DICKS: THE MUSICAL

Directing: B-
Acting: B+
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+
Music: B-

Dicks: The Musical is definitely the filthiest rip-off of The Parent Trap you’ll ever see. Strangely, even as it goes further with certain taboos than any other movie ever has—this is very much the point—I’m sort of disappointed it wasn’t any filthier. Get this: there aren’t any actual dicks in this movie. No genuine full-frontal nudity whatsoever! This feels like false advertising. If it weren’t for the endless amount of times someone says “fuck,” this movie might have gotten a PG-13 rating. Okay, probably not.

One of the many meta gags about this movie is that the “Dicks” of the title actually refers to the personalities of the two leads, Craig and Trevor (Josh Sharp an Aaron Jackson, on whose original 2015 UCB show this is based; they are also co-writers of the script). We’re told in opening title cards how “brave” it is that these two gay actors are playing straight characters—who are, you guessed it, both dicks. They display such a camp level of narcissism and misogyny that it circles all the way back around to delightful.

There was a moment early on in Dicks: The Musical when I was finding it so genuinely hilarious, I actually thought to myself: Is this the 21st century’s answer to AIRPLANE? Alas. If only.

As Craig and Trevor discover they are “identical twins” (even though the two actors don’t look anything alike aside from being a cuple of brown haired White guys) and hatch a plan to trick their estranged and bonkers parents (Megan Mullaly and Nathan Lane, milking this movie for all the moderate value that it’s worth), the potential is there. There’s a scene with Nathan Lane and his two janky puppet “Sewer Boys” that had me laughing so hard I was in tears. You’ll never look at a bag of ham the same way again.

And then there’s Megan Thee Stallion, cast as the CEO of the company both Craig and Trevor also discover they work for, and are tied for the top sellers of parts for autonomous vacuum cleaners. Getting such a wildly random name into this movie is fun, right? She even gets a pretty elaborate song and dance number. The problem is that her song is merely slightly amusing, and doesn’t elicit any genuine laughs, and in that failure kind of stops the momentum of bonkers hilarity dead in its tracks. And although there are certainly genuinely funny moments after that, Dicks: The Musical never fully recovers.

Megan Thee Stallion’s song isn’t even the only issue, musically—it’s just the best example, of how a movie like this works far better if the music is as exceptional as its humor. The Book of Mormon, for example, has much greater success at this. (To be fair, The Book of Mormon has never been adapted to film, and there’s no guarantee that it would adapt well.)

Dicks the Musical also features a pointedly flamboyant Bowen Yang as God, with mixed but fun results. I won’t spoil the specific depravity “God” winds up fully endorsing, which I have mixed feelings about, even as irreverent comedy. I don’t even necessarily take issue with it as a comic idea, but rather the manner in which it’s presented here. It’s simply not as funny as Josh Sharp and Aaron Jackson want us to think it is.

Megan Mullaly’s vagina falling off and running away, though? We don’t even see that happen, we get to watch Aaron Jackson as Trevor describing it to his brother—and it’s fucking hilarious. And that’s the thing: I laughed a lot at Dicks: The Musical. Unfortunately, like way too many other comedies, it’s front-loaded with the funniest gags, which means it starts to lose steam about halfway through. And this movie is all of 86 minutes long.

The performers across the board are clearly having a great time, and that alone keeps the filthy depravity a fun time, punctuated with some great outtakes during the end credits. It just moves from a movie that feels wildly underrated at first, to one where you consider its mixed reviews and think: that tracks.

You won’t see any actual dicks but you’ll see some guys singing about them.

Overall: B

MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH MARRIAGE

Directing: B+
Acting: B
Writing: A-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+
Animation: B+
Music: B

According to writer-director Signe Baumane, at a festival screening of My Love Affair with Marriage, a scientist in the audience stood up and declared it the most scientifically accurate film they had ever seen. What a ringing endorsement! From a solitary voice that by definition does not represent scientific consensus! As reported by the filmmaker!

I don’t mean to sound flippant. At the post-screening Q&A I was at, hearing this bit of information, in the moment, I was genuinely impressed. And: for the most part, the surprisingly extensive bits about the physiology and biology behind behaviors and emotions related to romance—in an animated musical—comes across as plausibly accurate. It even features “Biology” as an incredibly charming animated character, narrating these many interludes, a cell serving as the character’s face. The only part of this that I bumped on was a reference to dueling amounts of hormones during fetal development as explanation for a man turning out to be a cross dresser, which struck me as a gross oversimplifcation, of science that is not even fully settled.

