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Jack B Nimble posted:It looks like the director wanted to have Neo Tokyo and also wanted to have Vietnam War, and didn't think too hard about smashing them together. The dense urban sprawl in places like Tokyo and Hong Kong that inspired the look of Neo Tokyo was contemporaneous with the Vietnam War. Or in other words, it's like that William Gibson quote: "the future is already here; it's just not evenly distributed." Jack B Nimble posted:Nomad hovers or flies slowly at helicopter height for days Nomad appears to orbit at an unrealistically low altitude, but it's never that close to the ground. Take that as artistic license. Nomad is a looming and terrifying threat, so it's depicted as one.
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Oct 10, 2023 18:12
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Just saw it this morning. Extremely mixed bag Positives: Beautifully shot Good score by Zimmer Great special effects Great production design Heartfelt scenes when it took its time Decent acting Strong anti-imperialist themes Negatives: Terrible pacing tries to cram way too much Nonsense plot logic at times Weird orientalist mishmash of Asians Eye-rolling selection of off-the-shelf songs This really should have been a limited series. A lot of overcrammed plot would’ve been more effective if given room to breathe Steve Yun fucked around with this message at 21:26 on Oct 10, 2023 |
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Oct 10, 2023 21:20
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I’m getting the impression from these cinema sins that many were expecting an entirely different film about the Thai Air Force jetting around in X-Wings or something. Which, in fairness, is a fun movie concept.
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Oct 10, 2023 23:11
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Steve Yun posted:Eye-rolling selection of off-the-shelf songs I did roll my eyes when Kid A came on but then I realized that's the equivalent of the inevitable Creedence drop in a Vietnam movie and I'm just old. At least it wasn't American Idiot.
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Oct 10, 2023 23:20
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Joementum posted:I did roll my eyes when Kid A came on but then I realized that's the equivalent of the inevitable Creedence drop in a Vietnam movie and I'm just old. I also rolled my eyes at Claire de Lune. I can’t remember where I heard them but it’s been popping up way too often in movies/trailers
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Oct 11, 2023 00:03
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Ofc goons get a movie with veronica ngo as a hot goth robot girlfriend but they're too wrapped up in tactical realism, rip
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Oct 11, 2023 04:21
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Joementum posted:I did roll my eyes when Kid A came on but then I realized that's the equivalent of the inevitable Creedence drop in a Vietnam movie and I'm just old. Yes! But that’s why it was dope. It’s exactly that.
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Oct 11, 2023 04:51
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Jack B Nimble posted:I could be overreacting to Nomad because I didn't like the movie; the point about how the real US military is a good one and I suppose I'm wrong about that. Even so, my real complaints are with the characters and the dialogue. I think "serviceable" is too charitable, they're paper thin and poorly. It's almost like the movie filmed "placeholder dialogue", they way movies have stand in VFX shots. Fair enough, there's definitely some awkward lines of exposition. But there's some awesome ones too, the heaven exchange between Alphie & Josh is  and was the biggest selling point for me from the promo stuff.Past blockbusters have inured me to goofy dialogue and "thin" characters  in Edwards oeuvre I'd say The Creator is on the same level as Rogue 1, with Godzilla being his most solid on this aspect.
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Oct 11, 2023 18:11
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My take on the movie is that it's like Rogue One, but dialed up to 11 - all that was good and bad about that film is here, but magnified to an even greater degree. Is it good? I don't know. The visuals are stunning, and I certainly enjoyed it because of that. But the characters and plot are badly lacking, and it's not a film I'd sit down to rewatch anytime soon. But I also feel like it could have been so much better had there been just a few extra scenes put into place - like maybe an extended introduction showing Joshua and Maya interacting together for more than twenty seconds, rather than constantly flashing back to what looks like a goddamn pregnancy photoshoot.
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Oct 11, 2023 19:31
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Also the degree to which this was trying to be a Vietnam movie was certainly impressive. Putting in Huey-esque whump whump whump roter noises for the American VTOL aircraft wasn't particularly subtle, but a nice touch. I also thought the LA nuke was supposed to be reminiscent of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, in that the enemy didn't actually do anything but it gets used as an excuse to kick off the war anyway... Though that did also introduced one of the movie's many, many Fridge Logic moments, "Why the hell didn't Joshua already know this when he was embedded with this group for long enough to marry their leader and get her pregnant?" 
