Directed by Ivan Passer | Starring Peter O’Toole, Mariel Hemingway, Vincent Spano, Virginia Madsen
If you’ve ever wondered what it would look like if Frankenstein and Weird Science had an awkward, underachieving baby and then handed it off to a drunk philosophy major to raise—Creator is your answer. A film that tries to be romantic, scientific, and whimsical all at once, and ends up feeling like a movie written during a fever dream and directed by someone who had only read the back covers of medical textbooks.
Peter O’Toole stars as Dr. Harry Wolper, a mad-ish scientist who wants to clone his dead wife. Not metaphorically. Literally. Using DNA, science stuff, and apparently some leftover romantic comedy clichés, he sets out to reanimate the past in a way that would make Mary Shelley throw her hands up and walk out of the theater.
Peter O’Toole: Mad Scientist or Just Mad?
Watching Peter O’Toole in Creator is like watching your grandpa try to play a TikTok trend. He’s too dignified for the material, too tired for the pace, and way too British to be charmingly quirky in that 1980s rom-com way. He looks perpetually hungover and confused, which—let’s be honest—might not even be acting.
Dr. Harry Wolper isn’t just trying to clone his wife. He’s trying to do it in a college biology lab. With help from students. In between teaching lectures. It’s like if Weekend at Bernie’s decided to get a PhD.
He spends half the film raving about “life, love, and the human cell” like he’s pitching a Hallmark card for necromancy, and the other half leering at women in lab coats while monologuing about genetic destiny.
The Plot (Or What’s Left of It After the Scotch Wore Off)
So here’s the setup: O’Toole’s character is heartbroken over his wife’s death 30 years earlier. Rather than moving on like a healthy adult or at least taking up model ship-building, he decides cloning is the answer. He ropes in a student assistant (Vincent Spano) and they work out of what appears to be the least-regulated lab on Earth.
Meanwhile, Harry’s neighbor Meli (Mariel Hemingway), who looks like she walked out of a yoga-themed shampoo commercial, is inexplicably in love with him. It’s a romance so one-sided it might as well be a stalker subplot. There’s also a rival professor trying to shut Harry down—not because he’s violating every ethical rule of science—but because of jealousy. As if Harry’s creepy reanimation hobby is just quirky competition.
Along the way, there’s love, loss, existential crises, and one very unsettling cloning tank that looks like it was purchased from a Return of the Jedi garage sale.
Vincent Spano: A Man, A Lab Coat, A Completely Forgettable Performance
Vincent Spano plays Boris, the student lab assistant who mostly exists to be younger, dumber, and slightly more awake than O’Toole. His subplot involves a romance with Virginia Madsen, because even ethically questionable lab techs deserve love in 1980s cinema.
He bounces between puppy love and being a moral compass—though frankly, if this guy is your conscience, you’re already in trouble.
Spano delivers his lines with all the enthusiasm of someone who just found out the craft services table is out of bagels. He’s not bad, but he’s not memorable either. He’s like movie tofu—he absorbs whatever weird energy the scene is throwing off.
Virginia Madsen: Wasted Talent, Wasted Role
Virginia Madsen shows up as Barbara, a woman who gets mixed up with Boris and somehow winds up in the romantic meat grinder of this story. She’s smart, confident, and clearly slumming it in a movie where the main plot revolves around harvesting skin cells to recreate a dead wife.
She deserves better. Like Candyman. Or not being in this movie.
Mariel Hemingway: Earth Mother With a Death Wish
Mariel Hemingway plays Meli as though she’s been drugged with a blend of Xanax and glitter. She’s soft-spoken, dreamy-eyed, and absolutely unfazed by the fact that the man she loves is trying to grow his dead wife in a tank next to the Bunsen burners.
Her character would be charming if she weren’t enabling a deeply unhinged old man to practice corpse-based romantic science.
It’s like someone said, “Give me manic pixie dream girl energy, but make it necrophilic.”
Tone: Uneven, Like a See-Saw with a Piano on One Side
The film lurches between farce, tragedy, romance, and something that vaguely resembles science fiction. One minute you’re supposed to laugh at Harry making cloning jokes, the next you’re meant to weep for his dead wife. It’s like being on an emotional rollercoaster designed by a sociopathic poet with no engineering degree.
There’s an organ score that swells every time someone stares wistfully into a microscope, as if genetic engineering is something that should be done with candlelight and soft jazz.
And every few minutes, there’s a weird tonal whiplash where you think, “Wait… is this still supposed to be funny?”
The Science: Bad Even By ’80s Standards
Cloning someone in a college lab using a few photos and a hairbrush? Sure. Why not. It’s not like science needs realism when you’ve got Peter O’Toole waxing poetic about love being the true building block of DNA.
By the time they dump some chemicals into the tank and start whispering to the floating dead-wife-goop like it’s a mood ring, you realize this isn’t science fiction—it’s science fan fiction. The kind written by a guy who dropped out of biology class but watched Love Story ten times.
The Climax: Tissue, Meet Trash Can
Spoiler: the clone is “born.” Kind of. For a brief moment, you think the film might try to say something meaningful about grief or moving on. But nope—it slaps together a sappy finale like a lab report filled out 10 minutes before class, then slathers it in sentimental goo.
O’Toole’s character gets closure. Or senility. It’s unclear. The movie just kind of ends, like a mid-sentence nap.
Final Verdict: Science, Schmaltz, and Shenanigans
Creator is a bizarre Frankenstein’s monster of a film—stitched together from mismatched genres, unearned emotion, and a script that should’ve been locked in a cryogenic freezer. It’s a romantic comedy that isn’t funny. A drama that isn’t moving. And a science fiction story that makes Plan 9 from Outer Space look medically accurate.
Peter O’Toole could’ve played God, Hamlet, or a war-torn general. Instead, he plays a man trying to turn his wife’s memory into soup and pour it into a woman-shaped container.
Rating: 3/10 — The only thing Creator successfully clones is disappointment.
