Flasz On Film

If there is one word I could reliably use to describe Gareth Edwards’ directorial work, it is ambition. Maybe scratch that. Let’s use two words instead. I think this is key because it’s not just ambition that is important to what I’m trying to articulate, but a specific denomination thereof. His movies are therefore characterized as works of Spielbergian ambition where grandeur of the spectacle meets tactile human drama localized to exist within an otherwise vast universe of the filmmaker’s imagination.  

So, take this description into a conversation about Edwards’ newest film, The Creator, which is a sprawling piece of original science fiction set in the distant (or maybe not too distant? If I play my cards right, I might live to see 2065, who knows…) future where Artificial Intelligence developed to serve and protect humanity turned against its creators, dropped a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles and, thus a war on AI began. Locally, who we follow is Joshua (John David Washington), a grizzled former CIA agent who is brought back into the fold to help the US government find a secret location where a mysterious character called Nimrata (aka The Creator in Nepalese, as we are told in the opening title card) is working on a superweapon capable of turning the tide of the war, a weapon which soon is revealed to be a child (Madeleine Yuna Voiles) – a human-AI hybrid that grows like us and learns like them. Thus, we are scotch-taped to Joshua’s shoulder as he embarks on a journey to protect this miraculous little girl with incredible superpowers, initially because he believes she may know the whereabouts of his long-lost wife Maya (Gemma Chan), and eventually because it turns out to be the morally right thing to do.  

This journey – an impressively sketched out visual marvel of a globetrotting adventure – is both a triumph and a victim of that Spielbergian ambition I referred to just two paragraphs above. The scale of its worldbuilding together with the visual acumen and attention to detail deployed in execution of it are quite simply unparalleled in today’s climate, especially when we keep in mind that The Creator is a product of a wholly original vision. This is a movie that cannot benefit from decades-worth of comic book precedence embedded in the viewer’s subconscious understanding of the world beneath the story. It’s not a Marvel movie. It’s not a book adaptation. It wasn’t conceived as a manga. All it is built on is its creator’s (sic!) imagination and, thus, the worldbuilding required to immerse the viewer in the story must be executed within the confines of the movie itself.  

This presents a difficult challenge for any filmmaker trying to turn their story into a successful piece of cinematic entertainment. To better explain the nature of this conundrum it might be useful to compare the act of watching a movie to the act of participating in a car ride. The car ride itself is a journey. We didn’t climb into the vehicle to just be in it, but we have chosen a place where we’d like to arrive at some point. Now, we can take the highway and just blast through the required distance, or we can take the scenic route. The B-roads. This is where we are presented with an opportunity to either treat those B-roads exactly as we would have treated the highway and just laser-focus on the road ahead, floor it and get to our destination as soon as possible, or we can slow down and take in the view.  

I suppose it goes without saying that if we make a conscious decision to take the B-roads and not the highway, we should at least try to look at what’s around us. Which means, we need to slow down and make it physically possible to even notice what’s around us as we cover the required distance to get to our pre-agreed destination. To briefly come back to the world of the film, if we decide to make worldbuilding an important part of the journey through our story, we must give the recipient of that story some time to exist in the world, take in the surroundings and immerse themselves in what we have spent so much time thinking about as we were coming up with the narrative. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that The Creator is paced quite slowly, which stands in stark contrast to how franchise blockbusters are delivered, blitzing from A to B and all through the alphabet at breakneck pace… because they don’t need to ever slow down. They take us on journeys through landscapes we are familiar with.  

However, this is where The Creator perhaps falters because it is not enough to just slow down. You have to slow down just enough to let the viewer enjoy the view out the window, but you still need to drive fast enough to make sure the car ride as a process does not become a dragging bore. And if you slow down too much, even what you see outside your window may slowly become stale. To counteract this process, you can make the car ride a bit more fun and the way to do that is to make your co-passengers – the characters in the story – fun to be around. Therefore, a movie like The Creator can be paced slow enough to let you marinade in the world Gareth Edwards concocted in his mind and it won’t be an issue as long as the characters you are following are interesting enough, mysterious enough or cool enough. Or all three and then some more.  

Unfortunately, I don’t think Edwards’ movie finds this fine balance and falls short (but only just) of making sure that the car ride is paced fast enough for us to care about the destination, slow enough to care about the world and populated with passengers that are interesting enough to blunt the possibility of us getting bored before we reach the final destination. Consequently, as the movie goes on, the worldbuilding with its Blomkamp-esque attempt at cohesively welding spectacular special effects into the real world populated by actors becomes a bit of a drag and – occasionally – stops making any logical sense. And when that happens – even if only temporarily – the suspension of disbelief dissipates and the contract between the film and the viewer is broken. We end up ejected from the magical state of not noticing the seams or blatant narrative flaws and effectively become forced to focus on them instead.  

Thus, The Creator surrenders its intellectual slant, such as it was, and maybe allows us to notice that it was never that smart to begin with. Now, I have stated repeatedly in my numerous rants about dumb movies that I do not mind one bit that a film makes no sense, so long as it allows me to enjoy the journey in other ways or if it simply plods along fast enough for me not to be able to dwell on its stupidities for longer than half a second. If you can distract me with your spectacle, your drama, your characterizations, your worldbuilding or any combination of them, you still stand a good chance of producing a piece of moviemaking I could find entertaining enough to recommend to other fellow human beings.  

And this is where I am truly struggling because on one hand I seriously appreciate the Spielbergian ambition baked into this movie. I absolutely adore the attention to detail, the visual originality, the aesthetic connections to anime, and even dramatic nods to such classics as Paper Moon, Apocalypse Now, Rain Man or Blade Runner. But at the same time I can clearly see that Gareth Edwards either couldn’t decide where to shift his centre of gravity or he wasn’t sure which way he should go to service the story most effectively. At the end of the day, The Creator would never succeed as a piece of meditative science-fiction akin to Ad Astra or Blade Runner 2049 because it doesn’t allow its own narrative enough latitude to foster a genuinely original thematic conversation. It’s a collection of postcard clichés which would look convincing enough if we never had enough time to examine each one of them up close. At the same time, its central drama reliant on the chemistry between Joshua and Alfie either lacks a spark or enough room to let us acclimate to their chemistry. Because we still have a plot to follow. We still have a destination to get to.  

Therefore, I must peg The Creator as a flawed opus of modern science fiction that I shall still revisit on many occasions, even if I remain fully cognizant of the fact it’s far from perfect. It doesn’t fly by the way Blomkamp’s District 9 did. It’s not as smart as Akira. It’s not as immersive as Edwards’ own debut Monsters. Instead, it is a product that belongs together with Blomkamp’s later movies like Elysium and Chappie, or with the troubled Alita.  

It’s one of those movies I am happy to know they exist because we just don’t get to see too many original grassroots science fiction pieces like it. And I will gladly own it, display it on my shelf and revisit every now and again despite its flaws, just like I occasionally put on the remake of Ghost in the Shell or the aforementioned Chappie. But especially seeing how I loved every other movie Edwards made before it, I am somewhat disappointed that he couldn’t deliver. Because deep down I know he could have. I think there is a version of The Creator that finds a way to tune its properties in such a way to make sure the pace is fast enough to get us there before we start picking the movie apart, slow enough to enjoy the journey and interesting enough not to mind being in the car with John David Washington, Gareth Edwards and everyone else. But this isn’t it.