The Creator isn't very good. It isn't smart. It isn't exciting. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense and there are next to no emotional entanglements that can justify its 140 minutes of screentime. It's not just that everything in The Creator has been done before and done better, its that Gareth Edwards seems to believe that the juxtaposition of stunning vistas and floating machinery merits a pass on intellectual and interpersonal banality. The actors feel robotic - especially the humans and especially John David Robinson - and the set pieces repetitive and predictable. It's an extended chase scene that sprinkles its shoot-em-ups with visions of synthetic humans being tortured. We're told that this has consequences but none of them are detectible onscreen. Everyone here is just going through the motions as if preprogrammed by an AI to deliver the bare minimum action film experience.
What's alarming is that this is an amalgamation of Edwards' films into a single thematic unit that isn't worthy of any of its disparate parts. There are plenty of rebel politics, third-world exploitation, and monsters, but not an once of soul. While Monsters and Rogue One both had momentum and curiosity, Creator is closer in form and execution to the clunky, uneven Godzilla and less satisfying. Given an $80mil budget and a 2 hour cut, we see the strain of self-importance everywhere - an insistence that big themes are being explored. But all things being precious isn't a particularly compelling philosophical argument when every creature living and synthetic is designed as a weapon. Remove the fancy window dressing and The Creator is about as complex of a machine as a pulley. There are plot holes here that suggest the filmmakers couldn't be bothered to even read their own script.
What's alarming is that this is an amalgamation of Edwards' films into a single thematic unit that isn't worthy of any of its disparate parts. There are plenty of rebel politics, third-world exploitation, and monsters, but not an once of soul. While Monsters and Rogue One both had momentum and curiosity, Creator is closer in form and execution to the clunky, uneven Godzilla and less satisfying. Given an $80mil budget and a 2 hour cut, we see the strain of self-importance everywhere - an insistence that big themes are being explored. But all things being precious isn't a particularly compelling philosophical argument when every creature living and synthetic is designed as a weapon. Remove the fancy window dressing and The Creator is about as complex of a machine as a pulley. There are plot holes here that suggest the filmmakers couldn't be bothered to even read their own script.