Love, Death & Robots: THE CREATOR

In a time of Hollywood spectacles that can conjure up incredible digital wizardry to populate all manner of fantasy worlds, it is dispiriting how often it feels like visual effects that can take us anywhere are so often used to take us to a generic nowhere. The same templates of gloopy magics and yawning vistas can be so indifferently framed and formulaically deployed that we might as well stay home and imagine for ourselves. Gareth Edwards films, however, are among the few of their blockbuster ilk suited to drop us into an invented world and almost immediately conjure a real sense of place and space. He shows us what it’s like to live there, placing his camera at a human level, letting it sweep back with a sense of proportionality with the elements in the frame. The people in his shots are dwarfed by the enormity and complexity of their lives interrupted by conflict on a fantastical scale. His scrappy indie debut Monsters and his American Godzilla alike let skyscraper-sized beings tower over his human figures to sell a sense of massive, threatening scale. Even his Star Wars spinoff Rogue One, a film of much-reported post-production compromise, has that visual element of believable dimension and size, never more than when an Imperial Walker or Death Star shakes the ground and blots out the sun. Here are movies that acknowledge the smallness of its human element as a way of not only heightening the believability and the danger of its sci-fi conceits, but to make the human spirit all the more indomitable in the face of it all.

And that’s what makes his latest, the totally involving widescreen stunner The Creator, such a fine work of speculative sci-fi action and thrill. It has ideas—a bit of pop jumble and genre play where imperious American military might is waging a war against third-world countries harboring banned Artificial Intelligence. And it has character—a wounded G.I. mourning his presumed-dead wife, holding out hope that one last mission might bring him back to her. And it has spectacle. Boy, does it have spectacle, wall-to-wall with the kind of visual effects that are so seamlessly convincing that I just completely bought into its every detail. It takes place in a future wherein artificial intelligence is embodied in humanoid robots that took the place of blue collar workers from factories to police forces. It was supposed to protect humans. For some reason that lead the machines to detonate a nuclear warhead in downtown Los Angeles. (Isn’t that always the way?) This kicks off the conflict we join in media res, with John David Washington’s grieving grunt reluctantly called into action to stop a top secret A.I. weapon from being unleashed by a rogue robotics expert who may or may not be related to his late wife (Gemma Chan). That human-sized sadness keeps the violent suspense sequences tied to something real that lets us believe the sci-fi trappings all the more.

Edwards makes propulsive proceedings in whirring and clacking military skulduggery of the hardest of hard sci-fi, a Vietnam-War-movie-inspired edge to heavily-armed squads helicoptering into humble rice paddies and Buddhist enclaves populated with robot refugees hiding from the omnipresent threat of American bombs. Into this grim quagmire drops a bundle of sentimentality—an adorable robot child who may be the one who can bring peace to this violent world. Edwards develops these ideas with a fine degree of complication, with characters torn between seeing A.I. creations as mere programming and those who say, even so, why must we be cruel? Villains Ralph Ineson and Alison Janney are perfectly nasty, brutal figures who want to kill at all costs. We see violent robots, but also ones who just want peace. Some have eerily emotive human eyes with whirring open gears behind their ears; others are blank-faced humanoid machines. Good thing they were all programmed to care. Washington’s a perfectly complicated figure, who slowly navigates the twists and turns until he settles on a feeling of moral righteousness. At every step along that way, the movie is so hard-charging and wide-eyed in detail that every walloping explosion and casually revealed tech enhances the absorbing world-design and the genuinely spectacular spectacle. And yet there’s that undertow of human soulfulness that finds these robots just might bring out the humanity in us—for worse, yes, but for better, too. This is genre filmmaking at a huge scale that for once lives up to its size and scope.

Dark Side: ROGUE ONE

Rogue One takes what could’ve been trivial noodling around in Star Wars lore and turns it into a proficient sci-fi action movie building to intimations of grand space operatic tragedy. It’s the second film made after creator George Lucas sold his remarkable galaxy to Disney, who have thus far been studious, respectful, and cautious custodians. Instead of an idiosyncratic vision from one artist’s mind, it’s a committee polishing up effective fan service. (At least the emphasis is on “effective.”) For promising new narrative future, this latest film has nothing on last year’s The Force Awakens, with its immediately vibrant new personalities and their lingering unresolved promise: the simmering twisted villain Kylo Ren and fresh Force heroine Rey. But in staging Star Wars-ian action, Rogue One is the more complete experience, with a beginning, middle, and end, a style more efficiently beholden to what came before without strain, and a tone more willing to fit the enormity of the sacrifice in this conflict. It’s overly engineered to be a gleaming widget, fitting seamlessly into the larger franchise plan instead of springing from a singular revelation. But at least this is still a film that dreams a little bigger than most blockbuster product, playing in a hugely enjoyable and intricately imagined fantastical universe with some sense of the painful struggle to resisting brutal fascism.