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Oct 11, 2023 19:39
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Josh "knew", as in believed, that the toasting of LA that took his parents and limbs was a deliberate attack by AI. That's why he signed up in the first place, became a James Bond guy, infiltrating and seducing. But he caught real feelings, probably because he and Maya share similar trauma and a desire for a family. It is literally a pregnancy photoshoot, and one of his only cherished memories - Josh isn't a particularly smart or imaginative guy, like Max in Elysium. He's very capable but that's probably down to his training.
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Oct 11, 2023 19:56
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Blood Boils posted:Josh "knew", as in believed, that the toasting of LA that took his parents and limbs was a deliberate attack by AI. That's why he signed up in the first place, became a James Bond guy, infiltrating and seducing. Dude you don't have to defend every plot hole and bad writing choice in the movie.
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Oct 11, 2023 20:19
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Acebuckeye13 posted:Dude you don't have to defend every plot hole and bad writing choice in the movie. I don't have to do anything, I'm totally free to  But there simply aren't any plot holes in The Creator. Wish I could say the same about the realism complaints!
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Oct 11, 2023 21:12
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Acebuckeye13 posted:Dude you don't have to defend every plot hole and bad writing choice in the movie. The stuff he said is actually in the movie, the stuff about it being a Gulf of Tonkin incident is something you made up. Even if you assume that's true, that it is a gulf of Tonkin type incident, it's not a plot hole that they didn't tell their agent about it.
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Oct 11, 2023 21:17
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Seldom Posts posted:The stuff he said is actually in the movie, the stuff about it being a Gulf of Tonkin incident is something you made up. That's not - no, buddy, listen. In the film, Joshua is embedded as a deep cover agent with the AI insurgency. He has been with the group long enough that he has not only won over the heart of their leader, but he has married and she at least 8 months pregnant. The second-in-command of this group, Harun, knows Joshua and trusts him enough to leave him alone with both the group's leader and an American prisoner. Later in the film, once he's taken prisoner, Joshua about to be executed by Harun, who as an aside reveals that the nuclear detonation in LA that started this war was a human programming error and had nothing to do with AI. Maybe, in the five years since these two last saw each other, that knowledge about the LA nuke made its way to Harun. But on the face of it, it's a ridiculous reveal - you trusted this man that much as a part of your insurgency, but somehow the fact that the single biggest motivation for this entire war is a lie just never came up???? I compared it to the Gulf of Tonkin Incident because this movie so desperately wants to be a Vietnam War analogy, and like Tonkin the inciting incident didn't actually involve the supposed enemy, and was instead faults in our own technology - radar ghosts and coding errors. But with that being said, this movie fails spectacularly at making this clear to the audience. I was watching the movie and I caught it. My partner was right next to me and missed it. Apparently, you didn't catch it either! And I don't know about you, but "oh yeah the whole basis for this war is a lie" being a throwaway line that is easily missed is some really goddamn bad screenwriting.
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Oct 11, 2023 21:37
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Acebuckeye13 posted:That's not - no, buddy, listen. We also don't know that he's telling Joshua the truth, just like we don't know that it's necessarily a good outcome for humanity that Alfie survived at the end with that somewhat ambiguous shot. We do know that Joshua was sufficiently convinced by the end of the movie to actually get Alfie to the Nomad, essentially playing the same role for the AI as he was originally setup for at the start of the film but on humanity's side. I actually expected the whole movie that we were going to find out that his handler's story about her son being vivisected by AIs in Hawaii or whatever was a fake-out and then we never do, which I thought was interesting; if it was true, which the movie never remotely disproves, it's a complexity to the AI that we aren't witness to anywhere else; we only see what Joshua sees along his path to ultimately defeating humanity's lone edge in the war. ephori fucked around with this message at 22:06 on Oct 11, 2023 |
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Oct 11, 2023 22:02
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 Maybe they forgot to tell Joshua the war was started over a lie Or the general public Seems like the sort of thing you’d blast over every communication channel possible
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Oct 11, 2023 22:13
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Steve Yun posted:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War
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Oct 11, 2023 23:29
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In a more basic sense, posters in this very forum have historically had enormous difficulty handling these topics. Droid rights in films like Star Wars and 2001, AIs that go evil due to bad ideological programming like Skynet and Mother in Alien, etc.