To be fair, how to handle such a concept in the context of My Love Affair with Marriage is tricky. Baumane, a Latvian-born filmmaker who is using animation to tell a largely autobiographical story here, actually did marry a Swedish man (here voiced by Matthew Modine) who revealed he was a cross-dresser after they separated—and, this was her second marriage.

And it really should be not only noted, but stressed: this is a story about much more than that, though it’s a vital chapter in the story of the central character here, Zelma (Dagmara Dominczyk). We follow Zelma not just from birth, but conception (or Inception, as the “Prologue” is titled), learn how many of her behaviors and peronality traits are traced back genetically, even to the childhood traumas of her parents. We see that she is born on the Soviet island of Sakhalin, just north of Japan; and soon thereafter moves all the way west to Latvia, where she gets a rude awakening from classmates in regards to gender norms and expectations.

We watch Zelma grow up, learn through culture to lose her confidence as a woman, gain some of it back by selling art, and then eventually get emotionally blackmailed, manipulated and abused by her first husband (Cameron Monaghan). Through all of it, we switch over to “Biology” using neural pathways and chemical reactions to explain Zelma’s decisions and behaviors, a completely objective backdrop for otherwise subjective ideas and choices. What’s happening to our brain when we fall in love? When we have sex? When we kiss? When we get depressed? When we get defensive? When we fall out of love, or fall into resentments? “Biology,” the character (Michele Pawk), may not cover absolutely everything, but she’s memorably comprehensive.

This tension between biological imperatives and erratic behaviors is what really makes the movie, My Love Affair with Marriage, for me. Baumane says she spent a year studying the science, and it really pays off.

The animation style is peculiar, with what often look like photo backdrops onto which are superimposed the animated characters, themselves animated at a low number of frames per minute. I must admit that I wasn’t much into it at first, but I got past it quickly—and the Biology interludes are especially well animated, sort of like animated films from high school health class with nuanced intellectualization. I was not quite as taken with the musical interludes, most of them sung by a trio of “Mythology Sirens,” a few of which are catchy. The best song, with lyrics by Signe Baumane and performed by Storm Large, plays over the end credits.

In the end, I was very taken with My Love Affair with Marriage—and I wish I could tell you how or where to see it. I happened to see a one-time encore showing after it was at the Seattle International Film Festival six months ago; I’m not aware of it having gotten a wide release domestically. My fervent hope is that it winds up on a streamer sooner than later, for more people to discover. This film is the epitome of specificity translating to universal relatability.

Biology illustrates how feelings and behaviors are rooted in things more complex than they might seem.

Overall: B+

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B

I have conflicting feelings about Killers of the Flower Moon. One of the burning questions about it is whether or not it’s a “white savior” movie, and, without contextualization, it absolutely is not. This is a film that easily outclasses any film like The Blind Side or Green Book, and does not deserve to be in the same conversation with them. On the other hand, on a much more meta level, there is an argument to be made that such elements creep in: this is, after all, made by an 80-year-old White man, speaking for the Osage Nation and thereby decentering their very specific point of view.

It’s easy to go back and forth on matters of this sort. This film is telling a vital, American story that has never been told on this scale with this scope of distribution, after all, and a director like Martin Scorsese is one of few with the clout to make it happen. Does that make it right that no Indigenous director has been given the resources to tell such a story to as many people? Of course not.

There is some debate regarding the central character, Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), and the moral ambiguity with which he is presented and characterized. He has returned home from World War I, and taken into family business by his uncle, William Hale (Robert De Niro), by whom he is easily manipulated. With relative ease, Hale puts Burkhart into the path of an Osage woman named Mollie (a stupendous Lily Gladstone), who is one of the local Native American tribe who struck it rich by discovering oil wells on their reservation land. And this is Hale’s clearly stated intention from the start: to marry his family members to Osage women and thus secure land rights.

Ernest Burkhart, for his part, is a bit o a simpleton, incapable of much in the way of critical thinking. Over time, it becomes less and less clear how much we as viewers are expected to sympathize with him. Is it possible for him genuinely to love his wife, while at the same time taking an active part in the murder of both her people and her siblings? This is where much of the debate and discourse about Killers of the Flower Moon is going, and I am not convinced that was what Scorsese wanted to happen. The more important question regarding Ernest’s capacity for romantic compartmentalization (a concept he would not likely understand) is this: does it matter? The man’s a fucking murderer.