This entry tells a big, confident tale of a dark corner of the galactic conflict we’d long known about but never seen: the process by which the Rebel Alliance discovered the existence of the super-weapon Death Star and stole plans that’ll end up given by Princess Leia to R2-D2 in the 1977 original’s opening moments. A self-contained – despite the endless references and offshoots into other areas of franchise canon – and admirably scruffy combat heist film – think The Guns of Navarone…In Space!! – it has a motley diverse crew of insurgents striking back against the forces of an evil empire. Better symbols than characters, the underwritten rebels make decent action figures. Through swooping, crashing, clamorous adventure sequences across all manner of terrain – deserts, villages, space stations, jungles, and tropical beaches – they fight. Reluctant rebel Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) joins a spy (Diego Luna), a comic-relief combat robot (Alan Tudyk), an Imperial defector (Riz Ahmed), and two monk-like warriors (legendary Chinese action stars Donnie Yen and Wen Jiang bringing fun choreography). Their mission: contact her father (Mads Mikkelsen), an unhappy Imperial scientist who knows how to take the Death Star down.

This leads to varied action beats, like an ambush in a far-flung marketplace, a mountainous recon mission in a downpour, and a dizzying dogfight above a gleaming citadel. Along the way we learn a little more about the Rebellion than the earlier films had time to explore, with different factions of the Alliance debating battle plans and how to deal with extremists (like an under-used Forest Whitaker) in their midst. This mirrors the Empire’s side, as a commander (Ben Mendelsohn) fights off the life-and-death office politics of battle-station life. The script, pieced together by four credited contributors (Chris Weitz, Tony Gilroy, Gary Whitta, and John Knoll) juggles the movie’s hard-charging tough-minded warfare with hit-and-miss cameos, fun one-liners, smart retcons, terse exposition, and shorthand emotion. That’s a lot of balls to keep in the air – and the strain sometimes shows, especially in the final product’s clearly tinkered dropped connections and foreshortened beats – but there’s fun to be had in the tactile look and crisp pace. There’s even a welcome commitment to feeling the losses, culminating in a staggering shot of good characters embracing certain doom knowing they’ve done all they could to win some small hope for their cause.

Although this is a side story, a spin-off, it’s identifiably Star Wars in its concern with family dramas writ large in galactic conflict and a sense of spirituality amidst tactics, plus gearhead love of spaceships taking off and landing and fantasy anthropologist appreciation of interesting creatures and beasties. (We get all the old familiar X-Wings and TIE Fighters and fish-heads and tentacle-haired beings, as well as slick new designs and goofy new aliens, like a massive Force-sensitive slug used as a lie-detector test.) Plus it has a key insight to style the cast like they’re actors from the 70’s – shaggy hair, groovy mustaches – playing the characters. Though cinematographer Greig Fraser shot gorgeous location photography and ILM filled it up with top-of-the-line digital fakery, it has the scuffed retro-future look of the original trilogy, like a modern re-creation of a 70’s vision. The much-ballyhooed lived-in universe aesthetic of Lucas’s original trilogy still draws visual appeal because it’s so densely designed. It proves there’s still a sense you could find a fascinating new story around every corner in every frame of this series. It also proves once more director Gareth Edwards (of 2014’s great Godzilla) is a master popcorn image-maker (despite many eye-popping shots featured in trailers ending up on the cutting room floor).

The movie works best when it has soaring spectacle clued into the enormity of its scale – a shuttle dwarfed by a planet behind it, the orbiting Death Star creating a solar eclipse, a city destroyed by laser-blast sending enormous shockwaves ripping up surrounding terrain in waves, and massive space structures colliding in the way everyone has played with the toys has dreamed about. But even in the moments when it’s merely workmanlike – or overworked franchise caretaking – it has some of the appeal the old Expanded Universe paperbacks did, varying in quality but consistently a drip, drip, drip of more, more, more for fans. It has all the bells and whistles, the immediately identifiable sound effects, music cues, and visual hallmarks of the series, even if it now has an over-polished committee’s recreation of what was once a singular personal pulp remix. The best thrills – a sensational final battle like something out of N64’s Rogue Squadron video game – feature dazzling effects and action better staged than Abrams’. It may still be imitation Lucas – or maybe imitation Kershner at this point – but it’s sturdy and entertaining nonetheless.

King of the Monsters: GODZILLA

There’s a difference between filling a movie with effects and setpieces and constructing a movie with effects and setpieces. Gareth Edwards illustrates that difference with great excitement and skill in Godzilla, the latest attempt to recreate the beloved 60-year-old Japanese franchise on American shores. Edwards succeeds where others failed precisely because he takes great care in constructing his imagery – steady, dynamic, clear – and pacing – slow and steady, building to an impressive crescendo – to create a vivid sensation of awe. His Godzilla is awesome in the most literal sense of the word, an overpowering feeling of astonishment and terror. He manipulates his film and his audience with a methodical Spielbergian brio, gazing up at his tense scenarios and massive spectacle with trembling fear and wonder.