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Oct 12, 2023 01:37
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It's not a plot hole that the movie leaves responsibility for LA ambiguous, though I think it does lean towards Harun being correct. Even if AI did it, the USA isn't justified in genociding robots who had nothing to do with it - and that's what the story is actually about!Steve Yun posted:
Who forgot? Harun's claim is probably the popular one in New Asia and among the robots, but why would the Yanks believe them? I'm not even sure Josh ever changes his mind about who is at fault, he just realizes (finally! Lol) that his step daughter is a real person and deserves a future.
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Oct 12, 2023 03:10
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Acebuckeye13 posted:But with that being said, this movie fails spectacularly at making this clear to the audience. I was watching the movie and I caught it. My partner was right next to me and missed it. Apparently, you didn't catch it either! And I don't know about you, but "oh yeah the whole basis for this war is a lie" being a throwaway line that is easily missed is some really goddamn bad screenwriting. An explicit line of dialog being missed by an audience member is not the screenwriting's fault.
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Oct 12, 2023 15:18
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Steve Yun posted:Seems like the sort of thing you’d blast over every communication channel possible This is one of those things that only happens, much less has consequences, in movies.
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Oct 12, 2023 15:23
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I think it’s also explicitly a throwaway because it doesn’t matter. Maybe Harun is lying, maybe he’s just bought in to AI propaganda, the US is still committing genocide on a population that cannot effectively fight back and explicitly wants to just be left alone. Feel free to replace the US with Israel and New Asia with Palestine for a real world example of this.
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Oct 12, 2023 16:34
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:This is one of those things that only happens, much less has consequences, in movies. It's true, the public reveal that the government has been lying about a war has never had major consequences PeterWeller posted:An explicit line of dialog being missed by an audience member is not the screenwriting's fault. Sure, to be fair, it's not just the screenwriting's fault. But let's look at a counter-example, one of the most famous reveals in all of film: "Luke, I am your Father." It comes at the climax of a major scene, and the protagonist is in significant danger - so the audience is paying the most attention. It's part of a back-and-forth conversation between Luke and Vader, so the line is built up to and it's not just exposition or a monologue that a distracted audience member might tune out. And Luke reacts to it, confirming how important this information is. Of course, the director also shares some of the credit. The music, backdrop, character acting, and dramatic camera angles all highten the delivery and importance of the line, absolutely driving it home that this is important information that majorly affects the protagonist, and completely reframes our understanding of the relationship between Luke and Vader. It is as shocking as it is iconic - a good reveal! Of course, I'm not going to say that John David Washington needed to start wailing to make this scene in The Creator work. But at the same time, the way this scene was done really showcases how badly this film fails its characters. This is the first time that Harun and Joshua have spoken to each other in years, two former friends and comrades-in-arms, both with a close relationship to Maya, who died because of Joshua's betrayal. Captured and potentially about to die, this is Joshua's lowest point in the film, while Harun is at a high point, having just secured the weapon that could win the war for the AI and having the opportunity to get revenge on the traitor that (effectively) killed his close friend and leader. So does he greet Joshua as a former comrade? A traitor? Do they reminisce? Emote in literally any way? Of course not! The conversation does nothing to establish any kind of relationship between these characters, Harun just delivers some exposition and then tries to kill Joshua before running off at the last minute, the only hesitation being "hmm should I kill him right now or wait until after I find out what's going on up top." The only thing the scene does for the film is deliver exposition, specifically that the LA nuke was the result of a coding error and AI does not in fact want to murder humanity, but does nothing to establish what our protagonist might actually think about this information (That, as I already mentioned, he reasonably should already know as a former member of this group!) And this is important information for Joshua - at his lowest point, with his last friend dead, he's being told one of the worst events of his life was the fault not of AI, but of his own government. He should at least have *some* reaction to it! But he takes it silently, and it does nothing to shift his ongoing character arc - he does change sides after this point, but that's explicitly due to his relationship with Alphie and trying to protect her rather than any expressed shift in motivation towards the government. For the characters and the audience, the line may as well not exist - which is a major screenwriting problem! This film has a lot going for it, and I liked aspects of it. But this scene highlights one of its biggest problems: the script mostly fails to develop the majority of the characters, and wastes what opportunities it has to do so. Acebuckeye13 fucked around with this message at 22:35 on Oct 12, 2023 |
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Oct 12, 2023 17:30
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Acebuckeye13 posted:It's true, the public reveal that the government has been lying about a war has never had major consequences True, but this is one piece of a larger puzzle in which the public is politically engaged. More recent occurrences have demonstrated why such a revelation on its own is meaningless.
