magnusmax

Last night, I sat down in an auditorium brimming with a crowd of just three audience members, to (probably) Australia's first showing of Gareth Edward's esteemed fourth directorial effort. The sorry turnout forebodes a weekend of pain at the box office for The Creator. I wish I could say it was undeserved.

Going in, I sustained high hopes for what the critics had teased as a surprisingly emotional, existentially reflexive, and visually stunning work of cinema. The Creator is none of these things. The story and the characters who form it, suffer from an artificiality that makes every turn (there are no twists) feel contrived and forced. To the extent that attention is cast upon deeper, richer content, such as the human soul, human consciousness, and AI's value and place in the world, the film propagates a message as subversive as it is unconvincing - that machines are potentially equal in worth to human beings. The look and feel is oftentimes drab without intentionality, resulting more in mediocrity than in any kind of atmosphere that supports the story and the journey of the characters. In fact, characters who have never given the audience any reason to like them (and never will), and who bear little or no meaningful or consistent relationship with one another, traverse a world without traction, grounding, or realism - a supposedly hostile, novel land, which nonetheless holds little promise or threat - in a low-stakes torpor of brutality severed from sensibility through an induced torpor that desensitizes the viewer (deliberately or accidentally?) to life and death.

Combine this with a number of copy-and-paste cliches, presented unironically in aggressive bluntness (What? The antagonists are really those pesky white American military generals who happily overlook wartime atrocities carried out in the murky uncertainty of Asian territory in favour of attaining whatever self-seeking objectives of the day happen to motivate them... how revolutionary! I bet it took a good bit of thought to design that plotline.) The various inspirations from classic historical and filmographic locations are evident - but in place of using them as enrichment for a story already imbued with depth of its own, The Creator merely flags these tropes and leaves them at the door. Through lazy writing that denies its characters oxygen, these tropes become not enrichment, but baggage.

The Creator, then, is misguided philosophically, emotionally, and motivationally. With a good story, Edwards' eye for effects and staging could provide an invaluable asset, as it did in the much-celebrated Rogue One. The world-building, from the robotic farmers tending their rice paddies, to the impressive, Star Wars pastiche, NOMAD, all that pertains to VFX excels, reminding everyone of Edwards' unrivalled masterfulness in the field. However, all of the nifty innovations in the world cannot rescue a story whose mediocrity neither uplifts nor oppresses.

Edwards should stick to what he does best, and leave directing for those with a better grasp on what it is that makes us human.

Suzume is another pretty and imaginative film from director Makoto Shinkai, whose name has rapidly risen to the rank of household name for many anime devotees around the world.

Certainly it was not awful, and it's worth a watch. There's a very funny sequence involving some out-of-body magicking that had us laughing out loud.

Let's not be unrealistic, though. Sadly, the reviewers are correct: Suzume is by no means Shinkai's most original project to date. After the initial novelty of a few magical gimmicks wears off, we are left with a starkly modern (and consequently starkly unattractive) world - Japan's major cities, inhabited by armies of iPhone-wielding drones. Realistic, but miserable. Commonplace.

I think we watch Spirited Away because it spirits us away from what we know. Suzume feels all-too-familiar - and the glitz of an alternate dimension featuring Shinkai-staple pinky-blue skies studded with stars, is not enough to prevent us drowning in the empty mediocrity of a world of shallow characters and soul-crushingly ordinary glass temples (skyscrapers) we are all too well acquainted with already.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Meet the Parents, Heavyweights, all great films and this one fits right in. It's actually not meant to be a serious film. It's totally whacky and amusing. Had to put a review in here to even things out a little bit because obviously too many people who don't like comedy wrote reviews and lowered the rating.