Yup, yesterday was a
two-fer! (Thank you, Marcus Theatre's Value Tuesdays.) I couldn't make up my mind which one I wanted to see, and I had enough time in the day to see both
Saw X and The Creator. All things are
not equal, however, and I found one viewing experience to be vastly superior to the other.
You know... Once any horror movie franchise starts to get several films deep, the question of whether the latest entry in the series is any good or not actually becomes irrelevant. Rather, the important question becomes (at least from a corporate standpoint):
What sort of crazy twist or plot development can we introduce to keep the ball rolling? The ultimate case study in this phenomenon is the
Friday the 13th series. You never go to a
Friday/
Jason film expecting
anything resembling good cinema (with the arguable exception of
Part VI: Jason Lives), it's just that you're morbidly curious to see exactly
how they're going to defibrillate the hulking, homicidal, machete-wielding dead guy in the hockey mask
this time around. (I've actually got the Scream Factory Blu-ray box set, so I guess I can't really be
too much of a snob about it!)
The
Saw films, however, are actually extremely unique because of their extremely fluid, back-and-forth timeline in which later films can revisit the events from earlier films in order to discover the fates of surviving characters (the way we catch up with
I's Cary Elwes in
VII), or to set up exactly
when a character we're first introduced to in
later films actually entered into the story from a chronological standpoint (such as Costas Mandylor, who's introduced in
III, whose role and function is established in
IV and whose involvement in the continuing storyline is established in
V as having begun before the events of
I... I
think!). Confusing? Yeah, I know. I was kind of racking my brain figuring out how to phrase those last couple of sentences.
Saw X, the tenth and newest entry in the series, was directed by Kevin Greutert, who not only also helmed
VI and
VII but was the editor of
I-V. You know, I guess it's really not all that hard to jump back and forth in time within a series when your former editor has such a hands-on role in the creative process.
Anyway, the events of
X take place in between the events of
I and
II. In this movie, we discover that the nefarious Jigsaw, a.k.a. John Kramer (Tobin Bell)
isn't completely infallible, and that he certainly
can be taken for a ride. But those that try, certainly do so at their own peril. Kramer, as we all know, is dying from terminal brain cancer, and here he is offered a lifeline. He finds out about an experimental drug treatment program run by Dr. Cecilia Pederson (Synnøve Macody Lund). Her clinic supposedly was started in Norway, but has to pick up and move around from time to time and is currently stationed in Mexico. Anyway, our man John undergoes the operation, but eventually finds out that Pederson and her associates are complete and total frauds. Upon which point, Hell is unleashed and one by one, Pederson and her ne'er-do-well accomplices are rounded up and captured by Kramer and his accomplice Amanda (Shawnee Smith) to serve as players in his lethal games.
This one was actually pretty decent. The first half-hour or so of the movie starts out as mostly a rather straight drama, with John Kramer coming to terms with his impending death and finding out about the experimental clinic through a man claiming to be a fellow cancer survivor (Michael Beach) (a character who one feels throughout this movie has a
lot of explaining to do and whose fate you
will discover partway through the end credits). The straight dramatic mood of this first act is broken up only by
one horrific trap sequence, a gag involving broken fingers and eyeball suction, which one feels
had to have been shoehorned in just to remind audiences that they
were, in fact, at the latest
Saw sequel and not wandered into some dramatic tearjerker starring Tobin Bell by mistake.
But things eventually
do get bloody and once Cecilia and her cronies are captured, events unfold pretty much as one would expect and all the major players in the game have to go through some gruesome
grand guignol self-extrication from their respective traps. The most gruesome bit involves the use of a Gigli saw, and is actually one of the few scenes in the entire series which I had to force myself to look at and not avert my eyes! (I am for the most part a hardy soul when it comes to visceral on-screen horror.) Then, towards the end, there is an apparent setback when the evil Cecilia (with the aid of an accomplice) manages to (apparently) turn the tables on John and Amanda and force John into one of his own traps. Cecilia also, quite refreshingly, calls John out for his own moral hypocrisy, throwing his own words from an earlier scene back in his face. But John Kramer is a cagey cat, all wheels within wheels and contingency plans afoot, and his ultimate survival (well, until the end of
III) is a foregone conclusion.
In short, it's
not the greatest entry in the
Saw series, but it's certainly not the
worst either. (After the 2004 original, the two best in my opinion are the grim and claustrophobic
III and the social commentary of
VI, while the two worst for me would
VII in 3-D and failed stylistic departure of eighth entry
Jigsaw.) I guess I would put it in 5th place after
I,
III,
VI and
II.
(You know, it's really hard to believe - as well as kind of funny - that something so convoluted and non-linear could
possibly originate from what was basically just a "two guys trapped in a room" scenario.
)
--------------------------------------------------
The Creator, on the other hand, is probably one of the best movies I've seen so far this year! In fact, I'll go out on a limb and say that this is the type of science-fiction epic that Ridley Scott, James Cameron and the Wachowskis used to be able to make in their sleep! Set in the year 2070, fifteen years after a nuclear warhead destroys Los Angeles, the story deals with the power struggle between humanity and artificial intelligence. This type of AI is mostly represented by humanoid simulants who in actuality are more "human" than the humans, and they are at war with a very powerful high-altitude aerospace platform called the
USS NOMAD which is capable of locating the AI's hiding places and launching missile strikes against them. John David Washington (who greatly impressed me in both Spike Lee's
BlackKklansman and Christopher Nolan's
Tenet) plays special forces operative Joshua Taylor, who is recruited by the U.S. government to track down and destroy an AI superweapon capable of shutting down and controlling human technology, something that would greatly shift the balance of power. Taylor leads a special team behind enemy lines (somewhere in New Asia, where AI hasn't been outlawed), where the superweapon is ultimately discovered. The catch? It's a
child! The rest of the story details Taylor's attempts to protect this child (a very good Madeleine Yuna Voyles) from anyone who would seek to destroy or capture her for destructive purposes.
In addition to just being a great sci-fi epic, it's also a terrific character study. Joshua Taylor is actually a very tragic yet ultimately redemptive character, who starts out as a soldier working undercover and doing his duty battling a potential threat to humanity but at one point early in the story (ten years after the nuking of L.A. but five before the main body of the action) he ends up losing his wife and unborn child in the process once he's revealed his true intentions. There is a great deal of religious allegory and talk about Heaven in this picture, and even the very title of this movie reminded me of the plight of the space probe V'Ger in 1979's
Star Trek: The Motion Picture, who is also looking for its "Creator."
The Creator was directed by Gareth Edwards, whose previous directing gigs included the 2014 remake of
Godzilla and
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story from 2016. While I thought
Rogue One was
okay (not being overly impressed with latter-day
Star Wars), there was nothing in that movie to prepare me for what Edwards did with
this picture. The man has certainly given himself a tough act to follow, and I'll be very interested in what he does next. In short,
The Creator is
definitely one I'll get the 4K + Blu-ray set for!
Reply to Topic