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Oct 12, 2023 17:35
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:True, but this is one piece of a larger puzzle in which the public is politically engaged. More recent occurrences have demonstrated why such a revelation on its own is meaningless. To a degree, sure. The Bush administration lying about Iraq wasn't as damaging to the war effort because there was already pre-existing antipathy towards Iraq and many people struggled to distinguish between Al Qaeda and the insurgency groups that formed after the invasion (especially since while there might not have been much Al Qaeda in Iraq before the invasion, there certainly was some afterwards!) On the opposite end of the spectrum, if, say, Pearl Harbor had actually been a false flag or if the World Trade Center just collapsed on its own, that information becoming widespread probably would have affected the public's support for those wars. (Not that we really even know how much the public supports the war against AI, though - there's like one scene with an American civilian that has meaningful dialogue in the whole movie) All that said, I can absolutely buy that "The LA nuke was actually an oopsie" would not, by itself, end the war - the juggernaut of the war machine has gone on too long and has too much momentum for that to happen. But the reveal should have at least some effect in the film, certainly on Joshua's character, and that it doesn't makes it feel particularly pointless.
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Oct 12, 2023 17:50
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The Americans as such are represented primarily as conscienceless consumers, Joshua is met at a pool party, at the beginning, we see grinning suburbanites enjoying the fruits of robot labor. I was actually referring to Chelsea Manning, Ed Snowden and Julian Assange's revelations, for what it's worth, to show you how far beyond the Pentagon Papers we are.
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Oct 12, 2023 18:09
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Acebuckeye13 posted:It's true, the public reveal that the government has been lying about a war has never had major consequences I don't mean this as an insult to you, but it's pretty funny that one of the most famous lines in film is so often misquoted. It's not "Luke, I am your father"; it's "No. I am your father." I get what you're saying here, but I think the comparison is unwarranted. It's neither a throw away line, nor a major "reveal" like the moment in ESB. It's rather a confirmation of a suspicion that's been brewing since the beginning of the film. It doesn't need make Joshua distrustful of the government; he already is after the government blew his cover and blew up his wife. It doesn't need to change Joshua's feelings towards the AI; that's already happening as you point out in his relationship with Alphie. You wonder why the line doesn't affect Joshua emotionally, but you already said he's at his lowest point, so how could it bring him any lower?
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Oct 13, 2023 17:31
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Acebuckeye13 posted:The only thing the scene does for the film is deliver exposition, specifically that the LA nuke was the result of a coding error and AI does not in fact want to murder humanity, but does nothing to establish what our protagonist might actually think about this information Rhetorical Question 1: How and why does Watanabe's character know how the nuke-bot was coded? The simple answer is that the cause of the nuclear strike has already been investigated and is already 'common knowledge'. There is no big revelation plot twist because both characters already know that this is the case. There's nothing secret to reveal. Rhetorical Question 2: If Joshua's deal is that he believes the robots are p-zombies, then why does blame them for the nuke? The simple answer is that he blames them for not stopping the nuke - being unable to control themselves, blindly enacting the programming while offering up "fake" alarm, fear and contrition. See the differing interpretations of HAL's "it can only be attributable to human error". The easy (mis)interpretation is that HAL mechanically seeks to eliminate flawed humanity, while the actual horror for HAL is that he himself has developed a humanlike psychology and is consequently placed under immediate threat of death.
