The Creator

Let’s start with the positives. 

It looks good. 

Allison Janney makes a meal out of her part and made me once again wish that Hollywood would find a solid role for her somewhere. 

Country music singer Sturgill Simpson continues his streak of popping up in interesting places. Between this, his role in Killers of the Flower Moon, and  fellow country music singer Jason Isbell’s large part in KOTF it was quite the year for twangy guys who write killer songs. 

However, and we’ve got lots of spoilers here, I have a list of all the times The Creator made me throw up my hands in frustration at the proceedings. 

1. Not the filmmakers fault (they usually don’t control the marketing) but everyone who watched one trailer for this knew John David Washington and the kid end up hanging out together in this movie. That rendered the first 30 minutes of this thing inert. I kept yelling at the screen, “get on with it already.”

Sorry, but it’s hard to watch a half dozen scenes setting up a reveal and a payoff you have seen in a trailer a dozen times before the flick came out.

2. The movie has a spiritual golden robot child who can change the world. Did we also have to give her dialogue like this? 

What do you want Alphie?
For all robots to be free.
We don’t have that in the fridge. How about ice cream?

2. When the American sci fi tanks roll on a Vietnam village. I don’t care if America is cast as the bad guy in a war movie. Great War movies can do it both ways. But making all the robots Asian in yet another allegory for Vietnam, a conflict so old that it only immediately affected people who are now either dead or near death, seems past cliche. 

3. Then they go to Robot Tibet. 

4. At one point as the main characters are escaping the evil Americans they get on a commercial flight to the moon colonies. I’m pretty sure that at no juncture in this movie did anyone set up moon colonies. It’s so entirely out of left field that I chortled once again. 

5. While trying to go to the moon colonies a robot asks our heroes, What is the purpose of your visit?” 
To which our Robot Child Savior replies, “For Freedom.” 

6.  Everytime Allison Janney is awesome and I realize she could have been in a better film.

7. Ok without explaining the reasons there is a final kiss in this movie with our protagonist and his lady love. It’s supposed to be a sweet moment. 

But if you are gonna give your main guy a kiss before he heroically blows up why don’t you get him out of his clunky space suit first?

Poor John David Washington has his head surrounded by bulky plastic and is trying to have the final tender moment of his life and I’m screaming at the screen, “Take that junk off first!” 

Geez.

8. It also upsets me that this is all we have for Ken Watanabe to do. 

9. There are several types of robots in this movie including fully robot looking robots, half human looking robots and at least one fully human looking robot. 

Ok, so why the differences? The movie doesn’t answer that question. My guess is they look the way they look because the creators of The Creator thought it looked cool. That ain’t enough guys. 

10. They do a gag with a bomb that attaches itself to someone and blows up a few seconds later twice. Then they do two other slow timer bomb things. Including a gag where a dog returns it to the bad guys. 

On the one hand one of those is needed to set up something important at the end. But the other two? 

This movie is overflowing with bombs.