I swear the creator dialogue has got to have some amount of advertisment mixed in with real people because the biggest compliment I see everywhere is that the movie looks expensive but cost very little.
I saw it. It was gorgeous. The art direction was wonderful. But that was about everything positive I have to say about it.
The world building was atrocious, the plot was trope heavy, the sound design was serviceable but not many sounds stood out, I couldn't find an impactful or nuanced message, the pacing was a rubber band, and the individual challenges were boring.
I love original content, and quite frankly I feel like there's enough of them every year to not be heart broken everytime a bad original film doesn't make a stellar return. I'm kinda tired of the "where new IP" discussion though.
Of course I wish there were more big budget independent films but right now the problem seems to be big budget films in general to me. More often than not they hit like duds, but they're built on good will and that's all it takes to get me to return to the first dud.
Idk, Creator sucked and it hurts to say because I want new, great, and scifi worlds coming to the theater every year but the Creator isn't good simply because it's new and that doesn't meant new IPs are "hard for the masses" to understand/appreciate/turn-out-for.
Without data, take media reports as sensational by necessity. France's problems may not be as bad as they seem (I would assume they're not) and France's problems don't automatically translate to other countries like Japan.
To wrap this back around to your main post, travelling to Japan shouldn't induce fear at any step. It's a safe country with low crime rates and few health problems for tourists.