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Ready Player One
Thrilling filmmaking blends a coming of age drama with adolescent relationships and more pop culture references than you can shake a registered trademark at. This is the smorgasbord of Steven Spielberg’s latest blockbuster, an immersive and bombastically brilliant adaptation of Ernest Cline’s novel, scripted by Cline himself along with Zak Penn. In 2045, the world is a dystopia future with nothing to look forward to except the OASIS, a virtual reality environment where one can do and be anything. Within the OASIS, designer James Halliday (Mark Rylance) has hidden three keys that enable the finder to control the entire virtual world and become incalculably wealthy. Gamers of all types, from the corporate ‘Sixers’ of Innovative Online Industries (IOI) to the enigmatic Art3mis (Olivia Cooke) and our protagonist Wade Watson/Parzival (Tye Sheridan) compete in extraordinary events where literally anything can and does happen. Motor races feature Back to the Future’s Delorean roaring alongside Tron’s light cycle and the Batmobile, while a Tyrannosaurus Rex and King Kong take swipes at them. Zero gravity discos merge Saturday Night Fever with Aliens; battles to rival The Lord of the Rings sweep across distant planets, where the Iron Giant battles with Mechagodzilla and there is cause to shout ‘It’s fucking Chucky!’ In a bravura sequence, Spielberg pays homage to his mentor Stanley Kubrick with a prolonged sojourn into The Shining. In the midst of this eye-popping Nerdvana, Ready Player One tells a fairly traditional story where a young hero comes of age, learns the value of friendship and connections in the real world (including first love), while evading the nefarious machinations of corporate scumbag Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn).
What is especially pleasing about Ready Player One is that it demonstrates Spielberg experimenting and delivering with new technology. Previous efforts with motion capture including The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn and The BFG were interesting but lacked a sense of immersion. Here, Spielberg and production designer Adam Stockhausen as well as various effects houses including Digital Domain and Industrial Light and Magic have crafted a world of virtual environments and extraordinary avatars to match and in some cases exceed, well, Avatar. Long takes propel the viewer through incredible vistas that are uncanny in the best sense – different yet also familiar. The action sequences have a visceral thrill despite their virtual nature, the viewer never forgetting that their surroundings exist in a digital framework but experiencing the rush much like the characters. That is Ready Player One’s greatest achievement: with a cinematic marketplace stuffed with familiarity, the film manages to take a plethora of archetypes and trademarks and deliver something that feels wholly fresh and thoroughly exhilarating. For this, it deserves the highest applause.
Kong: Skull Island
Sometimes the most unexpected aspects of a film are the most enjoyable. In the case of Kong: Skull Island, which I enjoyed for multiple reasons, the most delightful aspect was the film’s relation to another film, a relation that is far from accidental and makes KSI an expansion of an established cinematic universe. The question therefore is whether Jordan Vogt-Roberts’ film works on its own or if spends too much time being referential. The answer is most assuredly the former, as Vogt-Roberts crafts an immersive thrill ride with a motley crew of adventurers journeying to the titular island, only to find more than they bargained for. This crew are diverse in terms of gender, race and personality, with tracker James Conrad (Tom Hiddleston), photographer Mason Weaver (Brie Larson), disgruntled US army colonel Preston Packard (Samuel L. Jackson) and visionary Bill Randa (John Goodman), who provides the main link to another film, as well as various other characters that have just enough background to make them more than faceless beast fodder. The 1973 setting, during the US withdrawal from Vietnam, establishes a conceit of humans’ non-superiority in relation to nature. The film explores this premise as several of the characters develop a new appreciation of the environment and their relationship with it. The most important aspect of this is of course Kong himself (played in performance capture by Toby Kebbell, who also plays soldier Jack Chapman), a massive presence who looms over the film even when off screen. Unlike other versions of the big ape, KSI does not overplay a Beauty and the Beast angle, as Weaver is far more capable than Ann Darrow and Kong remains unequivocally wild. This wild otherness gives the film its engrossing atmosphere, which is enhanced by other creatures and never lets up, Vogt-Roberts’ dynamic visual style conveying the thrills and spills of our heroes. With a post-credits scene setting up future developments, this is one island I’ll be keen to revisit.
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is a superb film. It is intelligently written by Mark Bomback, Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, skilfully directed by Matt Reeves (who effectively uses several of the techniques that worked to great effect in Cloverfield and Let Me In), well acted by a talented cast, beautifully shot by Michael Seresin and features truly astonishing visual effects by Weta Digital. The best compliment that can be offered to the effects is that they do not look like effects – at various moments one could swear there was actually a chimpanzee or orang-utan on screen or, at the very least, a performer in a physical suit rather a digital one. And what performers: Andy Serkis rises above Gollum, Kong and his previous performance as Caesar to deliver an astounding portrayal of familial devotion, loyalty, power and violence.
These themes are also central to The Godfather saga, which DOTPOA echoes in its exploration of family tensions and seemingly inevitable violence. We see two communities in conflict, with aggressive survivalists on either side: Dreyfus (Gary Oldman) among the humans and Koba (Toby Kebbell) among the apes, both of whom see only danger in the Other. Equally, there are diplomats who want the two communities to co-exist: Malcolm (Jason Clarke) for the humans and Caesar for the apes. These protagonists are all devoted to their families, Caesar and Malcolm fiercely protective of their respective mates and offspring. Similarly, Caesar, Koba and Dreyfus all give impassioned speeches to unite and motivate their communities. Great loyalty exists (initially) between Caesar and Koba as well as their fellow founders Maurice (Karin Konoval) and Rocket (Terry Notary), as it does between Dreyfus and Malcolm. But each side vies for power in the post-simian flu world of the film, their pursuits fuelled by fear and hatred of the Other, and the film effectively explores the tensions and violence bred by this fear.
The detail of the physical and digital mise-en-scene (supported by on-location performance capture) effectively creates a difficult world to survive in, and this makes the suspicion of the apes and the desperation of the humans palatable. As a result, we are drawn into the escalating tensions until they erupt with terrifying violence. Rather than being a welcome release however, the battle sequences are presented as tragic. Once again, this is reminiscent of The Godfather, which features the steady damnation of Michael Corleone as he gives terrible orders. In DOTPOTA, we see the decline and eventual destruction of two civilised societies, a tragic loss of peace and harmony that the apes had and the humans could have had. Strikingly, the apes become more aggressive and destructive as they become more like humans, increasingly speaking with words rather than sign language and using technology (mainly guns and fire). The swift collapse of the two societies is unmitigated Elizabethan tragedy, DOTPOTA resonating as much with King Lear or Hamlet as previous entries in the POTA franchise as well as other post-apocalyptic dramas such as The Road (John Hillcoat, 2009) and The Book of Eli (the Hughes Brothers, 2010) (which also featured Gary Oldman). It is the grimmest of blockbusters, beginning with the collapse of human civilisation in its startling opening animation, and ending with the first skirmish in (presumably) the War of the Planet of the Apes.
Vincent's Views 