“Probably the best”: the movie Gareth Edwards calls an absolute masterpiece
By helming The Creator, which garnered a lot of attention in sci-fi circles, Gareth Edwards finally took the next step in his directorial career. Receiving multiple Oscar nominations for its technical achievements in the latest iteration of the Academy Awards, it’s clear that Edwards has developed his craft further after already earning critical and commercial success with Rogue One.
Edwards’ penchant for the grand cinematic spectacle is no secret, and it’s on full display in The Creator. Based on a screenplay written by him and Chris Weitz, it imagines a future where human civilisation is in direct conflict with sentient artificial intelligence. John David Washington stars as a haunted former agent tasked with the important mission to locate and eliminate the mastermind behind the AI uprising, only to find himself in a moral and philosophical conflict.
Currently, Edwards is slated to direct the next instalment in the Jurassic Park franchise after negotiations with David Leitch did not pan out. While some fans are already tired of some of the new additions to the series that have failed to capture the magic of the original, it will undoubtedly be interesting to discover how Edwards interprets one of the most epic narrative frameworks in the history of cinema.
For those who are against the expansion of the franchise, it might help to know that Edwards isn’t just signing onto the project for the fat cheque. He is among those sci-fi filmmakers whose lives were undeniably impacted by Steven Spielberg’s astounding opus, with his 1993 masterpiece completely changing the rules of the game.
During a 25th anniversary celebration of Jurassic Park that was hosted by Universal Studios, Edwards joined the likes of Jeff Goldblum and Colin Treverrow to discuss how Spielberg’s work had inevitably shaped modern sci-fi. According to The Creator director, the special screening reminded him just how colossal a project it still is.
Edwards said: “It hit me, like it does every single time, that it’s an absolute masterpiece. It’s frustrating how good that movie is. It was the first one out of the gate in the whole digital revolution. It was the first real film that was using digital effects to do things you couldn’t normally do before.”
While computer-generated imagery might be the norm now, it was pioneering for its time and opened up the potential of cinematic special effects to an unimaginably vast extent. Using the imagery created by Industrial Light & Magic as well as incorporating animatronic dinosaurs, the crew managed something truly unique and celebrated the fundamental glory of the cinematic experience.
Addressing the panel, Edwards asked his contemporaries: “I think it’s arguably, and I’ll say it on record, probably the best one that’s been done. Why is it that one of the first-ever digital effects movies is probably the best?”
It was a painstaking process as well, since inserting the computer-generated dinosaurs into live-action sequences took hours. In addition, that iconic scene with the T. Rex in the rain was so graphically demanding that each frame took six hours to properly render. However, it all paid off because those iconic moments are now permanently embedded in the minds of fans all over the world.
Watch the whole discussion below.
