Saturday, December 30, 2023

Sasha and Ariel Experience ... The Creator!

Sasha: Okay, whoo! That was a rough one!
Ariel: I was sure hoping it would be more of a Rogue One, when I found out it was made by the same guy! But you're right, it turned out to be way more rough than rogue.
Sasha: Like, we should call it Rough One: A Sand-in-your-Drawers Story.
Ariel: That would be a not good place to have sand.
Sasha: So do we want to warn people to put on their spoiler blankets?
Ariel: Honestly? I don't want people to have to watch this movie at all. We should just spoil away and then they'll know they shouldn't put themselves through what we just went through. Plus ... how can you spoil something that's as pre-spoiled as this movie? It's like, "Don't leave that moldy lettuce out on the counter or it might get even more rotten!"
Sasha: Wow, you really didn't like it. I mean, I didn't either, but you usually go a little easier on things.
Ariel: Not when they put sand in my drawers like this one did.
Sasha: Where do you want to start, then?
Ariel: Let's start with the commercials, which all made me go, "Ooh, maybe I want to watch this movie!"
Sasha: They were pretty darn good commercials.
Ariel: Whoever made those commercials should have been put in charge of making the movie. It was like, "Look! They're trying to stop a terrible secret weapon! And now look! The secret weapon's really a cute little robot kid! And now look! Lots of cool action of robots getting attacked in a robot town! And here's this freaky-looking robot lady looking at the robot kid and the robot lady looks super interesting! She must totally be an important character in the movie or why else would they be showing her looking so interesting in this commercial?"
Sasha: She was sort of interesting in the movie too ... for all five minutes before they killed her.
Ariel: Those were some of the best five minuteses in the whole movie. I was like, "Yay! It's the interesting-looking robot lady from the commercial. Ooh, and she's nice too, and they're going to get ice cream!" And then I was like, "Hmm, now I want ice cream," and I almost got up to get some but before I could, it turns out there's a bomb in the ice cream! Who puts a bomb in ice cream they know is for a kid?
Sasha: Especially considering they super-duper wanted to capture that kid and not destroy her.
Ariel: Basically the bomb was there to kill the interesting robot lady because ... I dunno, if she didn't die there wouldn't be enough sad stuff in the movie or something, and for some reason having all kinds of sad stuff in the movie was apparently the most important thing. Way more important than maybe letting her live for even five more minutes so I'd have time to get my own ice cream.
Sasha: Hang on. Is the whole reason you didn't like this movie because it made you want ice cream and then made you too sad to want ice cream after all?
Ariel: Well ... it's not the whole reason. But don't you think it's a pretty good reason all by itself?
Sasha: Probably not all by itself, no.
Ariel: I think it would be. But we'll never know, because on top of bombing a little kid's ice cream and ruining ice cream for me for the whole night, there was lots more lame-tastic stuff in the movie too.
Sasha: No argument from me about that, for sure.
Ariel: Like, somewhere around halfway through it it was like they just stopped even trying to make sense. The first half of the movie was like, "Hey, look how super-evil the Americans are but at least they have to sneak around and try to kill the AIs without actually invading all of Asia. Seems like the only advantage they've got going for them is this hovering NOMAD thing that flies around scanning for AIs and missiling them to death when it finds them." Then the second half of the movie was like, "Welp, never mind, turns out the Americans have a giant jumbo shopping-cart full of super-weapons and plenty of soldiers and they can just send them in to whomp on everyone and the people in Asia won't do anything about it and also they know where all the AI bases are and now they're going to missile them all to death, which, couldn't they have just done that from the very start?" 
Sasha: I also thought it was weird how somewhere around then they started having flashbacks of the main character and his wife and she's got all this blood on her and obviously something really bad happened ... but we never find out what that was or when that was or whose blood it was on her.
