Tag: Mark Rylance

Ready Player One

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Spielberg has long been happy to move between big-budget spectaculars like Jurassic Park (1993) which push the boundaries of what’s possible in film and culturally significant stories like Schindler’s List (1993) which rely less on special effects or reshaping the blockbuster medium. Following Bridge Of Spies (2015) and The Post (2017), Spielberg now brings audiences Ready Player One which represents something he’s been trying to make for years – a movie which gets into the heads of gamers.

Among his earlier forays, The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) felt like a funny mixture of a sequel and an attempt at realising the gamer world (think: racing through fields in vehicles surrounded by numerous running dinosaurs). Subsequent films A.I. (2001) and Minority Report (2002) both boast futuristic environments that might not look out of place in a state of the art video game. Further, the experience of watching The Adventures Of Tintin (2011) recalls the process of actually playing a computer game. Ready Player One is, however, Spielberg’s first film to use gaming and Virtual Reality as its primary subject matter. Here, he finally puts his long-gestating gamer flirtation onto the big screen in all its virtual glory.

Ready Player One opens in 2045 in the futuristic environment of the rapidly developing and overcrowded Columbus, Ohio where trailer park meets high-rise architecture. These strange structures literally stack caravans on top of one another recalling Brazilian favelas. Inside the caravans, people eke out their days playing in a virtual world on headsets to escape the horrors of the real world. What people do inside the virtual world known as The OASIS determines their wealth in coin; a bad move can cost them everything they’ve worked for up ‘til then.

The OASIS’ late designer Halliday (Mark Rylance) decides prior to his death to issue a challenge to his gamers, hiding an Easter egg inside his creation. The finder of the egg will inherit The OASIS to do with as he or she chooses. Ordinary teenager Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan from Detour, effectively Spielberg’s avatar here) is determined to win this contest to escape the oppression of his life. His own avatar Parzival who drives the Delorean from Back To The Future (Robert Zemeckis, 1985) faces friendly competition from the beautiful Art3mis (Olivia Cooke) who rides the bike from Akira (Katsuhiro Otomo, 1988). More perilously perhaps, ruthless antagonist Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn) runs the Innovative Online Industries (IOI) corporation which will stop at nothing to beat all other players and win control of The OASIS. Their evil plan involves monetizing and privatizing the system for political gain.

Borrowing the iconography of the blue creatures from Avatar (James Cameron, 2009), Spielberg introduces Wade firstly as a real-world person, then as an avatar. Wade/Parzival’s friends are, however, introduced primarily as avatars so that you don’t know who they are in the real world – their avatar could be concealing an entirely different age or gender in real life. Some characters do indeed turn out to be very different from their online profiles.

There are some dirty settings in the real world too. Aside from Columbus’ seeming attempt to cram as many people as possible into small living spaces, IOI offers a corporate headquarters populated with helmeted minion employees known as Sixers – denoted by six-digit numbers and not names – where gamers work not for their own enjoyment but to increase the company’s profits. IOI’s Loyalty Centre provides the equivalent of a debtor’s prison wherein individuals are incarcerated and shackled. Locked into parts of The OASIS where they must work off their debt, being charged for the privilege of being housed there so that they can never break the cycle.

Captured and held in the Loyalty Centre, Art3mis finds herself forced together with other unfortunates to plant explosives at regular intervals within a section of The OASIS. People are expendable in IOI’s plan: witness the queue in a frozen wasteland of hopefuls required one by one to play an Atari game on an old-fashioned TV only to descend through breaking ice into the freezing depths below when they lose (as they invariably do).

The majority of the action takes place inside The OASIS where Spielberg stuffs his film full of multiple, largely 80s cultural references from King Kong and, yes, Jurassic Park’s T.Rex to The Iron Giant, MechaGodzilla and Mobile Suit Gundam. Many of these characters live and breath on the screen as impressively as elsewhere in pop culture or moviedom, if not more so. One sequence even enters the world of The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980), which one of Wade’s friends has never seen and thus falls prey to both the flooding blood outside of the lifts and the woman in Room 237. On one level all this is very playful, yet the whole has a deep mythological underpinning as the tale’s lone everyman, helped by an underground resistance movement of like-minded individuals, takes on a vast, profit-oriented organisation.

