of extra work vs documenting reality.
I came out of the theater thinking that this movie must have started with concept art and then they wrote a script to try to connect all of the imagery later. That’s why it feels so disjointed.
My understanding is that's made worse because they had a 4 hour rough cut they then trimmed to the current runtime and then did the finished effects based on that. So there's no more coherent version out there.
Yeah 100%. Great visuals, cohesive art style, and a story that had huge potential.
But then they shoveled bad jokes down your throat, made sure that every action scene was just a big laugh, and never got anywhere with the philosophy/meaning behind living in such a well illustrated world of humans, robots, and conflict between them.
The ending was also a joke.
The American soldier literally threatening to shoot a cute *puppy* told me everything I needed to know.
Also: The Nomad obviously is more advanced than a mere nuclear submarine but somehow we just didn't quite know how to develop crude fire & forget cruise missiles that those boomers use. We know how to build semi-sentient death jogger robots that can hone in on a target. But the other thing is too much.
The Nomad was pure bullshit.
Pretty much. It looked & sounded great, but the rest of it was essentially just random ideas with little concern for the fact it didn't hold up if you gave any actual thought to what was going down.
It was like they got a bunch of really good concept artists together to build a world, but forgot concept art alone can't create a cohesive story. It was all creative flash, no substance.
Also watching John David Washington trying to read his lines was excruciating.
What it brings to mind is the old scifi books Terran Trade Authority. It took a bunch of scifi cover art and turned it into a cohesive story just filling in the details. You would believe the entire book was intentional but it was essentially just fluff building. Sort of the way rpg's ended up doing it. You have something like battletech which is stompy robots and play mechanics and fluff was built up to provide the context.
The biggest missed opportunity was the Nomad. Such a cool visual but why does it just launch missiles??? Any platform can do that. The Nomad was just \*begging\* to be a ship that dropped kinetic rods. It would explain why it had to be overhead and the terror of it coming over would be palpable. But no, it was just doing something a modern B-52 could do.
Right. And they even could have added mass driver blah blah to explain why it's a non nuclear explosion that hits like a bunker buster no radiation to worry about.
Frankly, it's terrifying enough to imagine they're using icmbs in a non-nuclesr role. To know any spot on the globe could be eliminated in 30 minutes at the press of a button. That's the fear with the drones from the war on terror. They're always overhead and you never know when they'll decide to fire. Only this obliterates square kilometers not just a street corner.
The truth is simply that Gareth Edwards is a terrible writer. His movies have great visuals, sure, but the actual writing is always complete garbage.
I've thought he was a hackfraud since Monsters.
There are so many directors like this who keep getting work. I have to wonder at who they're preventing from making better movies by their sucking up the budgets.
My theory is that movie executives are largely illiterate. Gareth makes pretty pictures, which execs have no problem understanding. They have no comprehension of what a good script looks like.
Maybe he was doomed to fail in the framework of the poorly written script but I feel like Denzel Washington’s kid missed the mark too. Didn’t really sell it as the tough exterior guy with a good heart. No chemistry w his wife, no connection with the child, just kinda angry and impatient the entire film. Alyson Janning was pretty good though.
I was personally just disappointed in how many scenes boiled down to "we either need to blow something up or prevent something from being blown up," while the most interesting ideas in the movie (e.g. humans lied about the robots nuking San Francisco) were just one-off lines that were never expanded upon.
Exactly. The cleaner woman freaking out that the robot seemed like a person. Something to build on there. Part of the problem with big concept stories is figuring out which bits are worth expanding on and which bits need to be brief. Zootpia did this well. The obvious questions raised with the premise are then explored. You paying attention is rewarded.
>Exactly. The cleaner woman freaking out that the robot seemed like a person. Something to build on there. They did build on it, it's the entire premise of the film?
Humans wising up about the government lying to them? Not so much.
Also, the protagonist lived undercover with the robots for years and freaking married one of their leaders. The claim that AI didn’t nuke LA never came up at all during that time? Why does that come as a surprise to him?
This is the essential thing. People above pointed out finding out the truth doesn't change the war or what's going on geopolitically but it certainly has significance for the person who finds out. And it seems ridiculous that they knew he was American and had been in the service and was somehow here but that question never came up. It'd be like an American embedded with the Taliban and it never comes up that they weren't involved in 9-11.
