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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.
Review of the Year – 2016
There is significant consensus that 2016 was a thoroughly horrible year, with the deaths of many beloved figures and the ascension of hateful policies and individuals. However, the rot did not affect film releases, which remain as varied as any year. Perhaps inevitably, many films passed me by but, nonetheless, here are my top twelve films of 2016, and all titles ranked in order of preference. As always, my list is based on U.K. release dates.
Top Twelve (in musical form)
On the twelfth day of Christmas
The movies gave to me
Twelve Anthropoids
Eleven United Kingdoms
Ten Revenants
Nine Eagle Hunts
Eight Big Shorts
Seven Spotlight scoops
Six Strange Doctors
Five Noc-tur-nal Animals
Four Eyes in the Sky
Three Zootopians
Two in a Room and
A heptapod Arrival!
In more traditional list format:
Film of the Year: An eerie, enthralling, exquisitely balanced, inspiring and magnificent sci-fi drama.
A sublime, magnificent, heartwarming, heartbreaking tale of the terrible and the wonderful.
A brilliantly inventive, hilariously zany, poignant and intelligent anthropomorphic comedy.
A tense, nerve-shredding thriller of surveillance, globalization, military, political and ethical conundrums.
An exquisite, haunting, beautiful and intoxicating drama, suffused with style, pain and regret.
Inception crossed with The Matrix, enhanced with Harry Potter and amped up to ‘Are You Nuts?!’
An enthralling, absorbing, compelling journalism thriller about community, tradition and responsibility.
An equally hilarious and horrifying tale of economic, intellectual and moral bankruptcy.
An enthralling, inspiring tale of courage, determination and the tensions between genders, tradition and modernity, wilderness and civilization.
An immersive, enthralling, ethereal yet tactile portrait of survival, nature and revenge.
An epic yet intimate tale of love, duty, defiance and justice, in equal parts angering and uplifting.
An exquisitely detailed, brutally grim and unflinchingly gruelling wartime thriller.
Honourable Mentions
A gripping, atmospheric, terrifying Iranian Gothic of fears both natural and supernatural.
A dark, gripping tale of fractured minds, damaged lives, voyeurism and victimhood.
An unsentimental yet heartwarming and progressive tale of hardship, courage and strategy.
An intricate, stylish tale of identity, loyalty, moral, legal and financial interconnections.
A measured, melancholic and gripping modern western of bonds and devotion between little people.
A measured yet thrilling, warm and intelligent sci-fi adventure of duty, family and purpose.
A gorgeously imaginative and sumptuously realised tale of storytelling, destiny and belonging.
A fast, furious blend of high octane action, knowing humour and politically incorrect fun.
A truly epic super-bonanza of power, regret, choice and destiny.
An intense, gripping globe-trotting revenge thriller of loyalty and the proper uses of power.
A gorgeously designed, sometimes meandering but ultimately uplifting retelling of a timeless tale.
A stirring, planet-hopping, slightly unbalanced but compelling sci-fi war movie.
Pretty Solid
A warm, wacky and wild watery wonder of family, memory and destiny.
A sweeping, moving and enthralling romantic epic of repression, duty, desire and love.
A squifflingly scrumdiddlyumptious felim of dreams, delights and whizzpopping wonder.
A grim, brooding, lumpenly paced yet intriguing exploration of power and our responses to it.
A gorgeous, sumptuous adult fairy tale of identity, duty and desire.
Decent Enough
An endearing and moving portrayal of connection and choice, in equal parts heartwarming and heartbreaking.
A slick, stylish sci-fi tale of memory, identity and the panopticon.
A sharp, witty and often hilarious buddy comedy of 70s’ shadow and sleaze.
A grim, gripping, muscular thriller of concerns new and old.
A boisterous and energetically scrappy if somewhat overstretched paranormal comedy adventure.
A shambolic but stylish assembly of freakish figures and super villainous set pieces.
Disappointing
A politically correct and well orchestrated if sanitised and far from operatic action western.
A detailed, measured period spy romance of loyalties, devotion and nostalgia.
An atmospheric and sometimes gripping but also unbalanced and messy thriller.
A quirky, creepy, kaleidoscopic portrayal of Sartrean social insanity in the Infernal Tower.
An over-designed but still stylish splat of a fantasy epic.
Turkeys
An attractively designed but uneven and lacklustre fantasy adventure.
A hollow, preposterous, unengaging, mess of a thriller.
Turkey of the Year: a disparate, discordant and messily inferior sequel.
The BFG
Roald Dahl and Steven Spielberg are significant parts of many childhoods. Both artists use an exquisite method of storytelling that captures that most elusive of elements – true wonder. It is, therefore, perhaps surprising that Spielberg has not directed an adaptation of a Dahl novel until now, but it was the worth the wait as The BFG delivers exactly what could be expected of this dream combination. From the lovingly crafted streets of London to the intricate maze of the Big Friendly Giant’s (Mark Rylance) home and workshop, Spielberg and production designers Rick Carter and Robert Stromberg place the viewer in the position of the enchanting Sophie (Ruby Barnhill) as she learns about giants, Giant Country and dreams. DOP Janusz Kaminsky lenses the film in soft hues, while capturing two bravura sequences in single shots. These set pieces convey wonder and thrills both as spectacle and experience, while screenwriter Melissa Mathison imbues the Buckingham Palace sequences with Queen Elizabeth II (Penelope Wilton) with laugh out loud comedy moments. Performance capture and digital effects bring the BFG to startling life, Rylance’s performance one of charming innocence which rivals that of Sophie. This guileless innocence and childlike charm are the greatest strengths of the film, even if at times it is thematically insubstantial. Reminiscent in its finest moments of Spielberg and Mathison’s previous collaboration, E. T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, The BFG confirms Spielberg’s place as Hollywood’s enduring crafter of cinematic dreams, and the timelessness of Dahl’s beautiful storytelling.
Vincent's Views 