Tag Archives: Gareth Edwards

Sep 27 2023
Leave a comment
Movie Reviews, Movies

Meet Your Maker

John David Washington stars in a sprawling sci-fi drama with a mega-message about AI

The Creator
Starring John David Washington, Allison Janey & Madeleine Yuna Voyles
Directed by Gareth Edwards
PG-13

In theaters Friday, Sept. 29

Concerned about robots crashing your car, taking your job, or maybe even ruling the world? In this epic-scale sci-fi war parable, we’re a few bleak decades beyond concern—it’s already happened, and the humans are fighting back against the rising tide of AI. Robots deliver babies, quell riots and work as cops and security guards. But maybe they also set off atomic bombs, and rumor has it they’re making plans to wipe us out completely…

So now, in 2065, the dogs of war are howling and robots are the enemy. When a brassy U.S. Army commander (Allison Janney) gets wind of a super-secret mega-weapon being developed by artificial intelligence, she sends a war-weary special-ops soldier (John David Washington) on a covert mission to find and destroy it, along with its creator.

This wildly ambitious, extravagantly staged dystopian drama depicts a grungy futurarama that doesn’t feel too far removed from the present, just considerably more battle-scarred and damaged by America’s war against the machines—fully mechanized humanoids as well as “simulants,” hybrids that look, walk and talk like humans, but with big, hollow holes through their heads.

And the search for the doomsday device yields some surprises—in the guise of a little simulant girl (Madeleine Yuna Voyles, making her acting debut).Does she hold the key to the world’s destruction, or its path to reconciliation?

Director Gareth Edwards, who also cowrote the original screenplay, also directed the romping, stomping Godzilla reboot (2014), created space-alien creepy-crawlies in Monsters (2010) and put his creative stamp on Rogue One: A Star War Story (2016). He likes big, expansive movie playing fields, and The Creator certainly gives him one. Visually and thematically, it’s a golly-whopper, filmed in awe-inspiring locations around the globe and tackling big mega-themes of war and peace, American imperialism, colonialism, slavery, freedom, terrorism, the weaponization of misinformation and the double-edge sword of technology.

And, oh, the sights you’ll see—robot soldiers, military mega-machines, and squatty, sprinting suicide-bomber bots, like exploding trash cans with arms and legs.

It’s also, at its core, a love story.

You’ll have to wait until the end to see where and how everything ends up, but in the meantime, just sit back and enjoy the show. There are echoes of other visionary movies, sure, from Tenent, District 9 and Blade Runner, to even Wall-E. But The Creator makes its own bold claim to high ground as a meaty, immersive sci-fi spectacle with bountiful bang…and a message about how the key to survival might be simply learning to get along…even when some of us act like we have holes in our heads. 

—Neil Pond

Tagged , , , , ,
May 23 2014
Leave a comment
Movie Reviews, Movies, Pop Culture

Hear Him Roar

The King of the Monsters makes a rompin’, stompin’ comeback

GODZILLA

Godzilla

Starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Brian Cranston and Elisabeth Olson

Directed by Gareth Edwards

PG-13, 123 min.

 

At an age when some folks are thinking about retirement, the world’s most famous mega-monster is enjoying a roaring comeback.

First introduced in a 1954 Japanese flick as a metaphor for the nuclear weapons that had leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II, Godzilla went on to become a worldwide pop-cultural phenomenon—and sometimes a parody. The gigantic lumbering lizard appeared in nearly 30 other movies, squared off against everyone from King Kong to Bambi, inspired a song by Blue Oyster Cult, shilled shoes for Nike, and received an MTV Lifetime Achievement Award.

If it sounds like show-business super-saturation turned the King of the Monsters—a title he’s held since the 1950s—into a softy and a sell-out, the latest movie returns him to his rockin’, rompin’, stompin’ roots.

_KF10258.dng

Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Elisabeth Olson

While this Godzilla has an all-new, modern setting and story, it still connects back to the tale’s 1950s Atomic Age roots. Opening in 1999 when a nuclear physicist (Brian Cranston) detects a seismic anomaly in the Philippines that turns out to be something much more ominous, it quickly jumps ahead to present-day San Francisco, the scientist’s now-grown son (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), and another Pacific rumble signaling something big and bad once again about to blow…

Godzilla fans may be somewhat disappointed that they have to wait an hour for the main attraction to appear. But director Gareth Edwards deftly plays out the build-up to the big guy. He develops his characters (although Elizabeth Olson, as the wife of Taylor-Johnson’s character, and Ken Wantanabe, a fine, pedigreed Japanese actor, are all but lost in the shuffle). We meet a couple of other creatures, the huge, gargoyle-like Mutos, and delve into a subplot of government conspiracy and cover-up.

GODZILLASo when Godzilla finally does show, we’re ready for the rumble. As monster-movie fans know, Big G’s not really a bad guy; in fact, he usually appears when some other monster gets seriously out of bounds. And when two—or more—mega-monsters are tussling, well, you can just expect some things—Tokyo, Las Vegas, San Francisco—to get a bit trampled in the process.

Godzilla is also an environmentalist, of sorts. As Wantanabe’s character explains, “Nature has an order, a power to restore balance. He is that power.”

GODZILLA

Edwards, cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, and the special effects team do a great job of integrating digital dazzle and live action, and several scenes have an almost trippy, hypnotic aura of amazement and awe, as soldiers parachute through battling behemoths into the wrecked cityscape below, or children on a school bus watch Godzilla rage alongside the Golden Gate Bridge.

Other monsters come and go. But a prehistoric creature that still has the atomic oomph to strut out of the ocean depths, make a 400-foot-tall, megaton statement, and set the world straight, well, there’s only one that comes to mind.

Godzilla is still da bomb.

—Neil Pond, American Profile Magazine

Tagged , , , , , , ,