Making Ernest the primary protagonist of this film was a choice. Making him seemingly morally ambiguous, perhaps even vaguely morally conflicted, were also choices. The reasons for these choices may be the central mystery of this film, but to its credit, Killers of the Flower Moon does not let any of its White characters off the hook—least of all Ernest. It could be said that it makes sense for Scorsese to have centered these violent, White men because that is the story of both American history and Scorsese’s own filmography. That still leaves us begging the question as to whether Scorsese was the right choice for telling this story. If nothing else, much like the 1921 Tulsa race massacre—which gets a couple of mentions here—the Osage Nation “Reign of Terror” between 1918 and 1931 are not known to many, but are a deeply important part of American history. Now a lot more people will learn about this tragic chain of events.

How do you characterize how much you “like” a film like this? I find myself comparing it to last year’s The Fabelmans, which was also a late-career project by an iconic director, and which I loved. As cinema, it succeeds to a much greater degree than Killers of the Flower Moon, but it also does as entertainment. Killers of the Flower Moon wants to be more art than entertainment, but can’t escape also being the latter, its subject matter notwithstanding. It’s almost shockingly lacking in the cinematic flair of your typical Martin Scorsese film, which makes sense if he wants you to be paying more attention to all this shit that happened, than to any technical filmmaking achievements.

And on that level, Killers of the Flower Moon really works. This film is already famous for its runtime, at three hours and 26 minutes—although to be fair, that’s still three minutes shorter than The Irishman (which I felt was overrated, as is this film, albeit to a lesser degree). For a film that is pointedly not “propulsive,” with a consistently measured pacing, it’s genuinely impressive that it never lulls or feels tedious. It does not feel three and a half hours long. And the events depicted here are something we should all be sitting with for a while.

The issue, if indeed there is one, is in the point of view offered within that runtime. I happen to agree with the idea that it would be better for the entire story to be told from Mollie’s perspective as opposed to Ernest’s. There’s no reason this couldn’t have been done, skillfully, even with Martin Scorsese as Director. He could have gotten input from Indigeous and particularly Osage people (which, incidentally, he did), and maybe at least hired an Indigenous person to cowrite the script with him—instead, he wrote it with Eric Roth, another White guy (who cowrote both Forrest Gump and Dune, so at least he’s got range, I guess). The final result is at times uneven, as when Ernest is reading a line from a book aloud to say, “Can you find the wolves in this picture?” I thought, That’s a little on the nose.

I’m always interested in the reactions of critics and audiences who are part of the people being depicted onscreen, and in this case reactions have ranged from ambivalent to fawning. I would call Killers of the Flower Moon a solid yet imperfect work of cinema, a genuine achievement, but for now at least, even I fall in the ambivalent category. Subsequent viewings may very well crystalize my feelings, but at least this movie, even at this length, warrants multiple viewings.

Overall: B+

STRANGE WAY OF LIFE / THE HUMAN VOICE

Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B

Here’s another development in the evolving state of the American film industry: right now, you can go see film shorts in the theater, where the shorts are the draw themselves as opposed to being shown ahead of another film—and they aren’t even part of the annual theatrical release of Oscar-nominated shorts, which typically happens in February. We are still months away from Oscar nominations. Although it is arguably relevant that this new Pedro Almodóvar film, Strange Way of Life, will almost certainly be among the five live-action shorts nominated for the next Academy Awards.

There are several reasons why this is a film you can, right now, book a ticket to see in a theater—this one, 31-minute film being the headliner, the title on the ticket. My theory is that the biggest reason would be that there just aren’t enough other releases to choose from, thanks to a constantly changing stew of changing viewing habits in a post-pandemic world (changes that were beginning before it but which the pandemic hastened), and the industry impact of dual strikes by the WGA and SAG-AFTRA in the past few months. People weren’t going to movies in droves already (Barbenheimer being the exception that proves the rule), and then studios started postponing high-profile release dates due to their stars being unable to promote the work.

Presumably, that left some holes in the showtime schedule at your local multiplex. Enter Almodóvar, who at the very least has a niche but devoted audience (this includes me). It doesn’t hurt that Strange Way of Life is a Western starring Pedro Pascal and Ethan Hawke as past lovers hooking up one last time. Or that the film opens with a young singer-guitarist crooning through one of the most beautiful pair of lips I have ever seen.

