The Creator (film): It's just not very good

For me, having fantastic cinematography and wonderful effects just isn't enough for me to consider a movie good. This is the major reason why most of the Marvel and DC superhero films just don't appeal to me. Throwing 80 million dollars at something in order to make it look pretty just isn't enough. The Creator had an interesting concept in their AI vs. humans plotline, but in the end this film relies on it being visually pleasing much more so than it does on actually having a compelling story with a good script.

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Now for a lot of people the "director of Rogue One" maybe doesn't mean a lot but for me that is a big plus. Of all the latest Star Wars films that was really the only one that I thought was really good.

The Creator stars John David Washington who I guess is alright but you need to understand that he is the child of Denzel Washington and therefore, gets roles that he might not necessarily deserve. In his role as Sargent Josh Taylor he is your typical soldier who doesn't want to be involved with military ops anymore but they talk him into it because they have evidence that his wife, who he thought was killed, is still alive. I had to roll my eyes at this plot-point because it is just so friggin typical that they would do that. No! This is not a spoiler. It happens in the first 10 minutes of the film and is told to you in the trailer.

Joshua / Josh immediately signs on once they reveal this information to him and he is off to what is called New Asia, which is clearly Thailand, to attempt to find this new type of creature that AI has created that is meant to be AI's ticket to global domination.

This is where things start to irk me even more than they normally would.

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We are told that finding and destroying this objective is basically the most important thing on the minds of the United States military but instead of doing an all out assault they decide to invade this target using a small, roughly 20-person team. What could possibly go wrong?

So of course the team is defeated and only the Sarge manages to get to their intended target, which turns out to be an AI child who they say is a girl but I thought was a boy for the first half an hour that she is on screen.

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Now Sarge and 8-year old bald girl are being pursued by both the military that he was a part of as well as the group that they stole the kid from. This is because, I think, Joshua isn't really certain that the people he is working with are in the right on this one and even though he has been told to simply kill the kid, he refuses to do so.

They go through a constant barrage of completely implausible situations where they barely avoid capture because Joshua goes into "god mode" killing dozens of people and destroying robot after robot all while not ever getting hit by the constant gunfire heading in his direction. I'm sorry, but I need things to be more realistic than this.

In the end the movie just doesn't have any real twists and I could have guessed exactly what happened pretty much down to the letter. Sure, it is visually stunning, but this is simply a repackaging of dozens of other stories and it just kind of falls flat.

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The major actors in the movie are mostly good, with one exception being Colonel Howell who is played by Allison Janney - who I think is just terrible in this role.

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I like Allison Janney and think she is a very good actress. I do not find her to be a convincing high-ranking member of the military though. Perhaps there was some sort of DEI checklist and they needed a "girl boss" in there to get that particular tick-mark.

Another problem that I have with this film is that as is typical with a lot of films that are made on location in Thailand because of their unique scenery and attractive policies towards filmmaking costs to studios, they also almost always have some bad unintended consequences that come along with filming there. I don't know if it is required or because there is no other option as far as minor roles are concerned, but the Thai people that made it into the cast are absolutely terrible. This has ended up being the case in any film that I have ever seen that was filmed on location in Thailand.

Should I watch it?

Well, if you want some mindless entertainment the likes of which you would get with all films that are like this then I suppose it is ok to scratch that itch but overall this film's writing is just extremely typical and dare i say, dumb. Too many things happen in this movie that don't make any sense and therefore I was frustrated with it right from the start.

It is visually very good and I would imagine that a great deal of the film's $80 million budget was put into exactly that. I think they were so concerned with making the battles of the robots looking really realistic that they didn't bother to ensure that there was actually a coherent story built in as well. Some may enjoy this, but for most including fans of Sci-Fi I would say just go and watch Dune instead. They managed to make over $100 million globally at the box office but once you factor in various fees that go to cinemas and also advertising budget, this was likely something that lost 20th Century Studios tens of millions of dollars.

_{The only legal way to stream this film is through Hulu. It also can be bought or rented from a wide variety of other platforms}