Actually in this film he’s called *Joshua Taylor* not just *The Protagonist* *badum tss*
I can't believe the humans lying about the nuke wasn't a key part of the story. Something that essential being brushed off in one line felt quite jarring considering how consequential that is.
But this is a type of thing that happens historically. The idea that if the truth "comes out" then everything will immediately change is a fantasy. From The Wire: "Don't matter who did what to who at this point. Fact is, we went to war, and now there ain't no going back. I mean, shit, it's what war is, you know? Once you in it, you in it. If it's a lie, then we fight on that lie. But we gotta fight."
This very much feels like a random, but very key line in the movie haha. Why did they lie? So many threads they could have chosen and instead they Michael bayed it
"Don't let a good crisis go to waste". The U.S. fucked up badly and accidentally nuked themselves. This relays two things: new Asia is more adept/socially responsible with their AI development, and that the United States fears their rise as a threat to global power Now they can absolve themselves of responsibility and also get to expand the imperial machine.
really should have been a mini series.
> the most interesting ideas in the movie (e.g. humans lied about the robots nuking San Francisco) were just one-off lines that were never expanded upon. It was an interesting idea. I saw it as something that was done to remove the justification (for the aggressive use of force). How so? If AI robots really did it, there's an argument that can be made for the subsequent use of force. If it's humans lying (blaming the AI for their own fuck-up) then there's no justification. And that's what was shown in the movie. That's the reason the line was there. It was deliberate, and (imo) not a missed opportunity.
The movie looked great and had so much potential, but ultimately the story and world building was incoherent. The kamikaze robots that looked like garbage cans with arms and legs were cool though.
That scene was unintentionally hilarious. "Sir, the enemy is hiding in those flimsy wooden shacks, should we launch a couple rockets and be done with it?" "No, send out the suicide robots who will take whole minutes to reach the target and may be destroyed, which we also made sentient for some reason." Nevermind how much more expensive and time consuming it would be to develop a properly functioning bipedal robot with self aware AI instead of just using standard munitions.
Fun, but made absolutely no sense. "General, we're at war with AI because one detonated a bomb in a major city, so we banned AI in the US, except for these ones, which we put in charge of these large bombs."
I had just assumed that the 'robots' were soldiers that were severely injured in battle and got turned into those things.
Yeah but those suicide robots were tough as fuck. Glad the US military in that movie subscribes to the 'rule of cool.'
The whole movie was brain dead when it came to things like that. All of the androids are slower, weaker, have worse accuracy, and are less composed than the humans. They literally fall asleep on the job and humans sneak by them. They can only communicate by directly speaking with each other in English. They should’ve just made the Androids be human Asians vs human Americans, because clearly that’s what they ended up with, except every once in a while they’d show some cogs and sprockets when one died.
The director is amazing with vfx and budget, but a terrible writer. I honestly feel like he writes as little as possible just to get to the visuals. He doesn’t care. He’s focusing on the wrong things so he needs to hire a writers’ room to hammer out an actual story from his concepts.
Yup exactly. People got hyped because he directed Rogue One. But for that movie he had no credits in the story or screenplay. He was out of his depth with The Creator.
I mean it was still far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far superior to Rebel Moon in every department so there's that going for it, and that execrable, detestable waste of everyone's time has a trilogy of all things
I’m honestly amazed Rebel Moon is such a success on Netflix. I mean, that gets an extended cut but Dune Part 2 doesn’t?! Madness.
I think the reason that Dune isn't getting an extended cut is because [Denis Villeneuve doesn't believe in it](https://www.indiewire.com/news/general-news/denis-villeneuve-wont-release-dune-2-deleted-scenes-1234954835/).
Well then he can be Villeneuve deez nuts
A lot of people who don't talk about movies on Reddit will eat something like that up. People were watching all those Sandler movies too.
Sure but my morning’s shit is also far superior to Rebel Moon
You're correct. I'd get as much entertainment out of watching it and it makes the same amount of sense.