Evidently in an effort to make the outing worth the time and effort, this presentation is followed by another Almodóvar live-action short featuring a movie star, this one made in 2020 and starring Tilda Swinton: The Human Voice. This one is 30 minutes long, so, taken together, this “movie-going” outing has a runtime of a whopping 61 minutes, not counting the trailers at the top.

The thing is, it’s very difficult for film shorts to stack up to the best of feature filmmaking, even if it’s made by the likes of Pedro Almodóvar. I enjoyed both of this films, but I can’t say I would call them vital viewing. They were just an option at the movies by a writer-director I love.

Strange Way of Life certainly has the novelty of beloved stars playing gay characters, setting aside the now-longstanding discussion of straight actors taking gay parts away from gay actors. Maybe it makes a difference that Almodóvar himself is gay? Pascal and Hawke are lovely, believable, and nuanced. The story here is about much more than just old lovers reconnecting; it’s about why they are reconnecting: Silva’s son is suspected of killing Jake’s daughter-in-law, and Silva has returned in an effort to either defend or protect his family. This complicates matters between these two men in a way I’d be far more interested in seeing play out in a feature-length film, and I found the way this one ends to be strangely unresolved and abrupt.

There is also one flashback, to Silva and Jake’s younger, hornier days, and it features one of the oddest, and most manic, makeout sessions I have ever seen on film. First they are drinking wine literally getting poured onto their faces until they are drinking it out of each other’s mouths, and then they are jamming hands down the fronts of each other’s pants in ways that, let’s just say, don’t feel natural. It was very incongruous to the rest of the story.

Which is to say: both of these short films have their strengths and weaknesses. The Human Voice is mostly just Tilda Swinton, alone, in a home I suppose we are meant to accept as hers even though we see onscreen that it is built like a live stage set. She spends about eighty percent of the time talking to a recently-parted lover on the phone, gradually revealing herself to be mentally unstable, and we never hear the voice on the other line. I wasn’t super keen on this half-hour profile of a woman who is increasingly hysterical, if not sociopathic. But, Tilda Swinton’s performance is incredible, a solo tour de force. This film might be worth watching for her performance alone.

Taken together, Strange Way of Life and The Human Voice are imperfect but solid pieces, worth the time at the very least for Almodóvar fans.

A pleasant enough half hour to pass

Overall: B

THE ROYAL HOTEL

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-

I can’t decide how I feel about The Royal Hotel. My initial reaction, particularly to the ending, was that the supposed payoff was unearned. The more I think about it, though, the more I think: but, was it?

There was a David Mamet stage play, and then a film, about thirty years ago called Oleanna. In the first half, we witness a series of conversations between an older, male professor and a younger woman student. In the second half, she accuses him of rape, and you are forced to re-evaluate everything you thought you saw in the first half. It was a very polarizing story, particularly down gender lines. I can still remember reading about the arguments it elicited among audience members. in Rogert Ebert’s 1994 film review.

That script was clearly designed to make audiences second-guess their own opinions, and to a degree, even their own eyes and ears. I’m not convinced that was the intention of director and co-writer Kitty Green with The Royal Hotel, and yet I find myself having that sort of response to it. I can imagine very different, and very gendered responses to it.

The trouble with me is, I exist somewhere in the middle. And when I start to go down the road of criticism in my mind, I start to wonder whether I am falling into the trap of victim blaming.

Kitty Green, who also happens to be Australian, has set this film in the Australian outback. Two young “work travel program” backpackers, both women, need to make some money quickly, so they take a gig bartending in a mining town many hours’ drive away from any city. When they arrive, there are two young women from the UK staying and working there, but they soon move on. The pub they work at has one other woman employee, an Aboriginal woman. The entire time we spend with these ladies, we see maybe two other women patrons of the bar. The point is, women here are vastly outnumbered by men.

And Green definitely traffics in nuance and subtlety. The men that Hanna (Julia Garner) and Liv (Jessica Henwick) contend with, mostly pub regulars, display a variety of demeanors. But, the more you think about it, the more you realize that they’re displaying varying degrees of toxic masculinity. So much of The Royal Hotel moves at a labored pace, with seemingly very little actually happening, it takes a while to register.

My own gender expression has no bearing on the fact that I cannot truly fathom what it’s like to exist in the world as a woman—whether it’s in the United States, or Canada (where these two characters are from), or Australia. Of course, the Outback is a reliable source for putting these sorts of cultural ideas into sharp relief. In any case, I could very well be off base when my initial reaction is to think that the way Hanna and Liv ultimately respond to these men is wildly disproportionate. The more I consider it, the more it occurs to me that there are plenty of women who suffer a sort of million tiny cuts, and these are a couple of characters who reach their breaking point.

