(Don't You) Forget About The 80's

Year: 2018

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn

Run Time: 2 hours 20 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Of all the properties that exist out there in this wide world of ours, Ready Player One was probably the one most begging for the Steven Spielberg treatment. A parade of nostalgia triggers for people who grew up in the 80's, who could be a better match than the man who shepherded so many of those childhoods with his visionary blockbusters? Unfortunately, that man doesn't exist anymore. Who we got is the guy who made The Post and Lincoln and The BFG. And I didn't want to do this to you, but let me remind you that Bridge of Spies is a thing that happened.

Now can you relate to people who want to escape their own reality?

In Ready Player One, we meet our hero Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) in a futuristic Columbus, Ohio trailer park in the gently dystopian future of 2045. Famines and poverty have caused many people to want to shrink back from the real world, so they've become obsessed with the virtual reality open-world game of the OASIS. When the game's creator Jim Halliday (Mark Rylance) dies, he reveals that has he created an Easter Egg hunt, where the first person to find all three of the keys he has hidden throughout the OASIS will become the sole proprietor of the entire game.

This business model clearly has some glaring flaws, the biggest being the fact that the wicked company IOI has hired expert drones, led by Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), to crack the codes as quickly and efficiently as possible and thus own the biggest tech resource on the planet. But only the true fanboys and girls know enough about Halliday's past and his favorite old movies and video games to be able to get to the heart of the hunt. As the two factions get closer and closer to the finish line, Wade, under his online alias Parzival, must team up with other players, including his crush Art3mis (Olivia Cooke), his best friend Aech (Lena Waithe, a casting decision the movie doesn't want you to know at first, but the marketing has already blown to ribbons), and the prominent Japanese players Daito (Win Morisaki) and Sho (Philip Zhao).

And the true key to the heart of America, pop culture references. 

It's no use beating around the bush. The novel Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline (the screenwriter behind the execrable Star Wars-fellating road comedy Fanboys), is hot garbage. It's an incoherent, blithering mass of pop culture references that is mostly just a list of obscure anime and John Hughes movies masquerading as an adventure plot. It's an insufferable piece that beats the drum of nostalgia so fiercely that it rips right through the very fabric of art.

Ready Player One the movie is a massive improvement, because it almost completely throws away everything the book was working with. Some of this is due to necessity: you can't turn this crap into a movie. And you can't keep a plot moving when every challenge involves sitting down and playing an Atari game for hours. Other improvements are the invention of the filmmakers, like the fact that the egg hunt relies on the players being able to dig into Halliday's past and uncover more about his character, rather than random 80's detritus like his top 10 favorite music cues from Tron or whatever.

I can't say there were a lot of decisions in the making of either the book or the movie that were truly great, but that character exploration is certainly one of them. I'm not sure I'm loving what Mark Rylance is putting down with his performance here (it's very nebbish and Mark Zuckerberg-y, with a certain scatterbrained, naïve charm, but it slips into feeling like a monologue from Dexter's Laboratory a little too often for my liking - although the way this illustrates the difference between the real life version of him and his in-game avatar is truly special), but converting Halliday into an actual character - rather than a Willy Wonka who makes Monty Python references instead of chocolate bars - was a genius move.

That hairpiece not so much, but you can't have everything.

One area however where the film truly fails is the character of Art3mis. It shouldn't have been hard to make her not a Manic Pixie Virtual Reality Girl, but they actually made her role even more reductive and pointless. More reductive and pointless than something in an Ernest Cline novel. Let that sink in. Whereas in the book she was just as knowledgable about 80's trivia as the rest of the egg hunters, to the point that she was incredibly famous in the OASIS (a girl who knows pop culture? I'm quivering already), here she only exists to gasp with delight whenever Wade explains things to her, then reward herself to him as the ultimate prize.

Her position as ego-booster to this nerdy dweeb is demonstrated in this unwatchable scene where he throws on a Bee Gee's track and she grins, complimenting him on being "old school." Girl, this is the OASIS! People give lectures on the biographies of Atari programmers and treat Buckaroo Banzai like it's a cornerstone of world cinema. Everything is old school!