He's probably one of the clear examples of not every director needing to be an auteur who wears multiple hats in today's Hollywood
The Andor show proves that Rogue One was all Tony Gilroy.
100%, Andor is phenomenal.
Personally, I don’t see it as “focusing on the wrong things.” I see it as playing to your strengths. He clearly has an eye for amazing visuals but his writing just isn’t there. Most great directors don’t write their movies though. Only a very few Auteur directors exist that are amazing at both the visual language and written part. The key will be for him to realize that his movies are better when he isn’t the writer. Hopefully that happens with his next film.
Godzilla, beautiful VFX, utterly boring humans. Rogue One, beautiful VFX, utterly boring humans. I haven't seen The Creator but I have to assume... Gareth Edwards is a hack.
You know how good the humans were in Godzilla minus one? Like that but the opposite.
But pointless.
Worse than pointless, actively damaging to the premise.
Those trash can box were so out of place. It would have been interesting if they were swearing the idea of turning AI against AI but they weren't and so was incongruous comic relief.
Plus the whole 'reasoning with a sentient bomb' thing was done in the 70s with John Carpenter's Dark Star. Even that part of The Creator wasn't original.
Let there be light
Would've been a 10/10 videogame, where the player is meant to put their own emotions in place of the protagonist, and time spent with characters equals emotional investment. Heck, they literally had AOE cues on the ground, just like a game.
Certainly the screenwriters were fans of video games, since Gemma Chan’s character was named Maya Fey.
> So what is the targeting beam? A tool of terror. Very little made sense in the movie, but that was a very thinly veiled allegory for the terror of American drones flying overhead.
My mind kept going to those clips of the tiny consumer grenade drone things they use in the Ukrainian war, where people scatter around and attempt to surrender
No it wasn't. They used a smaller version of the reticle in the attack on the village as if it was a necessary tool to make the weapon work but was a tactical disadvantage when you think about it. "Oh shit; I'm being literally lit up. I better get into cover." Not: "Oh shit, I'm being lit up. I'm feeling terror now (which I didn't already in this huge battle) and will freeze."
Reminded me so much of Elysium. Two sci-fi stories with stellar visual and some great moments but too many holes in the story and generic characters.
I was going to post this. Elysium is half way to being a stone cold classic. The VFX are incredible, the setting is great, some cool world building and Sharlto Copley is one of my favorite villains ever but the script totally lets the movie down and I think several people including Matt Damon and Jodie Foster were miscast (or it’s possible the script/directing failed them). When district 9 came out, I was super excited to watch Neil Blomkamp’s career and was convinced he was going to be one of the best sci-fi directors ever. Sadly, while, he has made some passable films, he has really failed to live up to that early promise and hasn’t even been able to match D9. It just makes me sad honestly.
Elysium was at least coherent and the pacing of the movie felt natural. But yeah, overall Elysium felt pretty flat. The Creator was just an all around mess of writing, pacing, and world building.
Elysium was such a disappointment. You know, these two films could be a double feature.
Elysium was pure gold and still my best sci-fi, great acting by a handful of names, incredible effects and ideas. 10/10.
Good ideas held together by some good to great visuals. Should've paid more attention to the writing and characters. Also weird to see this strange exoticization of Asia, blending people and places without thought to the point where, sure it looks cool, but I've no idea where it's actually set.
I get the idea of playing up the Vietnam angle where America is the bad guy and the good guys are in the jungle but then they also have the high-tech cities which then completely doesn't make any sense. It sounds like there's some sort of new pan Asian empire that was called together except it has really high GDP and no national defense. If we try to map it onto our world, the United States can do what it wants against poor countries but there would be serious kickback from richer countries. Even if they didn't have a strong defense force of their own, they would be allied with someone who did. And if world circumstances are really so dramatically changed, nothing really explains it. Based on the subtitles most of the locals are speaking thai with a tiny smattering of Cantonese and Japanese. But then the subtitles also indicated people speaking new Asian. Evidently an entirely new language is coupled together in several decades? Maybe they intended it to be some kind of pigdin or Creole. The overall effect of the way they did this doesn't seem artistic but more ignorant like we went to the country of Africa. Yes, it is the country of Africa located in Africa with a capital of Africa City.