Edwards’ shoestring 2010 indie Monsters was a meandering mumbly relationship drama set against the backdrop of enormous beings wreaking havoc off-screen, but with it he proved his facility with effects. It ended with a scene of alien monsters so tenderly photographed as to border on the sublime. Now with a massive budget and a requirement to amp up the action, he finds a similar core of respect for the biology and ecology of Godzilla. He’s presented as an animal like any other where it counts, part of the natural order of things. We should fear him and respect him.

The beast’s 1954 debut created him out of the atomic anxieties of post-World War II Japan. This new iteration places him firmly in modern environmental worries. It begins with two scientists (Ken Watanabe and Sally Hawkins) surveying a dig in the Philippines that has uncovered incomprehensibly large fossils, and evidence a creature has dug its way out into the ocean. Meanwhile, distant tremors collapse a Japanese nuclear power plant where two more scientists (Bryan Cranston and Juliette Binoche) struggle to contain the radiation. In an echo of our modern climate change and superstorm anxieties, there’s a clear sense that humans are about to learn we don’t control nature. In fact, it is quite the opposite.

We jump ahead 15 years. Scientists continue to study the strange readings around the disaster area of the film’s opening. Cranston and his now-grown Navy officer son (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) explore the area and get caught up in the proceedings when an enormous beast breaks free, revealing itself to the world. In a nod to the franchise’s past, we learn that the military’s Cold-War-era nuclear tests in the Pacific were actually an attempt to put down the ancient beast they called Godzilla. They succeeded only in putting him in hibernation. Now he’s awake, hungry, and on the hunt for sustenance. It’s only a matter of time before he makes landfall in a few cities. The army, led by a tough general (David Strathairn), is in desperate pursuit, frantically cobbling together a plan to save the planet.

If you think all that sounds like it could be the generic plot description of many a monster movie, you’d be right. But where this new Godzilla really makes an impact is in its sensitivity in framing the disasters – the slam-bang monster battles, the peek-a-boo creature stalking, the crumbling buildings, rounds of ammunition, and billowing fireballs – against the consuming terror such a calamity would be to the people on the ground. It’s a monster movie stocked with flat characters run through a diversity of sequences of action and destruction as the low camera looks up at the creatures towering above causing their devastation. But because the people remain framed in the foreground, creating a sense of scale while stumbling away from unimaginable horror, gazing upwards in windswept confusion and terror, it matters.

So what if Taylor-Johnson, our lead, has an incredibly simple emotional through-line of needing to fight his way back to his health-care professional wife (Elizabeth Olsen) and adorable moppet (Carson Bolde) who are stranded in harm’s way? There’s no harm in such shameless emotional manipulation if it isn’t careless. This is also a movie that repeatedly puts barking dogs, small children, and the sick and elderly squarely in the path of chaos. But the movie seems to care about their plights, regards the destruction with a measure of real sorrow instead of mere CGI kick, and treats the events with the right mix of gravity and entertainment. It comes off less a series of jolts, more as a grand, relentless amusement park ride.

The movie is filled with complicated effects shots, pa-rum-pum-pum-pum booming brass on the score, and rattling sound design with deep bass footsteps that start as soft quakes until suddenly something is right on top of us. But it doesn’t add up to only a chaotic jumble of sensations. It’s a movie focused on process, troop movements, and monster behavior. Edwards, with screenwriter Max Borenstein, has shaped setpieces within this narrative to have peaks and valleys, tense escalations, teasing suspense, and dips of shaky, tenuous comfort. Take, for example, a great sequence set at an airport. The power goes out. There are explosions and commotion in the distance. The power comes back on, illuminating a monster towering over the runway. It’s a great tease, and Edwards takes amused pleasure in the construction of it while never losing sight of the scare. Like Spielberg’s Jaws or Jurassic Park or Ridley Scott’s Alien, Edwards knows how to get just as much entertainment out of not showing the monsters as revealing them to us in their entire enormity. No need to get the whole thing in the frame right away when one massive scaly flank striding past as people quake in their skyscrapers is even scarier. Even better, we aren't tired of the monster by the time the climax arrives.

This Godzilla is a full movie: big imagery telling a complete story. It’s not up to much beyond the sensations of its awesome creature feature spectacle. The stock characters remain flat. The ecological message doesn’t resonate or build as impactfully as it could. But it’s operating near the genre’s highest level. Edwards is working with impressive craftsmanship, visual intelligence, and moral weight that too few spectacle-wranglers can manage. Like the best popcorn entertainments of Spielberg, James Cameron, Guillermo del Toro, and Peter Jackson, he builds wonder with great patience, excitement, and skill.