By Brett Blake As an avowed Steven Spielberg enthusiast (some might say apologist), obviously I was in the tank for READY PLAYER ONE to some extent, and it basically met my exceptions. This is big, splashy fun, a blockbuster without pretensions that serves up a gigantic helping of (somewhat hollow) entertainment with no small amount of flair. It’s 2045. The world is a dreary place. Most find solace and excitement in the Oasis, a sprawling virtual reality world where people can literally go anywhere, do anything, and be anyone in a sort of pop culture heaven. When the creator of the Oasis, James Halliday (Mark Rylance), dies, he sets in motion a Willy Wonka-style contest for all Oasis users: complete three challenges, collect three keys, and claim an Easter Egg which will grant the winner full ownership and control over the Oasis. Enter Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), an average young man who attempts to complete the challenge before dastardly businessman Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), the head of an unscrupulous rival tech company. With the help of a fellow Oasis hotshot named Art3mis (Olivia Cooke) and a motley crew of friends, Wade finds himself thrust adventure. Fundamentally, READY PLAYER ONE shows that Steven Spielberg is still at the height of his directorial powers, and he’s dipping back into the “crowd-pleasing blockbuster” part of his skill set in a more pronounced way than he has for pretty much his entire 21st century output so far. He has made better movies than this over the last 18 years, but there’s a pure-hearted desire to entertain on display in this which works. This is almost a sort of comfort food movie, and its ambitions are not particularly higher than that; some will find fault with that, feeling that there’s not enough substance here, and that would be fair. However, I think there’s a real exuberance on display in Spielberg’s direction, and that goes a long way. The movie is a celebration of nostalgia, there’s no question; the amount of joy that Spielberg clearly derives from this stuff is absolutely evident in the way he stages things. However, there is a tiny bit of complexity at play, too. This is not total elevation of nostalgia with no strings attached -- there is a slight touch of ambivalence present (particularly in how the movie presents the character of Halliday), and the way in which the story resolves sends you out of the theater on a high note, sure, but also with a little bit of something extra to chew on. Ultimately the movie posits that nostalgia (and by extension, the online “world”) is good and fun, but it shouldn’t consume you, otherwise you’re just constantly looking backwards and missing chances in front of you. This is fairly lightweight stuff in intellectual terms, and again, some will find it too light (if not empty), but to me, there’s just enough of it to keep the movie from being simply a braindead spectacle. The narrative of the film is built around the spine of the three challenges that Wade (and eventually his allies) must complete. The first - a dazzling car chase through New York City - has been heavily featured in the marketing, as has the third - a massive siege of an armored fortress. However, the second challenge has been kept hidden from view in the trailers, and that’s for good reason: it is a wonderful surprise of enormous proportions, and one best discovered within the movie itself. It is a jaw-dropping homage to a much-loved movie from the 1980s, and it is brought to life with such care and affection from Spielberg that it’s impossible not to be at least a little charmed by it. As the sequence began, I almost couldn’t believe what I was seeing, and it will surely be one of 2018’s movie high points at the end of the year. Fans of the particular film being homaged (and more than homaged, replicated) are in for a real treat. Some of READY PLAYER ONE’s effectiveness for any given audience member will inevitably depend on how much that movie-goer is familiar with the dozens upon dozens of movies, games, and shows the movie explicitly references on an almost nonstop basis. In a certain sense, the references provide a bit of something for everyone, but somebody who is really attuned to so-called “geek culture,” or who grew up in the 1980s, will likely find more here to enjoy than somebody who isn’t as plugged into to that stuff. The good news is that the narrative is not dependent upon those references; they’re there (and everywhere!), but they’re the icing on the cake, not the cake itself. The story still functions as its own thing, and while aesthetic changes would be necessary, there could have easily been a non-pop-culture-infused version of this basic tale, and it could have been effective on its own. It’s a simple plot, and one with familiar contours, but it’s strong enough to hold up - and sustain - the added dressing and trappings of the homages and the cameos and the references. A few words about READY PLAYER ONE’s music, both the score and the song choices. Composer Alan Silvestri’s resume - which includes such 1980s classics as BACK TO THE FUTURE, WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT, PREDATOR, and THE ABYSS - made him a perfect choice to fill-in for usual Spielberg collaborator John Williams. Silvestri’s score is big and bright, featuring an unabashedly old-fashioned and upbeat main theme, and Spielberg allows Silvestri several moments for the score to really shine. It’s a throwback for Silvestri, and it’s neat to hear him reach back to some of his ‘80s sound. In terms of the songs, Spielberg has chosen some killer needle drops; yes, many of them are fairly obvious choices, but obvious doesn’t always mean bad, and it’s great fun to hear some hits of the era underscoring a movie whose aesthetics and effects stand firmly in the 21st century. That type of anachronistic contrast always runs the risk of being pandering or silly, but that’s not the case here with Spielberg’s guidance. At the end of the day, it’s impossible that READY PLAYER ONE will achieve the kind of resonance that Spielberg’s greatest blockbusters have, but the movie does feel like a genuine, hand-delivered gift to his fans and the mass audience hungry for quality pop cinema. READY PLAYER ONE just has such an eagerness to please; in lesser hands, this material could have so easily slipped into the realms of the obnoxious or the overbearing, but in Steven Spielberg’s hands, it’s extremely entertaining.
