The Creator (2023) - Movie Review

2023, in all facets of the film industry, is likely to be remembered as ‘The Year Of AI’. Production-wise, Hollywood has seen a once-in-a-generation workers’ strike (partly) out of fears of artificial intelligence threatening the livelihood of creatives. Narratively, stories about the looming threat of replacement by machines have reached a point of relevance that, even considering sci-fi’s rich history of prescience, is still kind of bizarre to contemplate at this point in time. And on the critical side of things, it seems like every goddamn person who writes about movies has uttered some variation of “it’s as if an A.I./ChatGPT/an algorithm made/wrote this film” as a go-to criticism for films that feel assembly-line or generic. Yes, I resorted to this very thing during the year-end lists for 2022, but the extent to which it has since mushroomed into a genuine cliché is… getting kind of irritating.

At any rate, alongside films like Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part 1, The Creator feels like one of those emblematic releases that help define a year as a pop culture moment. That it’s one of a shrinking minority of tentpole sci-fi flicks that aren’t based on pre-existing material (directly, at least, but we’ll get to that…) adds to that battlefront mentality. What can I say, this is the kind of metanarrative shit I crave in media.

Don't Worry Darling (2022) - Movie Review

It’s been a while since I’ve looked at a film that’s been swallowed whole by its own production drama. Paws Of Fury kinda had that same result, but the drama there was mainly background noise that you’d have to dig for. Don’t Worry Darling, on the other hand? It has been one of, if not the, most talked-about film of the year, and not even for anything do with the film’s content. Hell, the behind-the-scenes drama and marketing gaffs for this could (and has elsewhere) make for its own write-up.

But rather than just fill this review with references to #Spitgate, or how this movie feels like a movie, or hypothesising how much worse this could’ve been if Shia LaBeouf was still in it… well, outside of just mentioning them then, that’s not what I’ll be doing. Partly because, even at its most talked-about, all of this just isn’t that interesting to me (I’m not here for the gossip, I’m here for the movie), but mainly because this film is such a… bizarre creation all on its own that there’s already enough material here.

Let Them All Talk (2021) - Movie Review

While there are certainly filmmakers out there that I personally like more, I have difficulty thinking of a filmmaker who outright fascinates me as much as Steven Soderbergh. His prolific and endlessly flexible body of work, his revolutionary approach to the art form and the industry that dominates it, his consistent championing of low-budget independent filmmaking; I have all kinds of respect for the man as an artist. So I figured it would be fitting to close out my reviews for 2021 with a double-feature of the man’s most recent films, starting with this little curio of a feature.