Friday reviews: 29 September 2023

The Creator and Saw X are in cinemas, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar is on Netflix and No One Will Save You is streaming on Disney+

In Gareth Edwards’ The Creator, the United States responds to an atro­city it blames on ‘arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence’ by going to war against it and the remain­ing regions of the plan­et that live in har­mony with it.

Robots – some dis­tinctly robot­ic and some with human faces, called simu­lacra – have developed con­scious­ness and with it a sense of their own indi­vidu­al­ity and imper­man­ence. Like oth­er sen­tient beings that res­ults – pre­sum­ably logic­ally – in a belief in a ‘before life’ and an ‘after life’, mor­al­ity and judge­ment, and a belief in some­thing big­ger than themselves.

This is an inter­est­ing scen­ario but remains res­ol­utely unex­amined in a film that chooses instead to treat Asian cul­ture (and Asian reli­gion) as win­dow dress­ing for the age-old story of a man (John David Washington) search­ing for his long lost wife while car­ry­ing a prize of enorm­ous value to both sides.

The Creator looks amaz­ing. Edwards’ facil­ity for mix­ing genu­ine loc­a­tions and very real look­ing CGI has hit a new high and the phys­ic­al props and cos­tumes (designed and made by Wētā) are also first rate.

But the scen­ario feels like a bunch of oth­er films (from Apocalypse Now to Kundun) and some his­tory les­sons from the last 60 years have been inges­ted into some kind of large lan­guage mod­el and spat out the oth­er side with the assist­ance of a magic eight-ball device until some­thing vaguely nov­el but less inter­est­ing res­ults. There must be a catchy term for this? “A.I.” perhaps?

Nothing much holds up under scru­tiny and the frus­tra­tion I had that there’s a much more inter­est­ing film right there under the film­makers’ noses was not helped by the rushed and – frankly – silly end­ing which was just anoth­er excuse to blow up amaz­ing machines inside a computer.

The Creator either acci­dent­ally comes close to being pro­found or they were try­ing for it and missed by miles.

For my sins, Saw X is my fourth ven­ture into the Jigsaw uni­verse and, once again, I was struck by the con­sist­ent mor­al­ity at its malevol­ent and rep­re­hens­ible core. And, of all the ones I’ve seen, this one is the closest to being a prop­er film.

Tobin Bell returns as John Kramer, archi­tect of mis­for­tune for those who in his opin­ion have trans­gressed and require an atti­tude read­just­ment. He describes him­self wryly as a “life coach” at one point which is pretty funny when you think about it.

His meth­ods are mech­an­ic­al, bru­tal, and deranged.

Fans love the inven­tion of the vari­ous games – and on a tech­nic­al level they are superbly rendered by the cine­mat­ic craftspeople involved – but they take up less than 10 per­cent of the run­ning time and I man­aged to look away at most of the worst moments.

Where I think this Saw film is inter­est­ing is when Kramer’s plans seem to go awry and he is forced to impro­vise, per­haps even risk sac­ri­fi­cing him­self in favour of someone he knows is innocent.

But when you’re guilty, he’s an aven­ging angel liber­tari­an psy­cho­path hero and Bell’s per­form­ance is tremendous.

It’s fair to ask why it is that I could sit through all the dis­mem­ber­ing and mutil­a­tions of Saw X when I wasn’t pre­pared to watch the doc­u­ment­ary about the Kiwi cage fight­er which was released in the same week. It’s a ques­tion I was ask­ing myself, let me tell you, but I think the dif­fer­ence is that I can tell the dif­fer­ence between fantasy and reality.

When things get ugly in Saw X I can tell myself that they are only act­ors, someone is going to yell, “Cut!” and they’ll all go off and have lunch together.

And I had to remind myself of that sev­er­al times.

Wes Anderson gave me the most beau­ti­ful motion pic­ture cleanse after watch­ing Saw X, the first of four short film adapt­a­tions of Roald Dahl stor­ies that he’s mak­ing for Netflix – The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar1.

In it, he takes the storytelling ensemble idea from Asteroid City and runs with it as sev­er­al of our best loved char­ac­ter act­ors play mul­tiple roles in a deli­ciously invent­ive (but some­how still straight) telling of Dahl’s 1977 story, framed by Ralph Fiennes as Dahl him­self sit­ting in his little cot­tage workroom.

Sugar – Benedict Cumberbatch – is a rich man who enjoys a bit of a gamble. When he dis­cov­ers a mys­tic­al secret to read­ing play­ing cards from their reverse, allow­ing him to cheat at Blackjack, he becomes even richer.

Just as you might expect the fam­ously mis­an­throp­ic Dahl to provide some comeup­pance he goes in the oth­er dir­ec­tion and the story and film are as whole­some and joy­ful as any­one could ask for. A real ton­ic after all that dysto­pi­an hate earli­er in the day.

We laughed eas­ily (and a lot) dur­ing Henry Sugar and the roughly 40-minute length makes it per­fect for a home stream­ing double feature.

Spooky ali­ens are com­ing for small town America in No One Will Save You, a film so dark (in lumin­ance terms) that I often couldn’t tell what was going on.

Kaitlyn Dever lives alone in her old fam­ily home, shunned by the small town where she lives and mourn­ing the losses of her moth­er and best friend.

When she man­ages to kill an ali­en who has invaded her home one night, she real­ises that she might be the only per­son in the town that hasn’t been body snatched.

Writer-director Brian Duffield takes the story in some inter­est­ing dir­ec­tions but ham­strings him­self by insist­ing that the film con­tains no dia­logue, there­fore requir­ing a lot more con­cen­tra­tion on the viewer’s part than usual.

I wouldn’t nor­mally com­plain about being asked to actu­ally turn up for a film but it would have been much easi­er to take it all in if I had seen it in a cinema rather than at home2.