The Creator - Review
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00:00 I definitely don't have to write that on my hand to make sure I don't get them mixed up.
00:04 [BLANK_AUDIO]
00:06 Yeah.
00:07 [MUSIC]
00:13 Hello everybody and welcome to my review for the new film The Creator.
00:16 The Embargo just dropped for full reviews and
00:19 I'm excited to have my review for this one out at The Embargo.
00:22 The Creator is from director Gareth Edwards,
00:25 his first feature since Rogue One A Star Wars Story back in 2016.
00:29 Edwards co-wrote the screenplay with Chris Weitz, a credited writer on Rogue One,
00:32 and an Oscar nominee for the film About a Boy.
00:35 Wholly original movies are few and far between, especially when you're talking
00:39 about movies that operate at the scale of a film like The Creator.
00:43 When you look at the top 25 movies this year domestically, only two of them,
00:48 Elemental and Megan, pass the test of being wholly original.
00:51 And what I mean by that is not a sequel, not an adaptation,
00:54 not based on a true story, not based on any kind of preconceived property,
00:59 literally just an original idea with original characters.
01:03 And when you look at the top 25 films of all time domestically,
01:06 there are still only two movies that pass that barrier, Avatar and 1977 Star Wars.
01:13 And now more than ever, it really is a risk because there's no IP,
01:17 there's no audience goodwill to bank on for
01:20 a studio to invest in a movie like The Creator, they really are taking a leap.
01:25 And I worry as I look at the rollout of this film, that The Creator, for
01:29 these reasons, may be a financial disappointment.
01:32 And if that does turn out to be true, then it's gonna be a real shame,
01:36 because it is certainly not a creative disappointment.
01:39 I am a sucker for good science fiction, and
01:42 The Creator is one of the best pure science fiction films this century.
01:47 Yes, I said it.
01:48 Rogue One may not have been the best creative experience for
01:50 Gareth Edwards as a director, but
01:52 you can see what he brought to Star Wars and not the other way around.
01:56 He's painting on a similar canvas here, but
01:58 with a fraction of the resources that he had over at Lucasfilm, and
02:01 you'd never be able to tell.
02:03 The Creator is a stunningly beautiful film,
02:05 with cinematography from Dune and the Batmans, Greg Fraser, and
02:09 relative newcomer, Oren Sofer.
02:11 These images are complemented by some remarkable special effects that look as
02:15 good or often even better than what we see in movies with two or
02:19 three times this film's budget.
02:22 The scope of what is done here and the quality of that work at the budget point,
02:26 which again is reportedly around $80 million, is as much of an expose
02:31 on the waste of big studio movies as any kind of article in Deadline or
02:37 The Hollywood Reporter.
02:38 It puts these movies literally to shame, these $200, $250 million movies.
02:43 When you look at the effects on a movie like Ant-Man and the Wasp, Quantumania,
02:46 put those special effects up against the special effects in The Creator, and
02:50 you tell me which movie had the bigger budget.
02:53 It's not always about the size of the budget, it's how it's used.
02:57 And The Creator, from what it appears to be,
02:59 unless there's some crazy extra budget money that they're hiding away somewhere,
03:03 has one of the best uses of its budget of any movie that I can think of in a very
03:07 long time.
03:08 So I'm gonna once again paraphrase my favorite movie critic of all time,
03:11 Roger Ebert, you've heard me say this a lot if you've watched my reviews for a while.
03:15 He often likes to say that it's not what a movie's about,
03:18 it's how it's about it.
03:20 And this is a great example of that saying because on the surface,
03:25 it appears that we've seen some version of The Creator's story many,
03:29 many times before.
03:30 John David Washington plays Joshua, a special government operative who's called
03:34 back to duty after a tragedy in order to find a secret weapon being developed by
03:39 humanity's enemy, artificial intelligence,
03:42 which years before carried out a devastating attack on Los Angeles.
03:46 When Joshua finds the weapon, it turns out to be a young AI girl named Alfie.
03:51 And despite her destructive potential, Joshua begins to feel protective of Alfie
03:55 and to question the real nature of humanity and what it means to be alive.
04:00 We've seen shades of stories like this before, but
04:02 it starts with the performances.
04:03 And John David Washington is a strong lead,
04:06 grappling with his own past and inner turmoil about the mission that he has
04:11 been asked to accomplish.
