I re-watched Chappie recently. I’d already read someone say that The Creator gave them Elysium vibes, and then realized - there’s a fair bit of Chappie in The Creator too. Add that to the fact that Rogue One was supposed to ‘the District 9 of Star Wars’, and it suggests that Edwards’ strange goal is to be Britain’s version of Neill Blomkamp.

He’s already tried to re-invent VFX-led film-making once - Monsters looks like a 10M, but it was made for about half a million. The people involved in that film thought it would change the industry. It didn’t, because there’s more things going on that balloon blockbuster budgets up, until they all cost around 200M.

As for The Creator, he may have saved 120M from the production budget, but a few million spent on pre-production script development was what it really needed.

Goes to show what happens when you don’t crunch and abuse the VFX team I guess

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This is the best summary I could come up with:

After traveling to dozens of exotic locations around the world to film New Regency’s and 20th Century Studios’ The Creator, director Gareth Edwards made one last trek that was among his most consequential: to Industrial Light & Magic in Northern California.

Many of the key moments onscreen were filled with temporary text such as “epic Nomad shot,” a reference to the killer space station at the center of the film concerning a war between humans and artificial intelligence.

“The lights came on and a lot of 48-year-old men turned around — they’d been crying,” says Edwards, who was relieved to learn the film worked on an emotional level, even without VFX.

Initially, the team tried showing just part of Alphie’s face, making it appear like a mask surrounded by a robotic head and neck, but found that this made her scary, not lovable.

The filmmaker chose locations with the VFX in mind, knowing that anchoring shots in reality would give the film a more tactile quality.

Though the VFX team might have been crying tears of worry at that rough-cut screening at ILM, in the end they were grateful for the legwork Edwards did to capture real locations for them to draw inspiration from.

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Typical.

Sounds more like you shorted your fucking artists to hell and back. I’m not impressed.