If only any of the people making this movie had an actual woman to consult with.

But enough about characters. This movie is meant to be a visual spectacle, and I guess that's what it is. The unreality of the OASIS prevents the CGI technicians from having to go out of their way to make things seem realistic, which is both a blessing and a curse. It allows things to become stylized in an interesting way (the OASIS' interface and item screens are actually pretty intuitive and fun extrapolations from modern gameplay), but it too frequently becomes a maelstrom of unintelligible pixels flying around in muddy clumps of mottled color. Also, I'm not really even sure what Steven Spielberg had to do on set, because a good 75% of the movie is literally just a cartoon. This explains why he was able to make an entire The Post while this film was still in production.

The only time where the visuals truly come alive and work within the story's pop culture milieu to create something unique and spectacular is a scene that turns The Shining into an interactive minigame, delightfully combining old film stock with 3D CGI in an impressive feat of creativity that easily trumps the analogous moment in the book.

Unfortunately, aside from that scene, not a lot in Ready Player One is anything more than basically watchable. The run time never feels punishing thankfully, but you don't feel fully swept up into the world of the film. Maybe it's the endless, frustrating expository dialogue. Maybe it's the lame plot points involving Post-It notes. Maybe it's the odious cameo from an autopilot T. J. Miller. Maybe its Alan Silvestri's shallow John Williams impression on the soundtrack. But there's a lot here that just doesn't click.

Ready Player One might be a massive improvement on the source material, but that novel was so dire that even taking leaps and bounds above it leaves you in a very average, unimpressive place. That said, it's still the best movie Spielberg has turned out in years, unless The BFG was a secret masterpiece, because I surely haven't gotten around to seeing that one.

TL;DR: Ready Player One is a gleaming popcorn movie, but it can't escape the deep, deadly flaws of its source material.
Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 1275

Captain's Slog: Stardate Summer 2016

Year: 2016

Director: Justin Lin

Cast: Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Karl Urban 

Run Time: 2 hours 2 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Forgive me reader, for I have sinned. I have never seen a single episode of any Star Trek series. Hardcore sci-fi fandom is a little above my pay grade. However, I have seen J. J. Abrams’ 2009 lens flare expo Star Trek, so I feel perfectly capable of reviewing Star Trek Beyond, the reason I’ve gathered you here today. However, I’m not certain Star Trek Beyond is capable of being reviewed, because it’s the most Movie movie I’ve ever encountered.

It might as well be called Captain Whiteguy and the MacGuffin Adventure.

Directed by Justin Lin of the Fast and/or Furious franchise, for the first time in this new continuity the screen is actually visible, but you kind of wish it wasn’t. Or at least, you don’t need it to be, because every beat is exactly as predictable and nonsensical as every other sci-fi/fantasy adventure in the past 40 years. Captain James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) is getting weary of space travel, probably because he still doesn’t have a  love interest, and this film is all about slam-jammin’ forced romances into every nook and cranny. 

He is considering stepping down and letting Commander Spock (Zachary Quinto) take the lead of his crew: sassy doctor Bones (Karl Urban), visibly bored Spock love interest Lt. Uhura (Zoe Saldana), outrageously Scottish engineer Scotty (Simon Pegg, who also co-wrote this film), totally organically gay pilot Sulu (John Cho), and I’m-not-actually-sure-what-he-does Chekov (Anton Yelchin, may he rest in peace). But before Kirk calls it quits, he’ll go on One Last Mission.

Guess how that goes. The USS Enterprise is dealt a devastating blow by the forces of Krall (Idris Elba) who desperately seeks the MacGuffin they have on the ship for no good reason. They crash land on an uncharted planet and must survive the wilderness, relocate the rest of their team, and stop Krall from wreaking wicked, MacGuffiny havoc on a nearby federation base, which the movie stops dead for five minutes to show us the majesty of, even though it looks almost exactly like an M.C. Escher version of that city from the beginning of Guardians of the Galaxy.

Zoe Saldana was probably having flashbacks.