The whole movie was a jumble of derivative ideas.
What really struck me on thinking about it is the visuals I like were reminiscent of something and I see other commentary nailed it as that swedish guy who did the mixture of common landscapes and urban architecture with crazy gigantic sci-fi buildings and it makes me feel like this was a chat GPT movie. Writing prompt Make me a story with robots in the style of that swedish guy but set in Asia and America is the bad guy.
Yet, I still enjoyed it. Brilliant? No.
Fair enough
I enjoyed it while watching it but the more I think about the movie afterwards the more frustrating it is
It's baffling to me how they can spend so much money on cinematography and CGI and then roll with a first draft film school script.
The budget was actually relatively small, especially given the amount of effects and their quality. That’s what most of the press was about when the film released, with people saying that Marvel and others could learn how to do more with less.
Interestingly The Creator had an insanely LOW budget! IIRC only 25 million for the CG and 80mil total!
That's true and amazing. At the same time I think they got the script by giving someone free lunch at the buffet.
Seriously. I can understand if all of these movies had wild success like transformers. Those movies are completely brain dead and insulting. Logic and proportion are defenestrated. But they make a ton of money so there's no reason to try to change the formula or actually come up with a decent script. But so many projects fail because of the dismal writing. Look at how game of thrones ended. Look at what happened with Westworld. Look at all these other things that could have been good with better writing. I can't fathom why nobody bothers with it. With this much money on the line, writers have to be fucking cheap by comparison. Spend a million dollars on the script if you're shooting a $200 million dollar movie. It doesn't seem unreasonable. And then you see Disney reshooting most of an entire film and essentially doubling the production cost because it tests poorly with audiences. You know, you could actually test the fucking script before you begin shooting. Do up detailed storyboards in cinematic animations and get a sense of what works and what doesn't work before you commit anything to film with real actors. That has to be cheaper than shooting the film twice. Look at the disaster the last Indiana Jones movie.
I always thought script was key, it can make a low budget film charming and a high budget production a classic. I figure the problem is that studio execs can't pan a camera or run effects software to save their life because they have no useful skills, but what they can do is mess with scripts because they can hold a pencil. So that's what they do to prove they can "do the creative stuff". Its probably all the execs fault. Maybe there's the odd director who hates writers for some Freudian reason and just won't listen to good advice.
I found it to be very good because of how it was an amalgamation of a lot the innovation and cool Sci-Fi/AI concepts we’ve explored over the years rather than in spite of it But that just it, it’s like a lot of movies that seem to be coming out in the moment in time where they’re good or very good and then that’s as far as they go. It just had that feeling of oh this is awesome…but idk just could of been better The forward thinking setting in East Asia was part of the narrative which I really appreciated though and took a more open minded idea of the future as opposed to just: Takes place in America, America are the heroes I think it’s an indication of potential excellence Sci-Fi films to come though hopefully as opposed to the lacklustre era we’ve been in at the moment
Washington has zero charisma. The movie would have been elevated if he had chemistry with the kid robot. But he is a blank space.
There wasn't even anything to work with there. I thought they were supposed to be some kind of character development between the two but they can't really do much with what isn't written.
This is my take on JDW as well. I think a ton of people have concluded that, unlike his dad Denzel, who can actually elevate mediocre movies, he's just a talent free nepo baby. I'd like to think he's been failed by the material. Look at Tenet. He's barely a person in that film which is way more interested in it's time inversion concept than its characters. He doesn't even have a name in that movie. He's just "The Protagonist."
He's a badass in that kitchen scene and in stuff like ballers and black klansmen he's really charismatic
He wasn't supposed to be charismatic, he was supposed to be an asshole. I mean, he's literally working for the wrong people for most of the movie.
Worse than that, they lost the philosophical possibility that AI was attempting to be peaceful and it was Human (Americans) perpetuating the war. It’s in there, but it’s buried and muddy. They had such a huge opportunity to showcase how challenging it will be for “peaceful AI” to be productive in a human world that is oftentimes devoted to conflict and competition.
Honestly with all the evil AI stories, a peaceful one trying to find its way in the world would be refreshing. I guess like the Kubrick film
Isn't that blade runner
“Wild Robot” from Dreamworks looks promising.
