The Creator

[Jedigoat]

Who's seen it?  I saw it last night.  A lot of hype behind this in my social media feeds but there's also a lot of people saying it's super derivative and meh, etc.  Derivative it might be, but it's nice to finally get a chance to see an original IP on the big screen.  The previews may present it as some epic, large scale sci-fi extravaganza, but it's really not.  It feels very much the opposite of that.  Some really great scenes in this but overall, it kinda feels a bit empty to me.  A little incomplete.  I really enjoyed the ending though.

[Tank]

I wanted to love it more than I did, and I wanted it to do well. Mid-budget original sci-fi IP winning would have been so good for business. But sadly, I also found it super derivative with dialogue the was on the nose.

If you've watched more than a few anime, it was easy to know what was going to happen next. It felt to me like I was watching somebody else play a video game, you'd have a scene of on the nose dialogue where an objective would be stated, then you'd have a few levels of action and enemy clearing. 

All that said it looked amazing and it wasn't as aggressively bad as a lot of movies are. I was actually all aboard (despite it being "mid" as my son said) until the final act. Then it suddenly went WAY too fast. As if they realized they had another hour but the studio said "you got 15 minutes." I really couldn't get my head around the space station in the end. Its location and scale seemed to change scene by scene. You literally see it floating just above LA looking like a giant space ship, then it's in orbit, then its crashing over Eastern Asia, all the while targeting things across the world.

Gareth Edwards is definitely going to be in director jail now.

[Jedigoat]

20 hours ago, Tank said:

I wanted to love it more than I did, and I wanted it to do well. Mid-budget original sci-fi IP winning would have been so good for business. But sadly, I also found it super derivative with dialogue the was on the nose.

If you've watched more than a few anime, it was easy to know what was going to happen next. It felt to me like I was watching somebody else play a video game, you'd have a scene of on the nose dialogue where an objective would be stated, then you'd have a few levels of action and enemy clearing. 

All that said it looked amazing and it wasn't as aggressively bad as a lot of movies are. I was actually all aboard (despite it being "mid" as my son said) until the final act. Then it suddenly went WAY too fast. As if they realized they had another hour but the studio said "you got 15 minutes." I really couldn't get my head around the space station in the end. Its location and scale seemed to change scene by scene. You literally see it floating just above LA looking like a giant space ship, then it's in orbit, then its crashing over Eastern Asia, all the while targeting things across the world.

Gareth Edwards is definitely going to be in director jail now.

Director jail, eh?  Really?  I guess I was hoping that this movie would be a pivot point for studios and directors, showing how to make larger scale film on smaller budgets.....as long as it makes them some money.  I know The Creator isn't doing big business but did the industry really expect it to?  

[Tank]

The industry is IP obsessed. The fact this got made at all is almost a miracle. Gareth Edwards is a guy who comes from the VFX world, so he knows how to get his money's with out of FX and does a lot of shots himself to keep the budgets down. A lot of people, myself included, wanted exactly what you're saying. But sadly, it hasn't performed well enough for that.

And yeah, director jail is for real. Given that his last movie was Rogue One, and Tony Gilroy was hired to come in and reshoot/direct/edit to save it, and Godzilla wasn't much of a game-changer, I don't know if we'll see him doing more big pictures for awhile. This is basically the same thing that happen with Neil Blompkamp. District 9 was a game-changer, but everything he did after it bombed.