The Star Trek franchise is finally free of its lens flare prison. Praise Roddenberry! But nature abhors a vacuum, and so does Hollywood. So they’ve replaced J. J. Abrams’ shiny crutch with a truly shocking profusion of camera spins. The frame rotates this way and that like the DP used a Lazy Susan instead of a tripod, even using spinning shots as reactions to other spinning shots. It’s like being strapped to a windmill and it’s massively unpleasant.

A frustrating aesthetic is a bad starting point when your movie is this numbingly generic, because once you break through that crust there’s nothing really worth digesting on the inside. It feels like a story written with a randomized cliché generator (which might be thanks to the dozen or so studios that collaborated on this film), mixing personal favorites like “they’ve been watching us this whole time,” the convenient injury that’s only debilitating when the plot needs drama, and the Big Evil Thing in the Sky over a City, mixed with some Abrams Star Trek standbys like people having long conversations while their ship is being actively destroyed, and ludicrous technobabble monologues split between a dozen people to keep things snappy.

It’s the “celebrity PSA” method of screenwriting.

Unfortunately, Star Trek Beyond opens on one of its strongest sequence, an adventure-of-the-week scenario that depicts Captain Kirk doing his best Jason Bateman impression in a silly popcorn movie diplomatic mission. From here, you would assume that the movie will be full of frothy summer fun, but it quickly devolves once more into dour, self-serious didacticism. That unabashed goofiness returns in spurts, especially in the interplay between Spock and Bones (the only time Quinto is given anything to do other than being the film’s conduit for mourning Leonard Nimoy), but for the most part Beyond is just one more plodding downer in a summer heavy with them.

It finally loosens up for a pair of decent action sequences in the preamble to the finale, and the heavy-handed climax does do some fun (if geographically vexing) things with antigravity, but it’s too little too late for a film that already had a slippery grasp on merely being middling

It’s a thoroughly watchable CGI-laden blockbuster for the majority of its runtime, especially thanks to a charming new character played by Kingsman’s Sofia Boutella, but when Star Trek Beyond is bad, it’s atrocious. The dialogue is so wooden I’m surprised the actors’ mouths didn’t get splinters, and certain scenes are so overloaded with crashing, screeching sound effects that the words are plumb inaudible. But when you’re watching the crew tear through a bundle of half-assed video game levels, I suppose the script isn’t all that necessary.

Star Trek beyond may have shucked off the visually despicable deficiencies of the tyrant J. J. Abrams, but the franchise is left a shallow husk of itself. I suppose it’s too late to warn you away, but man what a miserable move year this is shaping up to be.

TL;DR: Star Trek Beyond is a hideously generic, mildly diverting blockbuster.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 894

Reviews In This Series
Star Trek (Abrams, 2009)
Star Trek Beyond (Lin, 2016)

Barmageddon

Year: 2013

Director: Edgar Wright

Cast: Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Martin Freeman

Run Time: 1 hour 49 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

We as a culture are rather obsessed with the end of the world, aren't we?

Perhaps this is a reaction to the massively misplaced hated of the generation that has come to be known as the "millennials." According to web news outlets, BuzzFeed articles, and angry bloggers, we millennials are less intelligent, less informed, more selfish, and so detached from the world that we may as well exist on a planet called "Tumblr."

This is patently wrong, of course. This is the topic for a rather different essay, so I won't expound on my opinions quite as vehemently as I might in conversation. But nevertheless a greatly misinformed older generation is contemplating a future filled with idiots in power (I'm not gonna go there), an inevitable economic downturn, and various bits and bobs of outlandishly pessimistic terrors.

It's no surprise that the end of the world has transfixed our current tastemakers, especially with the appeal of the deliciously sensational Mayan Apocalypse theory of 2012.

Thus audiences were inundated with songs like Britney Spears' "Till the World Ends" and Jay Sean's "2012 (It Ain't the End)" and the less obvious "Give Me Everything," a song about getting' busy because "we might not get tomorrow."