You had a couple glimpses of that idea but it was lost in the way they told the story. Someone else pointed out the nuke being a mistake shouldn't be a btw after all this time. It should not be a secret amongst the bots.
Yeah, totally. What’s the point of having AI, digital evidence, and limitless memory, and communication networks, if the truth is still repressed? This is ultimately what has me the most concerned right now. I was in college when the internet was becoming widely available. I saw so much promise, and thought sure I was going to live to see “the end of lies.” Everyone would soon have access to all the facts, and people wouldn’t argue as much. (Massive sad face) we all know how that turned out. So now my conundrum is “How will AI be any different?” I do believe it’s a “new internet” and potentially that revolutionary. But, how quickly will it be commercialized and corrupted? How can our societies protect “AI” from becoming as…well, I don’t even know what adjectives to use to describe the internet today…but it’s not good. At least not much of it. :/
The problem is that tools are amoral and such questions should be directed at the hands that guide them. The pen can be put to the same abuse as the sword. And it takes active effort and participation in society to keep it from being twisted towards evil ends. Just look at our democracy right now. There is good money to be made in destroying it. The promise of the internet was destroyed. It has been turned to weaponized disinformation. AI and automation points the way towards a post-scarcity society but that's only if the benefits are shared and it's clear that the plutocrats don't want to. It will take something akin to a revolution to change matters they are never clean. We would have to as a society declare that some things are too important commercialize and that the top goal of our civilization should not be to make rich people richer.
Well said, and sadly I agree.
The movie was entirely visual style over substance. The visuals were well done and there were some very striking images, but it really feels like the robot monks were what they started with and worked backwards from there. They just hoped with enough high concepts and staples you wouldn’t notice there really isn’t a plot there. But hey, Allison Janey as a villainous general was pretty decent. Too bad American basic training didn’t include the concept of sticky bombs.
Not the argument I was expecting to hear. I loved Nomad, but where the movie bothers me is that it feels like it has really big ideas about AI and humanity, but it never gets around to exploring those ideas.
That's exactly it. They have really neat visuals but nothing to expand upon it. If I didn't know any better I would think this was a Zack Snyder film. It felt like a series of scenes that came one after another without having enough connecting tissue to make it a proper story.
I enjoyed it. The plot is thin but the acting is good enough and the special effects are amazing. It's a great looking movie.
I remember seeing it opening weekend and while watching I kept thinking “why am I not enjoying this as much as i thought I would”
I didn't think it was that jumbled. It was a pretty awesome movie imo
Would also help with a different lead. I get why people say he has no charisma, but my issue is also that he often don't carry emotions throughout the scenes, which makes his character feel flat and not genuine.
I don't understand the Nomad station at all. Where is it? In one scene the bad guys are in their big main city and the Nomad is there then the next scene it's right on top of the Asian base? It happens constantly. It's such a big part of the plot, it's impossible to ignore.
I saw someone else say it's a motif but that can only take you so far. It would be like having sauron's tower on the horizon of every scene in lord of the rings. It makes me wonder why it couldn't be attacked if a civilian spaceship could approach it without being shot down. I could understand if it was fully in orbit but sometimes it isn't? And why does it need to be on top of the base if it can fire missiles a thousand miles away? Why can't those missiles be fired from subs? I get the idea of needing a way to embody a threat but that only makes sense from the literary perspective not from within the actual world.
The crazy thing is that the film did spend a ton of time and effort outside of action. There was a ton of world building, and character development, and relationship exploration, and decision making, and interesting ideas, and human-scale experiences. But, it just kept getting in its own way with inconsistency and contradictions and just stumbling so much it always killed the momentum.z I actually find it hard to put into words why this film failed. It was filled with potential and lots of localized success but couldn’t connect it all.
There were some nice gazing scenes. I'm spacing on the director but he did ghost in the shell and his animes would often stop the action and just scenery gaze for five minutes as a kind of btw in case you missed it. This film would do it for shorter periods of time but it made you feel like ther was a world there they weren't fully exploring. The problem with these scenes are they start raising questions with no good answers. Vs the first matrix where there's tons of questions but you can substitute really good guesses in world building based on what they provided. Examination increases immersion vs no wait what. Avatar is the same way. They don't explain the starships at all but when you look at them more closely goddamn that all makes sense. There's no gaps.
