The Beautiful, Empty World Of 'The Creator'
#243: "The Creator," "Reptile," "Serendipity," "Last Vegas"
Edition 243:
Hey movie lovers!
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This week: AI is taking over the world…and the silver screen (see what I did there?). We’re talking about the John David Washington-fronted sci-fi epic The Creator. Then I concede that Netflix may be doing some things right in its film division, before handing out some really easy watching streamers for your weekend. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke prepare for the end of the world.
The Creator
Here’s a movie premise that needs no introduction — the year is 2055 and AI has taken over the world.
Immediately I buy it. I’m in. I want to know everything about this world, where sentient AI apparently set off a nuke in Los Angeles and America went to war to eradicate them, but in “New Asia” humans and machines live in harmony. It’s very Blade Runner, obviously. What if…gasp…the robots are more human than the actual humans?
This near-future is rendered beautifully by Gareth Edwards, the visual stylist behind Godzilla and Rouge One which, despite their flaws, both contain some iconic imagery. The mix of post-apocolyptic Asian village aesthetics with hyper-futuristic AI robots is really distinctive, and honestly just really cool. It seems as if every element of the world is considered, and in each frame there are little flourishes and signs of life that I’d love to learn more about.
It reminds me a lot of a 2021 movie starring Hugh Jackman called Reminiscence. Its world-building was similarly excellent, imagining a near-future Miami where the streets are flooded and the sun is so hot during the day that everyone kind of hibernates and then lives during the nights, with rich people living up in dry skyscrapers and poor people boating around under neon lights. The movie was gorgeous. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s because…the movie sucks. While the world it imagined was infinitely interesting, the story it decided to tell within that world fell flat on its face.
I feel kind of similarly about The Creator. Our story centers on an undercover American spy — John David Washington, who is all-but doing an impression of his father Denzel here — tasked with finding a mysterious AI superweapon which just so happens to be housed in the body of a small AI child, whose cuteness and humanness (honestly, mostly the cuteness) cause Washington’s character to go AWOL.
Why is it that every sci-fi story feels the need for an innocent little kid to protect, and daddy issues to uncover? Surely there are better plotlines to follow than babysitting. Alas, the big bad American brutes (among them Allison Janney…what?) will commit any number of heinous war crimes to destroy the innocent, just-want-to-be-loved robots, who gain our sympathy the moment Ken Watanabe’s face appears on one of them.
There’s not a whole lot more to the movie. It’s cat and mouse, hide and seek while AI child and fath…I mean protector bond. It’s not necessarily bad stuff it’s just very stale and obvious in an environment that feels so fresh and exciting. I could see how hardcore sci-fi heads might love this movie because the vibes are immaculate. But in my mind story is still king, and this one is lacking.
Washington is at an interesting point in his career, because he’s obviously a leading man in big time movies and yet he doesn’t so obviously fit the categorization of movie star. His recent big star turns — Amsterdam, Malcolm & Marie, TeneT — were all somewhere between flop and failure. He’s not bad as actor or leading man, and here he does a good enough job carrying this movie, but it’s difficult to differentiate his appeal at this point beyond just discount Denzel.
It’s doubly disappointing for me to knock a wholly original movie made at this scale. This is exactly the kind of thing I feel like I’m asking for all year, the trailer shows off the beautiful shots while Aerosmith’s “Dream On” blares, and I start thinking about the implications of a movie like this being a hit. Then it comes out with a whimper at the box office, critics kinda go “meh,” then it’s forgotten just as quickly.
I had said this movie marked the beginning of #MovieSZN. I was wrong. That’s a tragedy.
Something New
Reptile (Netflix): For the past handful of years, it was a safe assumption to label all Netflix originals as ill-conceived, half-baked, or in many cases seemingly AI-generated. Movies that were supposed to be awesome were just okay, okay-seeming movies were bad, and bad-seeming movies were unwatchably atrocious.
But listen, I like to think of myself as an open-minded guy. When new evidence comes to light, I’m humble enough to reconsider my beliefs. So I can’t believe I’m actually saying this, but is it possible that Netflix might be figuring out how to make good movies? Lately, mixed in with their usual crap (Heart of Stone, The Out-laws), there’s been some reason for optimism — They Cloned Tyrone, Love at First Sight and now Reptile, a tense detective thriller that’s every bit as good and as interesting as anything the genre has put out in several years.
Benicio Del Toro’s lead performance might be one of my favorite acting jobs of the entire year as a detective leading a murder investigation in a chummy little town in Maine, where secrets hide around every corner. Justin Timberlake plays the boyfriend of the victim, and Alicia Silverstone (…as if!) plays Del Toro’s wife, but they’re a far less interesting part of the story than the fraternity-esque police force with a handful of actors whose names you don’t know but faces you recognize, all of whom so perfectly embody the bro-code ethos that makes solving the crime so challenging.
Like many great noirs — and to be clear, this movie doesn’t quite reach greatness, but does a fair impersonation — the story peels back in layers, with a handful of revelations that spin the story off in a new direction. It’s kind of slowly paced, more of an old school noir feel, but my mind was fully engaged trying to put together the clues. I also enjoyed another twist on the genre: detectives are usually grumpy, hard-drinking obsessives (think Humphrey Bogart) whose personal lives are either non-existent or a mess, but here Del Toro is seen with some semblance of a work-life balance and interests outside of work…until the movie cleverly twists that into the plot. Netflix, I see you! Keep this up!!
Something Old
Serendipity (2001, Max): As with all cutesy rom-coms of a certain era, this movie is a 90-minute billboard for New York City, from Saks Fifth Avenue to Central Park skating to Brooklyn brownstones. A young John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale meet by chance while holiday shopping, then rather than exchange information they let chance decide if they’re meant to be together.
It’s a preposterous, pre-social media thing to do, but the movie is able to pay it off thanks to the fantastic main character energy of NYC and the charm of supporting characters like Jeremy Piven, Eugene Levy and Molly Shannon. Because the leads don’t really spend much time together on screen, it’s not a traditional rom-com, but it goes to great lengths to slather on the romance and by the end you feel all the warm and fuzzies you’re supposed to. In terms of fun little streaming movies of its kind, this is definitely better than the stuff that’s coming out these days.
Something to Stream
Last Vegas (Netflix): There’s pretty much only one joke played repeatedly throughout this movie — old guys making fun of being old. But it just so happens those old guys are Robert De Niro (in his comedies era!), Michael Douglas, Morgan Freeman and Kevin Kline, so this becomes an imminently watchable comedy about four lifelong friends who reunite in Las Vegas for a weekend of rediscovering their youth. I’m not going to oversell it but I turned it on this week with the intention of dipping out early and couldn’t put it down. Sharing in case you’re looking for this very particular brand of easy-watching entertainment.
Trailer Watch: Leave the World Behind
That first season of “Mr. Robot” was one of those eye-opening, transformative TV shows for me, right at the time in my life when I started seeing shows and movies as an artform instead of just mindless entertainment. I’ve had huge respect for showrunner Sam Esmail ever since, a filmmaker who defined what an auteur could be in the television space by writing and directing every episode of the latter seasons of “Mr. Robot” and the Julia Roberts-fronted Amazon show “Homecoming.”
All of that is to say I’m pumped to see Esmail take a crack at a feature film, re-teaming with Roberts as well as Ethan Hawke, Mahershala Ali, Kevin Bacon and Myha'la Herrold in this angsty end-of-the-world disaster movie based on a best-selling book. I think this will be a great test for my newfound confidence in Netflix when it drops on October 25!