And of course Roland Emmerich had to jump on the bandwagon (what with his predilection for exploding American skylines) with 2009's 2012. Evidently he struck a chord as his worldwide disaster film made $800 million globally.

Nihilism still runs rampant even after the imminent apocalypse has come and gone.

So that's how we can end up with two major wide-release summer comedies that center around the end of the world. This is the End set cinemas ablaze in June and summer was capped off by Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright's final entry into the unofficial Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and...), The World's End.

Oh yeah, I'm talking about a movie. Whoops.

The film follows the efforts of alcoholic Gary King (Simon Pegg) to reunite his childhood group of friends and complete a pub crawl they attempted just after graduation. Their hometown has twelve pubs (whose names subtly reflect the progression of the story in true Cornetto fashion) called the Golden Mile. Their plan to drink a pint at each of these pubs was derailed something fierce by a bad crop of... drug cigarettes,

Since then the friends have drifted apart. Andy (Nick Frost) is a bland teetotaler. Oliver (Martin Freeman) is a successful real estate agent (I mean "real estate crumpet," or whatever the hell they call it in England) with a bluetooth glued to his ear (a cliché that I'm not entirely sure still holds water). Steven (Paddy Considine) is a recently divorced man who spent his teenagehood in Gary's shadow, losing girls to him left and right - most painfully the beautiful Sam (Rosamund Pike), Oliver's little sister. Also there's Peter (Eddie Marsan), who... I don't even know. He's something. He's the least important.

As they go along their journey, they begin to realize that most, if not all of the inhabitants of their hometown have been replaced by murderous robots.

Either that or he accidentally broke open a glow stick. They warn you about that.

The trilogy's classic standard of rapid fire jokes and cuts is back in full force, but it is in support of a much more subdued narrative. There's a lot to unpack about The World's End, and while it's certainly the most intelligent and layered film of its brethren, this is at the expense of out and out hilarity. Where Shaun of the Dead is like being sprayed with a fire hose of comedy, The World's End is more like taking a warm bath.

There are some great and hilarious moments in here of course, that's to be expected for this team of artists. But Wright and Co. are a bit more grown up than in 2004 and commentary about growing up (and apart) and the "Starbucking" of society are more at the forefront. Global homogenization is a topic ripe to be skewered and it is done better here than anywhere else, but it's really just not as punchy.

Perhaps it's not fair to hold The World's End up to the light of the other two movies of what is only nominally a trilogy, but it's just human nature. Life is unfair.

In a righteous world, we'd all have British accents.

So what we have here is an admittedly funny screenplay that's content to be more sober than its brethren. Pun intended.

But when the action gets kicked up a notch (and it does, oh believe you me it does) and the protagonists fend for their lives, the film shines bright as the glowing eyes of imminent doom. The robot fight scenes are truly inspired, filled with wacky slapstick, wry dialogue, and some truly impressive choreography. It plays like the daydream of every youngster who grew up through the Stars, both Trek and Wars, fantasizing about conquering planets in a galaxy far far away.

With these scenes to buoy the narrative, the film never drags. And, I need to make this clear, the movie is really pretty freaking funny all the way through (save one unfortunately repeated joke that relies too heavily on the phrase "WTF" and rings with all the clarity of the Liberty Bell).

The ending is pretty weird, but what are you gonna do?

All in all, The World's End is a film that really isn't meant for my demographic. It's a tender and human depiction of men growing up and entering middle age, which isn't exactly something I can relate to, try as I might. One for the parents, perhaps, with enough sizzling bite and snarky British comedy to propel any younger viewers alongside them.

Unfortunately, most of the adults I've talked to have been put off by one element of the film or another, most commonly the high octane robot angle. So The World's End is a trapeze artist swinging madly over the net, reaching for but never quite grabbing either side. And that's a darn shame.

But still. Robots.

TL;DR: The World's End is content to be more sedate than its predecessors, but still packs a punch.

Rating: 7/10

Should I Spend Money On This? It's all but out of theaters at this point, but I'd say run out to see it while you still can. I want to be proven wrong about the film missing its demographic goals.

Word Count: 1104