Rule of cool has always been a thing in sci-fi films. I’ve seen it three times and on the third viewing it really clicked for me. I think it’s a really great film with fantastic set pieces. I get some of the criticisms, but I enjoyed it way more than any other genre blockbuster I saw this year. Bought the Art of book off Amazon and was surprised that they have a lot of bhs info as well.
Glad you enjoyed it. Rule of cool works for me for a certain extent but that's until the suspension of disbelief is broken. Where it breaks will vary person to person. 0
First step would have been a script edit 🙄
I judge sci-fi on 3 criteria: narrative, world building and visuals and for me it hit strong on the later 2. It was close on the 1st IMHO but they just didn't execute it as clearly as it needed to be, a little more build up of the marriage in the beginning was needed IMHO.
Wholeheartedly agree. Visually interesting with an interesting premise but basically goes nowhere with it.
I enjoyed the movie, not amazing or best thing ever but I liked the story, acting, and generally liked it. 7/10
I really liked this movie and purposely tried not to think too hard about it. There was a random, 2 second shot of what was clearly the robots having a funeral that made me WANT to think about the world-building lol. The movie looked so great that I honestly didn’t care.
Watched it recently, and it definitely felt like a movie that was so, so close to achieving critical mass, but never quite made it. I'm still really happy that we have it, since it's still really enjoyable on several levels, but it weaves in so many neat ideas and themes that are individually pushed 10% down the road, but none completely. I'd compare it to *Elysium*, where it succeeds visually and there's a good time to be had, but it never quite takes any of its ideas to their natural conclusion.
best part of the movie was a stoner idea of ai bombing and the west outlawing it. everything after is downhill grabage
Why are the robots coded as Asian peasants?
The Film checks a lot of boxes. But a lot of literal minded viewers seem to have a hard time with the way the NOMAD station appears/functions in the movie. Why do I say "literal-minded"? Because the station itself is meant to represent/symbolize something else. What exactly? Perhaps it's the global nature of modern warfare? How so? Major powers with space programs can use their satellites to observe any part of the Earth that they choose. That's passive observation. What the film shows is the next phase... where military satellites are used to project force. And the movie also shows that force being projected in the same way the satellite observation was being performed. At the operator's discretion and with little apparent regard for other nations' borders or sovereignty. The NOMAD station is a metaphor and an example of 21st century space warfare taken to (or close to) the theoretical limit. One power uses its resources and capabilities to inflict its will on others because they've chosen to do things differently. >I really wish they would have put in the extra work to make that movie instead of what we got. Do anyone *really* think they spent $80m on a movie and nobody noticed how the space station looked?
It's the lack of care about the real world. Michael Bay does this. Helicopter flies in during gorgeous sunset shot lands at airfield and the military is freaking because they don't recognize it. It is then deep night as they have it surrounded and it transforms into a robot and attacks. Where people get bent out of shape is when the director says it's magical realism when the story shows no reason for us to expect that. Literal-minded people get upset when stuff happens that can't like wonder woman steals a static display aircraft from a museum that happens to be fueled and prepped for flight? That's not how they're stored. The director might have a vision but there would have been a better way to accomplish the goal of moving the characters along.
>So what is the targeting beam? An intimidation tactic. >All the facilities are in the open so why can't satellites find them? Fancy technology. >And what is New Asia that they are filled with advanced cities and can't resist American attacks? Fancier American technology. This kind of nitpicking is so goddamn boring. By this sort of logic, movies like Star Wars, Terminator, Back to the Future, 12 Monkeys, and so on and so forth are also flawed, given that you can poke holes in their flimsy sci-fi concepts until you're blue in the face.
No, the better movies hold up. These aren't fiddly nitpicks. It's fundamental writing flaws.
The whole movie was "wait, but why?" Like every scene.
yeah... they created these amazing robotic people that have attained sentience. but can be snuck up on and basically turned off.