Ariel: I think somebody said, "Hey, guys, didn't any of you notice we hired this really good-looking actress to play this character and there's no sign of her in most of the last half of the movie? Can we maybe film some sad scenes of sadness where she can act really sad?"
Sasha: I was confused by those scenes, for sure. But I was even more confused by how the main character was undercover trying to get to the creator of the AIs, and to do that he hooked up with the creator-dude's daughter, and then he fell in love with her, but he kept on going with his mission anyway and then was all surprised that things don't work out between them. What a dope!
Ariel: I mean, I've never been the daughter of a super-genius who invented a whole race of AI robots and then got married to a guy who it turned out was just using me to get to my dad or anything. But I think maybe if I was, once I found out about that it would be kind of a deal-breaker? Why doesn't he ever think about that?
Sasha: I don't think he's a big thinker. We're talking about a guy who falls mad in love with this chick who's obviously crazy passionate about the struggles of the poor AIs that the Americans want to hunt down and destroy, when his viewpoint is the AIs are just robots with programming and don't really think or feel. It's like he figures this isn't something they're way incompatible on?
Ariel: Or maybe he thinks its just a phase she's going through?
Sasha: I guess the real answer is that he just didn't think about it any more than the dude who wrote the movie did.
Ariel: Yeah. Here's another question I had, though.
Sasha: What's that?
Ariel: The Americans start trying to destroy all the AI bases at the end, right?
Sasha: Right, civilian casualties and all.
Ariel: But the whole time the main character and the little robot girl are tooling around Asia looking for his wife, there's robots and AI simulants walking around everywhere out in the open. And the movie just out and says that the people in Asia totally accept the AIs as being cool and are fine with them.
Sasha: Pretty much.
Ariel: So why do they have hidden bases? And what good does it do the Americans to destroy the hidden bases if there's still all these AIs walking around the big cities with the rest of the population?
Sasha: It does kinda seem like they'd have to lay waste to all of Asia if they really wanted to get rid of the AIs.
Ariel: It makes my head hurt.
Sasha: Yeah, mine too.
Ariel: Well, dang.
Sasha: What?
Ariel: You know how the AI simulant people all have that hole running all the way through their heads from one side to the other?
Sasha: Sure, that was a really cool effect. What about it?
Ariel: I was totally figuring I'd get around to making a joke about something going "in one ear and out the other" on one of those guys, but I just don't think I have the energy for it.
Sasha: I hear you.
Ariel: Haha!
Sasha: Anyway. Is there anything else to say about this one?
Ariel: We could talk about the evil general who pops up out of nowhere in the last part of the movie just to keep being generally evil.
Sasha: I guess.
Ariel: Or we could talk about how the orbital military base has a big garden in it, basically it seems like so there can be a beautiful field of plants for the main guy and the robot version of his wife to run across toward each other when the base is blowing up at the end.
Sasha: True.
Ariel: Or we could talk about how the little robot girl can turn off all electronics by doing this thing with her hands, and she shuts down the base just at the right moment before the conveyor belt of missiles is going to shoot a missile down at the surface, which happens to be the missile the main guy was hanging onto to plant a bomb to blow up the station, and then when he plants the bomb and they're trying to escape, the robot girl has to let the power turn back on, but for some reason even though the base starts firing and guiding all its missiles again, that one missile that he put the bomb on doesn't get fired but just sits there where the bomb can go off and blow up the base.
Sasha: We could if we really wanted to, I guess.
Ariel: But basically what it all comes down to is, the whole last half of the movie whatever happened just happened because that's what the writers wanted to have happen, not because any of it made any logical sense.
Sasha: Exactly.
Ariel: Which means if they wanted there to be a happy ending, there could have been. They just didn't want there to be, which I think makes them kind of jerks.
Sasha: Amen to that.
Ariel: Okay. I think I'm done.
Sasha: Let's put a fork in this one, then.
Ariel: Uh-huh. "The Creator" is officially completely forked.
Sasha and Ariel: Goodnight, everybody!