Gareth Edwards makes enormous creatures feel as though a camera has found them in the wild. We rate his patience and sense of scale, but his films too often give us little reason to care about the people standing nearby.
Fi1m perspective
The camera sits low, with ordinary people in front and something enormous above them. Gareth Edwards gives an arrival time to become frightening. His effects have weight because he makes the creatures seem to share our space. We rate him as a director of spectacle, though the writing in his films does not always deserve such careful staging.
Monsters (2010) established that approach, with Edwards handling writing, cinematography and visual effects as well as directing. Godzilla (2014) took the human-sized viewpoint into his first major studio film, and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016) followed with a grounded war-film tone. His preference for real locations, with effects layered in afterwards, helps explain why these vast objects feel solid. He wants the camera to appear to have found something, rather than been placed to admire it.
The Creator (2023) is where the writing becomes particularly frustrating, because Edwards shares the screenplay credit with Chris Weitz. New Asia's rice fields and temple towns make a convincing place for his future, but its inhabitants are too often left as extras. The familiar story of a soldier and a powerful child gives those images less to do than they deserve. It is hard to keep admiring a world so carefully imagined when the film has so little curiosity about most of the people living there.
In Jurassic World Rebirth (2025), cinematographer John Mathieson uses flat, grey light to make a dinosaur look simply present, while editor Jabez Olssen gives the water sequence room to breathe. We felt tense because we could see no join between the digital animal and the real water. Edwards trusts us to watch, and that trust pays off. David Koepp's script supplies people we barely know and an errand that cannot sustain the film.
We would like to see him given characters who reward that close observation. His own contribution to The Creator means a change of screenwriter alone is no guarantee. Choose Jurassic World Rebirth for the animals, with fair warning that the humans will require more indulgence.
Biography
Gareth Edwards is a British film director and screenwriter. He studied film and video at the Surrey Institute of Art & Design, graduating in 1996, and began his career in visual effects for television documentaries and dramas.
Edwards gained recognition with his debut feature Monsters (2010), which he wrote, directed, shot and provided visual effects for. He went on to direct the studio films Godzilla (2014), Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), The Creator (2023), on which he also received story and screenplay credits, and Jurassic World Rebirth (2025).