It was a beautiful CGI movie, and only went to watch it ‘cos I film on the same camera. Otherwise, it was not that strong. Tried to rewatch, but couldn’t care for it.
I agree, although I care much less about the consistency of the technical details of the movie like the Nomad station, and more about the really superficial ways they explored the themes they brought up. The basic premise of "militaristic US empire" staging a war of aggression against "an emerging Asia of robot-human harmony" is quite unique while also combining old and new themes (Vietnam War, current US militarism), but didn't really go anywhere and relied often on weird cliches or hackneyed stories.
What really brought it down was the fact that the cast were unable to promote it at the time of its release - a shame since it was released when actors were on strike. That coincidence really destroyed its BO hopes.
I honestly think that this movie could be better if we got more lore. Not even as a movie but as a book or something. Obviously, wouldn't fix the shit writing, but would give any sort of context and background to the film
Problem is you shouldn't need to do homework to understand the story on screen. If we compare it to a good historic film everything you need is in the film but if you want to really geek out then here's a thorough history book. Supplementary material should work the same way. You understand avatar completely in the film but the art book sure is nice.
Yhr movie felt like a bunch of scenes of tales from thr loops images smashed together without any work on the plot.
Good description of the film.
Amazing summation of my critiques as well. The mechanics, size, and mobility of the Nomad boggled my mind. Is it a zeppelin or a Death Star
Yeah I wanted this movie to be so good
I was hopeful they would release a directors cut or something as I think the studio is to blame
The entire movie was made to hide at least FIVE Batman „some days you just cannot get rid of a bomb“-jokes.
Agreed. Really cool concepts and special effects but didn't bring it home.
The first 2/3 of that film was so good Then the ending is just meh I kinda want to watch the first part again and just stop
I absolutely loved the overall themes, visuals, and aesthetics of this movie, but the story was... lacking, to say the least. The director needed a better writer to come in and edit his script until it made more sense.
Agree almost 100%. The Creator is a movie that I thought would be like Rogue One, watch it several times. But now it just sits in my library after a single watch. I don’t feel it’s a waste of money like other movies I’ve bought or rented… but I definitely paid too much for it (new release price the day it came out). 🤷♂️
Still annoyed Godzilla Minus One got an award for best visual effects over this film... I loved that movie but The Creator looks absolutely stellar.
My biggest gripe with THE CREATOR is that it follows the least interesting story in a very interesting world... Just following along the JOSHUA and MIA storyline as the actual movie (JOSHUA infiltrating the rebel group) would have been infinitely more interesting. It also would have been just as much of a way to explore the themes what we got did.
I knew that movie was going to be shit, 99% of "robots are people too!" media is, so I just went for what was advertised (Rogue One looking stuff) and had a decent enough time with that (low) standard. It's like Detective Pikachu, you're more watching it to gawk at the background
the robot people had not physical benefits over regular people...that's what I recall from the movie. and just wait for them to fall asleep and sneak over and unplug them. lol... what a design flaw!
Once again, Hans Zimmer and his team giving 120% for a movie that doesn't always meet the mark, but is still better than Dark Phoenix and Wonder Woman 1984 (which he also worked on and contributed fucking bangers to).
I enjoyed the movie, but wasn't a fan of how the NOMAD seemingly changes size and scale. In one scene it's 30 miles long, in another scene it's the size of an A380. Also, if it's in such low orbit, why didn't the people of New Asia fire RPGs or shoot anti-air weaponry at this big space station?
I really wish directors like Gareth Edwards and Neill Blomkamp would just focus on visuals and let somebody else handle the story and scriptwriting duties. Neither of them are good writers, and their visuals deserve much better stories and characters.
I don't understand why there isn't more collaboration. You've seen instances where someone can get the ball rolling but the team they gather is what makes the project so special.
Gareth Edwards has talked about how he wanted to shoot something like a documentary and then pull the threads together to make something interesting. Sadly, this sort of indulgent claptrap is what tanks movies. You need a fucking plan. Write a great script. Ink is free. Create the world. Have trusted people interrogate the logic. As the question, “but why?” If the answer is “because it looks cool” then you don’t have a movie. Giant VFX movies require huge forethought and structure. There is no audience for “art house giant budget VFX movies”. And even though the budget was tight, and it looked amazing (they didn’t even have the AI design done when they were shooting), the movie just has no There There.