04:12 He's paired with a young actress named Madeline Una Voiles in her first
04:16 on-screen performance.
04:18 And again, at the risk of sounding hyperbolic,
04:21 this is one of the best performances from a young actor, particularly an actor that
04:25 is not experienced and hasn't been in show business already for years and
04:29 years, that I can remember maybe ever.
04:32 Voiles commands the screen and her character from the first moment.
04:36 And as the movie goes on, she gradually shifts the emotional burden of the film
04:40 onto herself right up to the movie's last frame.
04:44 There isn't one single second of kid acting or unreality.
04:48 She brings an experience and a wisdom to her role that far exceeds the abilities of
04:53 so many young actors, even good ones.
04:55 This performance will most assuredly be on my short list
04:59 when I'm thinking about my favorite performances at the end of this year.
05:03 The rest of the cast is also stacked with talented actors.
05:06 Gemma Chan plays a critical role as Joshua's wife, Maya.
05:10 Ken Watanabe comes in to lend gravitas to the movie,
05:13 as he is often tasked with doing.
05:15 And Allison Janney ditches all of her inherent likeability to play one of
05:18 the most abjectly hateable villains that I've seen in a movie in a very long time.
05:23 I had no idea that the actress that brought us CJ Craig was capable of such
05:28 on-screen depravity.
05:29 The creator feels like a throwback to the time in Hollywood when you
05:34 could sell a movie on concept alone.
05:38 And I think that for people that give it a chance,
05:40 you're gonna be rewarded with a little bit of everything.
05:43 There's some great high-minded, thinky sci-fi.
05:46 There's some incredibly executed and choreographed action scenes,
05:49 uniformly stellar performances from the cast, genuine emotion, excitement,
05:54 humor, spectacle.
05:55 It's the kind of movie I think would have been a big hit in 1993, or
05:59 maybe even in 2003.
06:01 But when we look at the theatrical marketplace of 2023,
06:04 I worry that there's just not gonna be enough support for it.
06:08 And the marketplace needs a movie like this,
06:10 with movies like Challengers and Dune being pushed off the schedule.
06:14 It really is kind of a wasteland out there.
06:16 I think people are looking for an option, for a reason to go to the movies.
06:20 And I think that for the people who show up to see the creator,
06:24 they're going to be rewarded.
06:25 And I hope that they tell their friends,
06:27 maybe it has a chance to be a word of mouth hit.
06:30 I'm definitely gonna be seeing it again, because I can think of four or
06:33 five scenes right off the top of my head that I'm excited to experience again
06:38 in a theater.
06:38 Not just because they're exciting or emotional, but
06:41 because they are uniquely exciting and emotional.
06:44 They are specific to these characters and this movie.
06:48 And that is the hallmark, really, of a story well told.
06:52 I love how the AI and the machines are designed and executed in the movie.
06:55 Many of them having taken on partial human form to replicate their creators.
07:00 And in a lesser movie, they would have just been the faceless bad guys,
07:03 the humanity versus the machines.
07:05 But of course, it's all much deeper than that.
07:08 And the way that they deal with this AI human war,
07:11 there's a whole scene where it's brought up and
07:13 kind of addressed in a way that I didn't really see coming.
07:16 And in a way that some people might say, well,
07:18 that doesn't really make a whole lot of sense, or maybe that's anticlimactic.
07:21 But it works again because it's specific to this story.
07:24 And you realize as you go on that it really isn't about this global conflict
07:28 that's happening.
07:29 It's about this personal conflict between this small group of characters.
07:33 And the movie works on that scale and also on the big action scale.
07:37 There is the conspiracy theorist part of me, however,
07:40 that does think it's a bit suspicious that a movie is coming out right now from
07:43 a major studio, a studio owned by Disney, no less.
07:47 That's about how AI is more likable and
07:49 more human than the threat that we all think that it is.
07:54 Of course, the elephant in the room here is this movie's similarity in some
07:58 respects to Star Wars.
08:00 And there are some parallels that you can draw.
08:02 There is a giant floating space base in the film that is able to target things on
08:08 the ground and rain destruction from above.
08:10 In this movie, it's called Nomad.
08:12 But I don't really think that the characters in the film would have been out
08:15 of line if they had nicknamed it the Death Star.