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Oct 13, 2023 19:13
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PeterWeller posted:I don't mean this as an insult to you, but it's pretty funny that one of the most famous lines in film is so often misquoted. It's not "Luke, I am your father"; it's "No. I am your father." I didn't see it as some big reveal. Whether it's true or not (and not every line of dialogue is Literally True Exposition), if you got captured by ISIS or whatever and one of them told you Bush did 9/11 you wouldn't be like oh whoa drat my whole worldview is turned upside down.
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Oct 13, 2023 19:24
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I mean yeah either person could have bad information and misinformation is rampant these days but I feel like in a film if you bring up the concept that the major inciting action of the present situation may in fact not be what we were told it is, and that action goes to the potential motives of the entire conflict (ie did the AI actually have a reason for nuking LA, or did they do it at all, or what), the audience is not wrong to expect something to be done with that. It's not a fatal flaw but it's weird that it's just never brought up again even as the film turns our sympathies to the AI side.
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Oct 13, 2023 19:29
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Maxwell Lord posted:I mean yeah either person could have bad information and misinformation is rampant these days but I feel like in a film if you bring up the concept that the major inciting action of the present situation may in fact not be what we were told it is, […] the audience is not wrong to expect something to be done with that. There isn’t any new information. The bombing was done by robots, unprovoked, exactly as described. Long before you get to the dialogue, it should be incredibly obvious that - whoever did the bombing and whatever their motivation - it wasn’t these particular robots. By the end of the film we have distinct groups of robot monks, (self-)programmed to never kill, etc. So, the dialogue simply clarifies that no robots were really responsible at all, as the bombing was an accidental result of the American military’s attempt to weaponize the AIs.
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Oct 13, 2023 21:14
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i think the film pretty clearly understands that one guy going 'IT WAS A CODING ERROR' wouldn't do anything to stop anything. the nuke was so long ago that it simply doesn't matter. if someone found out tomorrow that 9/11 was definitely an inside job or something, do you really think it'd amount to anything? would it suddenly undo everything that happened in the wake? that line didn't prove that AI didn't want to murder humanity, the whole film up until that point has shown how AI/robots/simulants are perfectly happy to live alongside with humans. it's practically ancient history. it was a melancholic conversation between two former comrades.
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Oct 14, 2023 11:10
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Insane timing for the "We are not at war with New Asia, just the elements within" thing to come out like, the same week Israel pops off a thousand bombs into Gaza "at Hamas".
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Oct 18, 2023 03:27
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VROOM VROOM posted:did they keep the shot where somebody CGed over footage of the Beirut port explosion Holy poo poo lmao it’s wild that you say that. I forgot how to spoiler but yes. This is the final big explosion in the movie.
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Oct 18, 2023 06:18
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Acebuckeye13 posted:That's not - no, buddy, listen. SHE SECRETLY MADE THE BABY AND HE DIDNT EVEN NOTICE THATS A VERY BIG PLOT HOLE HES JUST A BIG DUMMY AND THE STORY IS BAD dude
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Oct 18, 2023 08:27
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killaer posted:Holy poo poo lmao it’s wild that you say that. I forgot how to spoiler but yes. This is the final big explosion in the movie. No it isn't? That was just a temp shot that got into the trailer, it wasn't in the film itself.
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Oct 18, 2023 11:09
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killaer posted:Holy poo poo lmao it’s wild that you say that. I forgot how to spoiler but yes. This is the final big explosion in the movie. The final big explosion is Nomad blowing apart in orbit Blood Boils fucked around with this message at 21:49 on Oct 18, 2023 |
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Oct 18, 2023 21:46
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killaer posted:SHE SECRETLY MADE THE BABY AND HE DIDNT EVEN NOTICE THATS A VERY BIG PLOT HOLE HES JUST A BIG DUMMY AND THE STORY IS BAD dude A character keeping a secret from another character is not a plot hole. That's just plot. Josh is a selfish dummy, yes.
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Oct 18, 2023 21:57
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There wouldn’t be movies if every fact was available to every character
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Oct 18, 2023 22:21
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