They don’t reach it at the same time, mind you. Hanna is uncomfortable in this working-class, male-dominated environment from the first night. Liv spends a lot of time giving virtually all the men the benefit of the doubt, even a particular one who is clearly a creep. She’s convinced they all just have cultural differences.

A lot of The Royal Hotel is spent worrying about what harm might come to Hanna and Liv. Nothing as bad as feared ever really happens, and yet, it’s in this space of degrees where the real food for thought lies. There is a bit of violence that occurs in one instance, and again: it’s easy to imagine the interpretation of the degree to which it was an “accident” being split down gender lines. I think this is where Kitty Green knows exactly what she’s doing.

It’s whether it works, particularly as a movie, that I can’t quite decide. Also, no discussion about misogyny or toxic masculinity is complete without consideration of race, and that is every bit as much the case in Australia as any other bastion of colonialism around the world. An Aboriginal man appears in one scene, driving a delivery truck. The owner of the pub, Billy, still owes him three months back pay. Elements of racism, both with this character and with the woman who works the pub kitchen, are only hinted at. But, to a large degree, so is toxic masculinity.

Billy is played by Hugo Weaving, bearded and much aged since his heyday in the Matrix movies. I didn’t even recognize him. There are so many men with speaking parts in this film, I find myself wondering how much they truly understood the nuances of the script. The setting was very remote, and so was the set: filming occurred in the town of Yatina, South Australia, with a population of about thirty people. It’s roughly 150 miles north of Adelaide, where, presumably, a lot of the local actors were found. Billy is a drunk, and is predictably late paying Hanna and Liv, who over time are left to fend for themselves tending bar to rowdy locals.

I find myself struggling with this movie. I wanted more to happen in it, to justify the telling of the story. The plot pivots significantly at the end, in a way that may make some think of it as a “women’s revenge” movie. It’s not at all that simple. That’s an element in its favor, but, while I suspect I would gain greater insight with repeat viewing, I just didn’t find the overall story compelling enough to think that kind of investment would be worth it.

The Rorschach Hotel: you tell me what you see.

Overall: B

DUMB MONEY

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B-
Editing: B

I’m honestly surprised no one has titled a movie Dumb Money before now. This movie itself informs us that “dumb money” refers to investments made by individual, non-institutional investors. Here that money is represented, first and foremost, by Keith Gill, a regular guy who inspired an investment revolution aimed at hitting hedge fund managers where it hurts.

This is the GameStop story you likely remember from the news—from literally just two years ago. It’s not often that a true story gets optioned, greenlit, produced and released to theaters with that kind of turnaround time. The height of the GameStop buying frenzy occurred in March 2021, and this film’s script writers were hired the following May.

What curious timing this film has. On the one hand, it tells the story incredibly soon after it actually happened—in movie production time, two years is not a lot. On the other hand, early 2021 was also the height of the covid pandemic, with most people working from home unless they were essential workers, and right now that feels like an entire world away.

It’s worth noting that more people are seen walking around in face masks in Dumb Money than any other wide release film I can think of. The way director Craig Gillespie (I, Tonya) represents mask-wearing in this movie is strange inconsistent and sometimes outright odd. Of course, any director wants his actors’ faces to be visible wherever possible, so for instance, we see hospital staff removing masks when only two people are in a room together, even though at the time hospital staff would be masking around anyone at all. A bar waitress removes her mask to gawk at Keith Gill’s stock portfolio on his phone. A GameStop store manager is constantly telling his employee to wear his mask properly, which is actually right and correct, and yet we are meant to think of the manager as a nag and the employee as the one to root for. We get it, the whole mask thing was annoying. Does it make sense to subtly villainize the people insisting on doing the right thing to actually save lives?

Dumb Money isn’t so much concerned with the details of a pandemic, however—only with the “little people” who stuck it to the man while one was happening. It’s relevant that many companies raked on record profits at the expense of essential workers, and kind of odd that no one in this movie ever mentions it.

Still, the whole business, in this particular context, is undeniably fascinating, and kind of surprisingly fun. Given the time in which the story occurred, we don’t get any crowd scenes, yet Dumb Money features a large ensemble cast, of people mostly existing in separate locations. I find myself wondering if Keith Gill and his actual family are as colorful as depicted onscreen here, with Keith played by Paul Dano; his brother Kevin played by Pete Davidson, and his parents played by Clancy Brown and Kate Burton. Having Kevin employed as a DoorDash delivery guy who constantly grabs bites out of the food he delivers is an odd detail. Anyone whose OCD was exacerbated by the hygiene practices of peak covid are certain to be triggered by that.