08:18 But I think it speaks to the ability of Gareth Edwards and
08:21 his actors to carve out a unique voice for these characters.
08:25 That this movie doesn't feel like a retread of Star Wars or
08:28 of other movies that it shares a similarity with.
08:31 Just as George Lucas reinvented the tropes of the hero's journey and
08:35 story beats that have been around for so many times before to craft Star Wars,
08:39 Gareth Edwards is recrafting our current cinematic language to tell his own
08:44 unique and affecting story.
08:45 If this sounds like a rave review, well, it is.
08:48 And I'm not saying that this is gonna be my favorite movie of the year so far, but
08:51 it is one of my favorites so far this year.
08:54 And perhaps the most refreshingly original movie I've seen in 2023.
08:59 The creator is an incredibly effective use of all the tools that a modern
09:03 filmmaker has at hand in order to craft an epic sci-fi vision in the tradition
09:08 of Stanley Kubrick's 2001, A Space Odyssey, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner,
09:12 Denis Villeneuve's Arrival, Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men, and
09:16 Alex Garland's Ex Machina, to name a few.
09:18 I'm not saying that the creator measures up to all of those movies or
09:23 that it's as great as all of those movies.
09:25 But I am saying that it comes pretty close.
09:28 In the comment section below a lot of my videos that I've been making about
09:32 the strikes, and particularly the writer's strike,
09:35 I've seen several people make the same point, which is, well,
09:38 what does it matter that the writers are on strike?
09:41 They should stay on strike because Hollywood hasn't produced anything
09:44 creative or original in the last 10 years or 20 years or however long.
09:48 And my guess is the people that say that are also the ones that limit themselves
09:52 to only watching stuff that comes out of Marvel or Star Wars.
09:56 And to them, well, that's Hollywood, and that's all that Hollywood can produce.
09:59 And despite the fact that that's not Hollywood,
10:02 that's a tiny fraction of what Hollywood produces each year,
10:05 I worry that the same people who are out there saying that Hollywood doesn't make
10:08 anything creative are also the ones that are most likely to skip a movie like
10:13 The Creator because it's original and not familiar.
10:15 And I would say, give this movie a shot.
10:19 I don't think that you'll be disappointed if you do.
10:21 And on my personal scale, I am giving it a rating of see it now.
10:25 I am an unabashed fan of and advocate for this movie.
10:29 And I really hope I don't have to spend the next few weeks on charts with Dan and
10:33 sitting over there in the corner shaking my head in disappointment that nobody
10:38 is going to see this movie.
10:39 And yet many of those same people will still turn around and
10:42 say that Hollywood's not making anything new or original.
10:45 I have no idea why the studio waited so
10:49 long to drop the official review embargo on this film.
10:52 Because I saw it last week.
10:54 I actually drove a few hours away to see it because I was excited by what I'd seen.
10:59 And I wanted to be able to be on the front lines here, really,
11:02 recommending it if I really liked it.
11:04 And this is the kind of movie that could use that critical word of mouth.
11:08 And it's really the kind of movie that makes me excited to be a critic.
11:11 In the era of Rotten Tomatoes, when film criticism has been boiled down to this
11:15 sort of binary fresh rotten metric, if you were to ask me for
11:19 my most simple review of The Creator, well then I guess it would be just one word.
11:24 And that word is go.
11:27 So in case you couldn't tell, that is a recommendation for me on The Creator.
11:30 It opens nationwide this Friday, preview screenings start on Thursday.
11:33 And if you're on the fence, it's a wholehearted recommendation from me.
11:37 Thank you so much for watching this review here on the channel.
11:39 I'll be back later on today unless some breaking news pushes charts for
11:43 some reason until tomorrow.
11:45 This review took the slot that charts normally sits in, so
11:48 charts will be out later this afternoon.
11:49 And as soon as the details of the WGA deal are released,
11:53 I will also have a video breaking down what's in the deal, what's not in the deal,
11:58 what did the writers get, what did the A&PTP get?
12:00 There's a lot to break down there.
12:02 So much, much more to come here on the channel today and
12:04 throughout the rest of the week.
12:05 Until then, thank you so much for watching.
12:07 Stay safe, and I'll see you next time.
12:09 Bye. [MUSIC]
12:19 [MUSIC]