alx++ @alx@weirder.earth

On the bright side, I can now scroll without using so much pressure that I accidentally middle-click

Oh, some of the world design was kind of cool I guess.

/end

Yesterday I watched On The Silver Globe, a film which is only 4/5ths complete (thanks to Soviet-era authorities) and is pretty bananas in the sections that exist. And yet it still manages to make way more sense, and raise way fewer red flags. Not that that's a high bar to clear.

In summary, life's too short to watch The Creator.

Don't go thinking that's the worst this movie has to offer though. They save that for the very climax of the movie.

He rescues the macguffin and destroys the death star, but in doing so must martyr himself. He assures the macguffin that his place in heaven has been secured by this act. And then?

Then, just as he's going down to his demise on the death star, a robot that's been loaded with a brain scan of his ex comes out. She runs to embrace him, calling his name, even though last time she was conscious she was fleeing him for being a terrible cesspit of a man. They embrace, tragically doomed, but *so in love*.

We find out that she was secretly the leader of the group he was spying on. He throws out some line like "yeah we both had our secrets, but we loved each other", as though both secrets had equal moral weight. This is well into when we're supposed to be thinking he's turned things around for himself.

No, instead we're shown how devastated he is at losing the woman he deceived, because he genuinely loved her waah waah waah. And then most of the film hinges on him chasing the possibility that she's still out there to be found, even though why in the hell would she want anything to do with the fucking spycop that got her pregnant.

And when he does find her. Oh, she's unconscious and on life support *because of him*, and for some reason he's the only one who's allowed to turn off her life support. This is a sad but apparently necessary thing for him to have to do, to wield the power of life and death over someone whose life he's comprehensively ruined.

But there's a more fundamental problem with the whole thing that I wouldn't be able to fix without just writing an entirely different story. The protagonist is despicable. Not in an anti-hero kind of a way, but a we're-meant-to-root-for-his-redemption-arc kind of a way.

A very early scene establishes that he's a future-day spycop. Pulling the same shit that spycops tend to do, i.e. starting relationships with the people they're infiltrating and getting them pregnant. If a film wanted to show that in order to critique it, that's good and necessary. This film is not interested in doing that.

Now, I'm no qualified screenwriter. But if I'd been given like six hours with the screenplay I could've plugged *so many* gaping plot holes and improved *so much* awful, clunky exposition dialogue.

Like, at one point some guy waves what's basically a sonic screwdriver at an Android and is immediately able to say not just that it's the most advanced thing he's ever seen, but exactly what its potential capabilities are.