A lot of other stars are featured among the rest of the supporting staff. A couple other random “regular guy” investors, among a handful, are represented by America Ferrera and Anthony Ramos. Shortsighted billionaires are played by Nick Offerman and Vincent D'Onofrio; a multimillionaire by Seth Rogen. Shailene Woodley is Keith’s wife, Caroline, here depicted as uniformly supportive.

The pacing moves at a steady clip, keeping the runtime at a tight 105 minutes, although it relies heavily on YouTube and TikTok clips, not to mention memes. On the whole, Dumb Money is unexceptional, but I enjoyed it. It’s certainly a unique story worth being told. I can’t say it commands viewing in a theater, much as I advocate for the theatrical experience. This is a movie worthy of an eventual couple of hours on your television.

Well this guy was not as dumb as he looked.

Overall: B

THE CREATOR

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: C
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B
Special Effects: B+

The Creator is a visual achievement, and if that’s all you need, it will work very well for you. It’s also a narrative mess.

This film seems to be leaning into ideas of xenophobia, American exceptionalism, the narrative structure of Apocalypse Now (which itself was a loose adaptation of the 1899 Jospeh Conrad novella Heart of Darkness), and even, arguably, both-sides-ism. The script, co-written by Chris Weitz and director Gareth Edwards, doesn’t fully commit to any of these things to achieve any truly crystalized ideas. This movies seems to want, at the same time, to entertain both American military jingoists and self-identified compassionate leftists.

It’ll probably satisfy average viewers just looking to watch a science-fiction action movie. And on that front, it does impress: Gareth Edwards, with previous directorial offerings from Monsters (2010) to Godzilla (2014) to Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), has an established history as a gifted visual storyteller. He knows how to integrate visual effects on a modest budget that serve the story rather than the other way around. And in The Creator, every scene is visually compelling. with attention paid to every part of the frame, foreground as well as background. Combined with the production design, it makes for very effective world building.

I just wish the story these things are serving were better. Too many things don’t add up, not least of which is the idea of a world threatened by AI that exists in self-contained, individual robot units, some of them with only robot parts, some with heads and faces indistinguishable from humans, aside from cylindrical holes that pass through where ears would otherwise be. I’m frankly astonished that Edwards would make a movie like this without once considering the idea of, say, a wifi network in which all of these machines are connected to each other, as one unified whole. These AI “beings” exist as though they are all singular personalities, much like androids. Except this is never the way that would go, especially if humanity were to declare war on the lot of them, as has happened here—due to a coding error that resulted in Los Angeles getting nuked, fifteen years before the events of this movie.

We’re moving through the 2060s here. What’s the state of climate change, then? No one ever even mentions it. I suppose I’m nitpicking here, but still, I prefer movies like this to make sense. The best science fiction extrapolates from plausible, present-day realities, which this film all but ignores. Instead, it relies on wild plot contrivances.

I hesitate to even get into the moral quandary of “compassion” for artificial intelligence. Multiple times we hear the line: “It’s not real. It’s just programming.” This movie clearly wants us to hear that as misguided, and take the side of the AI. The problem with this is that “it’s just programming” is actually correct. Ironically, humanity is wildly vulnerable to emotional manipulation by AI to think it’s “alive,” and The Creator itself is a movie that successfully manipulates our emotions. To say there’s a lot to unpack with this movie is a wild understatement.

Further complicating matters is how undeniably entertaining it is, at least when you’re not thinking too much about its many plot holes and lapses in logic. John David Washington makes a great protagonist in this world, easily seduced by the adorableness of “the weapon,” a super-advanced “AI” being designed to look like a little girl, played by a seven-year-old Madeleine Yuna Voyles—complete with her own cylindrical hole through her head, ear to ear. These two have great chemistry together, and could have been a classic duo in a better written movie, the “lone wolf and cub” trope notwithstanding.

Between the acting, the cinematography, and the visual effects, The Creator has more than enough going for it to keep viewers rapt from start to finish. When it comes to the technical elements, this is a very well crafted film. If you don’t mind that it really has nothing original or even cohesive to say, then I guess it delivers.

Sure, it looks great if you only look skin deep.