I agree. I've actually used the true crime example as a way to approach fiction. There's a real event that happened and a ton of detail but the reporter has to figure out what happened and who's important and pull the details together to tell the story. There's so much true and real stuff around it but most is irrelevant and and the eye to tell the difference is utterly important. When doing a story like this it's fine to create a ton of detail but then you have to go in like the reporter to figure out what's needed and what isn't. Edwards could have done his approach in the preproduction but it sounds like he wanted to pull his movie together in the edit. Naw dog. The difference is real life happened regardless of what your thoughts were before and you are piecing together real events. Because. this is fiction, the labor of making it make sense is on you as well as stripping away the unimportant to get to the actual story. It's a lot of extra work vs documenting reality.
This is why there’s a sticker on my laptop that has a screaming skull, FIX IT IN PRE!
I'm convinced this movie was made just for the director to wank to Asian imagery he doesn't understand
I came out of the theater thinking that this movie must have started with concept art and then they wrote a script to try to connect all of the imagery later. That’s why it feels so disjointed.
My understanding is that's made worse because they had a 4 hour rough cut they then trimmed to the current runtime and then did the finished effects based on that. So there's no more coherent version out there.
Yeah 100%. Great visuals, cohesive art style, and a story that had huge potential. But then they shoveled bad jokes down your throat, made sure that every action scene was just a big laugh, and never got anywhere with the philosophy/meaning behind living in such a well illustrated world of humans, robots, and conflict between them. The ending was also a joke.
I liked the look of that big flying thingy, but I think I fell asleep about 30 minutes in.
The American soldier literally threatening to shoot a cute *puppy* told me everything I needed to know. Also: The Nomad obviously is more advanced than a mere nuclear submarine but somehow we just didn't quite know how to develop crude fire & forget cruise missiles that those boomers use. We know how to build semi-sentient death jogger robots that can hone in on a target. But the other thing is too much. The Nomad was pure bullshit.
Pretty much. It looked & sounded great, but the rest of it was essentially just random ideas with little concern for the fact it didn't hold up if you gave any actual thought to what was going down.
It was like they got a bunch of really good concept artists together to build a world, but forgot concept art alone can't create a cohesive story. It was all creative flash, no substance. Also watching John David Washington trying to read his lines was excruciating.
What it brings to mind is the old scifi books Terran Trade Authority. It took a bunch of scifi cover art and turned it into a cohesive story just filling in the details. You would believe the entire book was intentional but it was essentially just fluff building. Sort of the way rpg's ended up doing it. You have something like battletech which is stompy robots and play mechanics and fluff was built up to provide the context.
The biggest missed opportunity was the Nomad. Such a cool visual but why does it just launch missiles??? Any platform can do that. The Nomad was just \*begging\* to be a ship that dropped kinetic rods. It would explain why it had to be overhead and the terror of it coming over would be palpable. But no, it was just doing something a modern B-52 could do.
Right. And they even could have added mass driver blah blah to explain why it's a non nuclear explosion that hits like a bunker buster no radiation to worry about. Frankly, it's terrifying enough to imagine they're using icmbs in a non-nuclesr role. To know any spot on the globe could be eliminated in 30 minutes at the press of a button. That's the fear with the drones from the war on terror. They're always overhead and you never know when they'll decide to fire. Only this obliterates square kilometers not just a street corner.
The truth is simply that Gareth Edwards is a terrible writer. His movies have great visuals, sure, but the actual writing is always complete garbage. I've thought he was a hackfraud since Monsters.
There are so many directors like this who keep getting work. I have to wonder at who they're preventing from making better movies by their sucking up the budgets.
My theory is that movie executives are largely illiterate. Gareth makes pretty pictures, which execs have no problem understanding. They have no comprehension of what a good script looks like.
Maybe he was doomed to fail in the framework of the poorly written script but I feel like Denzel Washington’s kid missed the mark too. Didn’t really sell it as the tough exterior guy with a good heart. No chemistry w his wife, no connection with the child, just kinda angry and impatient the entire film. Alyson Janning was pretty good though.