POST-BURNOUT
The Creator
In an age where all blockbusters cost around 300 million dollars to get made, The Creator slides in way under that at around 80 million dollars; putting all those films to shame with the amount of quality on show with just a third of their budget. While also being a film about AI, it has more heart and humanity than those huge-budget black holes.
The Creator opens with a tactical attack from the Americans on the home of an undercover agent, Joshua, played ever so passionately by John David Washington. The raid results in his wife and unborn child being killed. Flash forward to five years later, where an aimless Joshua is recruited by the Americans to infiltrate New Asia, with the mission of destroying an extremely dangerous weapon that could turn the war between the Americans and the AI of New Asia. The sticking point for this seemingly nihilistic ex-soldier? They’ve found proof that his wife is still alive. So, he accepts and the film gets underway.
I’m ashamed to say that I did not view this on the biggest screen I possibly could. This film is screaming out to be viewed on an IMAX screen, due to Oren Soffer’s and Greig Fraser’s jaw-droppingly stunning cinematography. Being frugal in the way they shot the film by using a camera that is worth less than 4000 dollars, they frame the gorgeous landscape of Thailand in breathtaking ways. The whole world these characters inhabit is much bigger than them, and so is the mission. Joshua travels with a child called Alphie, who is a key part in winning the war, but the inner conflict of what Joshua should do comes out within these ultrawide shots of the cities and nature. The mission is bigger than his personal needs, yet he doesn’t agree. Through the use of the camera, the visual story is shown large and astoundingly, interweaving clever use of CGI in regard to the machines in the film. Once again, on an 80 million dollar budget, the team puts together much better special effects than those in 300 million dollar films. If there’s one thing Gareth Edwards can do, it’s scale. Godzilla and Rogue One both felt massive in comparison to the story they were trying to tell. Mostly through the use of the cinematography.
Just as clear as the vistas in the film, the world-building has even more depth than the photography. Gareth Edwards and Chris Weitz clearly have put a great deal of care into constructing this world. With the unique designs of the NOMAD, a flying missile launching aircraft, there’s clearly history to this world that shows it’s a finely conceived sci-fi setting. From a huge flying aircraft, all the way down to a small memory device that allows a person’s consciousness to be extracted. But as much of a breath of fresh air as the world is, the narrative isn’t as staggering. It plays it on the straight and narrow, with the main characters constantly being followed by an American general, checking in with her every now and then to see the progress she’s gained in tracking down an unreachable soldier. While the plot doesn’t offer much in terms of substance, it’s the relationship between John David Washington and Madeleine Yuna Voyles that gets you invested. Their relationship is akin to that of Joel and Ellie’s from The Last of Us, the adoptive father taking care of a young girl. But the formation of that relationship seems rushed to get it where it needs to be by the final act. While the story can be compared to that HBO show, the film as a whole can be compared to Avatar or District 9 in terms of its technical achievement. In fact, it does take the anti-US army stance that Avatar showcases as well, so it also shares that aspect; portraying the US as the true monsters by taking villages by storm and rolling huge tanks through the land of New Asia, mowing down anything in their way. All while leaning towards a more civil and optimistic approach for AI with them being the next step in evolution while wanting to co-exist with humans. One can at least hope this will be the case in the future.
Although it has extreme contrivances and moments of “What are the chances?”, sweeping under the rug some plot points that are barely brushed upon, the final result of this sci-fi epic can leave you a little emotional (especially with one last track during the credits from Hans Zimmer), something I certainly didn’t expect following a bit of a drag from the end of the first act to the halfway point. It’s only when it gets into the latter half of the movie that it comes alive like the AI it’s portraying.
The Exorcist: Believer
The subtitle of “Believer” is very appropriate because you really had to be one to have any faith that this film was in any shape or form going to be good. When you spend 400 million dollars on purchasing a property, you better be an advocate for it rather than just a believer. Why am I focusing on the subtitle more than the actual title of The Exorcist? Because the film puts in as little effort as possible to remind you that the star of The Exorcist is the actual exorcist. It seems that along the way, the writers had their left hand covering the first half of the title and with their right hand, just wrote the script based on the subtitle and hope (which is what a character talks about during a long and weak monologue towards the end of the movie).
How can one mismanage a beloved horror franchise so much? We need only look back to how David Gordon Green handled the Halloween IP, starting off pretty decently before plummeting into hoping that the title of Halloween Ends will stay true to its promise. If I was a huge fan of The Exorcist, I would’ve thrown all the holy water I could get my hands on to toss it in the direction of David Gordon Green in the hopes of keeping him away.
Leslie Odom Jr. plays Victor, a husband who is on a trip to Haiti with his pregnant wife. Visiting Haiti in 2010, you could probably guess what happens. The tragedy that was the earthquake hits, leaving Victor with the choice of saving his wife or unborn child. Cut to many years later, where Victor is raising his daughter, Angela, a curious teenager who just wants to talk to her mother again. She and her friend, Katherine, then run off into the forest to try and connect to her through some sort of ritual, only to end up missing for three days and found in a barn with no memory of what happened.
There are two major issues with The Exorcist: Believer. Firstly, it copies the original beat-for-beat while somehow missing out on a main aspect of it that made the original superb: The story of the priest. Instead, it focuses on the families and how they are affected by the possessions. Unlike in the original, where we cared for all the characters, the characters in this film get nothing more than a boohoo due to how underdeveloped and terribly written they are. Some characters, including the returning Ellen Burstyn, are nothing more than just a means for exposition, doing complete injustice to a character like Chris MacNeil. But due to it following so closely in the footsteps of the original film, it only gets half the story, due to omitting the priest. So, what do you do then when you have half of something? You double it to make it full. Double the possessions, ‘cause that’ll give it some level of intrigue. All it does is waste the time of the viewer more by still not giving anything in terms of substance, doubling down on the absent-minded, vomited excuse for horror.
Which leads me to my second point: It’s not scary. When the most frightful moment in a horror film is a jump scare of a snake slithering away from a rock, you know you’ve messed up. Compare it once again to The Exorcist. That film grosses you out, makes you uncomfortable and makes you horrified. A film from 50 years ago does a better job tenfold in scaring you than this. Why is that? To avoid the simple answer of the difference in the craft of filmmaking, I’ll state one choice that makes it so: The choice to reveal. There’s no mystery as to why the two girls get possessed. We’re shown exactly what happened to them. The fear of the unknown is so strong, yet they discard that for some milquetoast explanation for the audience to have injected into them.
The film wraps up with one of the dullest third acts I’ve seen in a horror film. William Friedkin would roll even more in his grave knowing that this was how an Exorcist film was going to conclude. Calling it lacklustre wouldn’t even begin to describe how much of a drag the last 30 minutes or so are. But just as it’s starting to reach the end, it hits you with a narrative twist, which is something that is so desperately needed. It’s just a real damn shame that the twist makes me lose respect for a character that was, up to this point, one of the reasons why my heavy eyes weren’t fully shutting. When a horror film has you wanting to close your eyes to doze off instead of closing them to hide from the scares, you know you’ve messed up.
Dale Kearney is the Film Editor for Post-Burnout, and is a passionate film enthusiast, boasting multiple years studying and working within film, with an intrigue in all genres of film, from horror to comedies to musicals.