The Creator

You don't know this yet, but you've already seen the
flick many times before
dir: Gareth Edwards
2023
This was terrible on a whole host of levels, and I think I’m one of the very few to think so. How very edgy of me.
It wasn’t terrible to watch, as in, it wasn’t an entirely unpleasant experience watching it. The acting is fine, the action is okay, the digital effects are solid.
It’s just that it’s all in the service of a terrible story, conceptually, and on a bunch of levels I can only barely grasp. I’ve read so many reviews that talk about how fresh and original it is, and I feel like screaming “have you watched any science fiction movies ever?”
Nothing in this flick is even barely remotely original. Everything is cobbled together from other flicks. I’m not even going to list them. Listing them is just me mansplaining and naming the same and usual suspects every time a sci fi flick is made. There are few images from this that I haven’t scene in other movies.
And touting as it does a storyline about humans versus AI, during an era in our own history where society says it’s grappling with the ethical and technological implications of advances in so-called artificial intelligence, the flick not only manages to say nothing new about AI; it manages to say nothing about AI at all.
It’s set, mostly, in the 2070s. So, our future. But long stretches of the flick look like they’re set during the fucking Vietnam War. I am not exaggerating. The fucking Vietnam War.
For reasons that I find hilarious, an African-American man lives with a pregnant generically Asian woman on the coast of a generically Asian country. This is New Asia. Not Thailand, not Vietnam, but New Asia. That’s not me saying it, it’s the movie.