2023 – The Creator
The visual effects for The Creator were incredible. OK, so I know we didn’t see anything new here, but the realism of the fantastic sci-fi images just keep getting better and better, improving on old visuals and making them more stunning to see on the screen. For me, the most memorable effects were the AI robots with large mechanical holes in their heads, the incredible design and locator technology of the military base called Nomad, and the great explosions. Who doesn’t love a good explosion? There were many other things, of course, but these were really great.
First was the mechanical people or Simulants. Remember back in 2001, the movie A.I. Artificial Intelligence? Stephen Spielberg was doing things in that film that the world had never seen before. Well, here, The Creator does the same thing. It used live actors to play the parts so you could see their real faces, but the backs of their heads were all mechanical. A simple hat allowed them to pass for human. Here, you could clearly see through the holes in the heads. You could see the rotating mechanical parts inside those holes.
And they impressively showed the Simulants in various forms of lighting. I’m guessing that this robot effect was applied to about half the characters in the film. And they showed a wide range of ages and ethnicities. It was so creatively and realistically done! And it wasn’t just that one kind of robot. There were military robots that were fully mechanical, only resembling humanoid shape, with a filly mechanical head. The designs were really cool, and even though they were artificial devices, they moved with the ease and fluidity of humans.
Nomad was a fantastic sky ship that searched out specific targets and obliterated them with missile attacks from above. It was like a giant bird of prey, searching for its next kill. The blue search lights that hit the earth’s surface were like a combination of digital mapping technology seen in films like 2012’s Prometheus, and the fantastic laser light show I remember seeing at Epcot in the mid 80s. It looked very futuristic and powerful, just like it needed to.
But one thing I did learn is that one of the impressive things about The Creators visual effects, was that they were able to accomplish all these stunning visuals on a very minimal budget. To quote an article that appeared in 3D World Magazine, “The Creator made headlines at the end of 2023 when it was revealed the movie’s VFX cost just $80 million but looks like $300 million film. The VFX team on the movie made good use of its budget to bring the sci-fi fable to the screen with a sense of realism. This new detail is just another insight into how the team created an emotional connection to its digital VFX.” And that’s the truth. I was just as emotionally invested in the Simulant characters as the human ones.