Noisy, clunky, and conventional, Gareth Edwards’ The Creator is a disappointing folly. Yet it is also a worthy endeavor, attempting to wield boisterous blockbuster filmmaking in the service of an original, idea-driven story. It could have been great, if only it were good.
Originality is relative in mainstream cinema. It’s commendable that The Creator isn’t formally rooted in existing intellectual property; the screenplay, by Edwards and Chris Weitz, actually invents new characters and conceives its own quasi-apocalyptic future. It also exhibits minimal interest in jumpstarting a franchise, instead telling a complete and self-contained story. (Of course, Disney might have demanded otherwise had the film been commercially successful; in that regard, early box-office receipts indicate the studio has nothing to worry about.) At the same time, it borrows liberally (one might say shamelessly) from numerous science-fiction touchstones—most obviously Blade Runner and its sequel, 2049, but also the Terminator pictures, Star Wars, and plenty more. It’s a putatively original movie that nevertheless feels recycled, as though an algorithm spat out a vague approximation in response to the prompt, “new-age sci-fi entertainment.” Read More
Cory Finley won’t repeat himself. You couldn’t have blamed him, following his electrifying debut of Thoroughbreds, if he’d chosen to keep making razor-sharp thrillers his whole career. Instead he pivoted to docudrama with Bad Education, telling the fact-based story of a different sort of sociopath who preyed on people not with poison and knives but with smiles and scams. His new movie, Landscape with Invisible Hand, is also partially set in the classroom, but the malfeasance it chronicles is far stranger than garden-variety embezzlement. Early on, an English teacher informs his students that his “microscopic salary” has nevertheless been deemed too onerous for the new administration. He then strolls into the courtyard and, with minimal fanfare, puts a gun in his mouth and splatters his brains all over the concrete. Bad education, indeed.
It’s a jolting introduction, one which signals that the ensuing picture won’t conform to the sanitized standards of the young-adult playbook. But the oddness of Landscape with Invisible Hand is apparent even earlier. Its very first scene finds a young aspiring painter named Adam Campbell (Asante Blackk, from This Is Us) sketching a vista of the bright blue sky, only for his view to become clouded when a gigantic flying saucer rolls overhead. That might seem alarming, but Adam reacts with resigned annoyance—“Find someplace else to park!”—and we immediately realize that we’re watching a piece of dystopian fiction. But where many alien-invasion films traffic in terror and violence, this one is characterized by drudgery and disenchantment. Read More
[EDITOR’S NOTE: In 2003, long before MovieManifesto.com existed, I spent my summer as a 20-year-old college kid writing as many movie reviews as I could. My goal was to compile them all into a website, possibly hosted by Tripod or Geocities, which would surely impress all of the women in my dorm. That never happened—neither the compiling nor the impressing—but the reviews still exist. So, now that I am a wildly successful critic actually have a website, I’ll be publishing those reviews on the respective date of each movie’s 20th anniversary. Against my better judgment, these pieces remain unedited from their original form. I apologize for the quality of the writing; I am less remorseful about the character of my 20-year-old opinions.]
The most important quality found in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines is, coincidentally, also characteristic of the terrifying androids of the movie’s creation, and it is not intelligence but self-awareness. The first two Terminator films were astonishing in their innovation, offering spectacular action sequences while simultaneously employing dizzying storylines that toyed with the high-brow concepts of time-travel and artificial intelligence. James Cameron’s pictures radiated a daring but thoughtful ingenuity largely absent from today’s science-fiction genre (though not entirely so – see The Matrix). Now, rather than attempting to equal the historic heights of the franchise’s previous features, Terminator 3 has the humility not to try. Recognizing (for the most part) that it lacks the tools required for greatness, T3 settles for simply being enjoyable, and while it is surely deficient in the subtlety of Cameron’s works, it more than qualifies as absorbing entertainment. Read More
During a quiet moment in Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, a journalist played by Jeffrey Wright bristles when a television interviewer asks him why he’s written so frequently about food. “Never ask a man why,” he grumbles. Wright returns in Anderson’s new feature, the strange and beguiling Asteroid City (he plays a gruff military general with the onomatopoetic name of Grif Gibson), but his reporter’s distaste for contemplation has been left behind. Instead, the characters in this movie are constantly pondering questions of meaning and motive. Why does a photographer injure himself in a burst of frustration? Why does a brainy teenager constantly invite others to dare him to perform perilous stunts? Why does an alien suddenly appear in the middle of the desert? And above all: Why are we here?
“Here” is a matter of perspective in Asteroid City, which again finds Anderson indulging his penchant for nesting tales within tales, art within artifices. Simply telling an entertaining story is no longer sufficient for him, if it ever was; even Rushmore, his breakout second film released a quarter-century ago, found its amateur-playwright hero obsessed with substantiating his own legend. As it happens, that enterprising yearner was the screen debut of Jason Schwartzman, who stars here as Augie Steenbeck, a gifted photographer with four children, a recently deceased wife, and multiple types of baggage. Schwartzman, with his thin frame and bookish demeanor, is a natural fit for the famously fastidious Anderson (this is their eighth feature-length collaboration), but Augie is a departure, armed with a corncob pipe, a tanned complexion, and a masculine beard that’s so sharply manicured, you wonder if it’s a prosthesis. Read More
James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water is a movie full of miracles—floating mountains, underwater trees, resurrected warriors, talking whales—but perhaps the most miraculous thing about it is that it exists at all. With more than a decade spent in mysterious development, its hypothetical completion and release became something of an industry joke—the cinematic equivalent of hell freezing over. Yet defying the odds has long been Cameron’s forte; remember, Titanic was a colossal boondoggle until it became the biggest movie in the world, and the original Avatar was initially anticipated to be a misbegotten foray into motion-capture extravagance before it dethroned Titanic and attained box-office supremacy. (Until Star Wars: The Force Awakens came along, financial analysts resorted to qualifying new hits as setting records among movies “not directed by James Cameron.”) Now, 13 years later, the self-proclaimed king of the world has finally emerged from the oceanic depths with a sequel, and it’s both exactly what you expected and more than you could’ve imagined: repetitive, eye-popping, clunky, spectacular. Strictly speaking, The Way of Water may not be better than Avatar—which, to be clear, is fantastic—but there is certainly more of it.
In a sense, Cameron’s triumph here is limited, even as it’s also boundless. His reputation as a cinematic pioneer remains intact—he once again channels his instinctual pop savvy and his extraordinary grasp of technology to conjure images, environments, and sequences that have never before been glimpsed on screen—yet his innovation is still exclusively (if exquisitely) visual. From a storytelling standpoint, he prefers to mine familiar terrain. If Avatar was derivative of a dozen prior adventure epics (it’s Dances with Wolves! it’s Pocahontas! it’s FernGully!), The Way of Water is derivative of Avatar. Once again, the native Na’vi—those twelve-foot blue-skinned forest-dwellers who are indigenous to the bountiful planet of Pandora—find themselves under attack by marauding human invaders. There are minor tweaks—instead of installing a mining operation, the colonizers now seek to permanently inhabit Pandora in light of Earth’s impending ecological demise; rather than extracting the precious mineral “unobtanium,” venal poachers now hunt down giant sea beasts to secure a priceless enzyme that prevents people from aging—but the movie’s central conflict remains largely uncomplicated: The Na’vi and the humans are still at war, and the good guys—led by Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), the former Marine who defected after he fell in love with the beautiful and fearsome Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña)—are the ones in blue. Read More
