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DokBrowne [ 7.5 ]
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So this Gareth Edwards movie is about two people traveling cautiously through an exotic danger zone, it's about a scrappy noble rebel resistance force, it's about the American military fighting an uphill battle against what they perceive as an invading non-human threat, there's something incredibly important to the rebels' destiny that they have to protect through enemy lines and deliver, and there's a notion about people sacrificing themselves to bomb a giant oppressive half-nuclear weapon-deploying/half-bad guy-HQ sky ship (a "death star", you might even call it) into oblivion? Waaaaiiit a minute...this is like if Spielberg made a WWII drama about a dinosaur-riding Peter Pan fighting a Nazi shark with daddy issues piloting a spaceship.
And that's not even adding the 150 other iconic sci-fi movies, shows and stories this movie is pieced together from, or the prevalency of robo-civil rights fiction in recent times (the indie sci-fi movie realm has a lot of these). Savior epics, one-last-jobs, the parent with a dead kid who suddenly gets another one to take care of, feverish odysseys through war-torn Asian countrysides, it's a vast lexicon of tropes, truly dizzying in volume and familiarity all woven into the fabric of a single film.
There are a million and one legitimate complaints to log against "The Creator" - my own personal pet peeve is that it never engages the can robots feel? debate, it just takes for granted that we should have empathy for them, which is a loaded topic and naturally I'm inclined to agree that we should leave them alone if all they want is to co-exist peacefully but both sides have valid points (aren't their feelings merely programmed and performative? But also in the chance that they genuinely believe they have feelings isn't that just as valid as a real person?) that would be worth discussions this movie never wants to have; it's just another metaphor for prejudice. You might say this topic has already been covered really well in things like that "Matter of Perspective" Data episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" but I think we need more modern takes on it that factor in newer wrinkles. Not here, though. (also how come the A.I. kid can sometimes wield massive control of her environments to help them out of jams but sometimes just gets scooped up by bad guys and kidnapped in a truck like a helpless child?)
And yet, all the world-building! The vision! The scope! The unique settings! The tactility and weight! The lived-in futurism! The enduring imagery! The humanism (so to speak)! The shrewd entertainer skills that Edwards brings to bear on a movie that should be a musty mausoleum of over-used ideas yet somehow feels alive and true in a pre-digital, pre-everything's-been-done-before way. Even as I rolled my eyes at various parts and wished for smarter philosophy underneath the story, I still had a terrific experience with it as a whole. Emotional, imaginative, grand and vivid, even though it might be the most thoroughly formulaic movie of all time.
*props for the audacity of an American movie by a major American studio to directly cast Americans as a whole as the big villain. Wretched yankee scum!
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| Weighted Rating | : 6.8 |
| No. Ratings | : 1 | |
| No. Reviews | : 1 | |
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