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By Brett Blake A sequel that nobody was asking for usually has a tough road ahead of it, and that proves to be the case with PACIFIC RIM: UPRISING. Despite a game cast (almost all of whom are wasted) and some fun monster hijinks (which mostly arrive too late in the game), this movie is - for the most part - lifeless and empty. Picking up 10 years after the events of the first movie, UPRISING concerns Jake Pentecost (John Bodega), son of one of the heroes of the original movie and a reluctant teacher of a new generation of pilots in the Jaegar program: the giant robots which protect the planet from the monstrous kaiju, which haven’t been seen in a decade but are (for some reason) still thought to pose a threat. Jake must overcome friction with a former friend, Nate Lambert (Scott Eastwood), and teach his 15-year old protege, Amara Namani (Cailee Spaeny). And in the background, a sinister new drone program may pose the greatest threat of all... The main thing about PACIFIC RIM: UPRISING is this: it’s not a good movie. It nominally functions as a movie, it hits certain beats that it thinks movies need to hit, but there’s an utter emptiness here -- a soulless quality -- that stands in striking contrast to the first PACIFIC RIM... which itself was far from a perfect movie! That film, though certainly silly and with only enough plot and character development to justify the massive action setpieces, at least had heart, a feeling of whimsy, and artistic flair courtesy of its director, Guillermo del Toro. UPRISING feels (ironically) robotic, like a calculation, a facsimile. It’s purely product, designed to appeal to demographics in the Asian markets where the first PACIFIC RIM performed well at the box office. This is not a movie concerned with being particularly good. Its only concern is with making money overseas, and that’s blatantly obvious at the script level, because the characters here are so thinly, broadly sketched that it’s almost insulting. However, that will make it easier to be translated into the various foreign languages of the countries where the studio hopes it can make some money. There’s no real depth, no compelling dynamics or relationships between characters; they exist only as necessary cogs in the machine, and one gets the sense that if the filmmakers could have figured out a way to present a movie without any characters at all, they would have. There’s also unnecessary - and uninteresting - nonsense about corporate intrigue which serves only to pad out the running time, and to provide the story with an ostensible villain (and in fairness, this angle is so far out-of-nowhere that it’s almost interesting). The script also features some of the most painful exposition in recent memory. But I will also say this: after making the audience slog through an eye-rollingly dull and painfully unfunny (but, boy, does it think it’s funny!) first half, the movie does eventually unleash some agreeably goofy giant monster madness in its back half. In contrast to the first PACIFIC RIM, which staged the majority of its big setpieces at night/in the rain/underwater, UPRISING sets most of its action in the daytime, which this gives those sequences a bright, colorful flair, and that feels like really the only aspect where this movie brings anything different to the table compared to the first. The downside to this is that the harsh light is not particularly kind to the CGI, rendering the battle sequences - essentially - cartoons. There is some playfulness to be found in this stuff, though, which is more than can be said for the drudgery of the human (so-called) drama. In terms of the acting, John Boyega is forced to coast purely on his inherent charisma and likability, because the screenplay saddles him with an unconvincing and contrived character journey that is both entirely superfluous and perfunctory, the double-whammy of badness. Really, the only true bright spot in the cast is Cailee Spaeny as Amara; she’s playing a stock “type” (the tough, street-smart kid who deep down just wants to belong), but Spaeny brings energy and plausibility to the role. She an appealing, very naturalistic performer who takes what could have been an annoyingly-cliched part and makes it grounded and memorable. PACIFIC RIM: UPRISING is just not a movie that needs to exist, and one gets the sense that most involved knew that was the case as it was being made. It’s not aggressively bad or unwatchable, and just on a surface level I suppose it’s possible for somebody to get something out of it, but ultimately it’s a big misfire.
By Brett Blake
Breanne Brennan joins me once again (in an annual tradition) to extensively break down this year’s Oscar nominations in advance of this Sunday night’s Academy Awards ceremony. We go into exhaustive detail, offering our thoughts on the nominees, which ones we think will win, which ones we’d prefer to win, and some alternative nominees that didn’t make the Oscars cut... but should have! The full nominations list for this year can be found HERE, so you can follow along with us if you like! Disclaimer: The Cinematic Confab is a non-profit entertainment and analysis podcast. All audio clips and music cues used are the property of their individual copyright holders. They are presented here under the banner of “Fair Use,” for the purpose of analysis, criticism, and/or humor. No infringement of copyright is intended. |
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