While it’s hard to believe 2045 will actually look and feel like this, Ready Player One is undeniably timely with the world of Virtual Reality just around the technological corner. It’s a film to see on as big a screen as you possibly can with as much digital detail as that screen will allow thanks to breathtaking, rapid-fire visuals. It’s loud, flashy and moves along at an incredible pace. Still, while that could simply denote the latest vacuous Hollywood blockbuster, there is a lot more going on here beneath the slick and frenetic surface. Moreover, once the narrative leaves the impressive enough futuristic real world for the virtual gaming environment, Spielberg finally pulls off that movie which he has been trying to make for years. Welcome to The OASIS, truly.

Ready Player One is out in the UK on Thursday, March 29th. It’s available on digital streaming on Monday, August 6th. On Netflix in October (2020).

Dunkirk

Posted on by mjbstaging

British filmmaker Christopher Nolan – now one of the highest-grossing film directors in history, with the Dark Knight Trilogy under his belt – has created a complex and multilayered film that cleverly interweaves three separate narrative strands: 1) on land over a week a young soldier (Fionn Whitehead) after he arrives alone at Dunkirk beach and falls in with others (including the music superstar and heartthrob Harry Styles); 2) on sea over a day a small, requisitioned, civilian boat (crew: three) go to bring home trapped combatants; and 3) in the air over an hour three Spitfires fly a sortie. Nolan is fascinated by time and runs these in parallel so that an incident partly revealed in one strand is later retold in another revealing more. There’s a constant sense of the clock ticking differently in the three time frames: mind-bending and exhilarating stuff.

The impressive analogue 70mm IMAX version puts you in there as if you’re escaping death on the way to the beach or in a Spitfire cockpit shooting at/being shot at by the enemy. It has everything you expect from a big screen war movie that small scale drama Churchill lacks. It’s a remarkable insight into the dirty side of being part of a war. The issue is survival: if not everyone can be rescued, who will be? The top brass organising the operation led by Kenneth Branagh must confront this issue to transport the maximum number of men home.

For those who are not familiar the events, the film depicts the Dunkirk evacuation of Allied soldiers from the eponymous beaches and harbour of France, between May 26th and June 4th 1940. It is believed that the extremely risky and unexpectedly successful operation saved the 330,000 British, French, Belgian, and Canadian troops from almost certain death under the surrounding German Army. Hence the “Miracle at Dunkirk” accolade.

As in the best horror films, anyone can die at any time. Not that this is a horror film. English soldiers are gunned down by French friendly fire. Spitfire pilot Tom Hardy’s broken fuel gauge makes him reliant on the pilot in the next plane relaying how much fuel that plane has left. Civilian boat captain Mark Rylance sails into a war zone with no weaponry or means of defence so he can rescue combatants. Shell shocked soldier Cillian Murphy completely loses it and injures someone trying to help him.

Men trapped in a beached boat are fired on from outside the hull by unseen assailants. People are trapped in spaces large or small which water threatens to fill cutting off their air supply. Swimmers covered wholly or partially in oil from crashed aircraft are forced to choose between staying underwater and not breathing and coming up to breathe when an inferno rages above the surface. Life and death situations.

Nolan manages some worrying tilts at British society circa 1940 which resonate today. A young soldier reaches the beach and joins a queue to be told to go elsewhere as this line is reserved exclusively for the Grenadiers. Another soldier who doesn’t speak much is accused by others of being a German spy. And an airman who nearly drowned in action is asked by an embittered evacuee, “where were you when we needed you?” British conformism, value judgments and prejudice are alive and well in the fight for survival. But so too are heroism and being prepared to give one’s life in the fight for a better world. Britain, now as then, is both good and bad.

Dunkirk, however, is consistently good. In fact, it’s likely the most impressive film you’ll see this year. It’s out in the UK on Friday, July 21st (2017). See the analogue 70mm IMAX version at BFI Waterloo London, The Science Museum London or Vue Printworks Manchester if you can.

On Amazon Prime on Thursday, April 1st (2021). Also available on other platforms.

Watch Dunkirk‘s two IMAX trailers below:

And here:

And click here for our review of another British historical film set around the same time, and still out in some UK cinemas.