Spielberg master of beautiful game
(Cert 12A; 140mins)
READY Player One invites us into a world of pure imagination as Steven Spielberg revisits the territory that made him a box-office giant.
It is a fantasy adventure set inside a virtual reality universe and feels like an ambitious reworking of Tron blended with a fond nostalgia for a host of 1980s pop culture highlights from Back To The Future to Duran Duran.
It is clever and endearing and there are some magical moments but it never feels like anything more than a big-screen computer game.
Ready Player One is based on Ernest Cline’s science-fiction novel and set in Columbus, Ohio, in 2045. The future looks grim. Drought has struck and cities have fallen so everyone escapes their worries by entering a virtual reality universe called the Oasis.
It is a second home for orphan Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) who dons a headset, assumes the avatar of Parzival and experiences all the adventure he will never know in real life. In the Oasis you can be anyone you want to be and enjoy the thrill ride of your dreams.
The Oasis was created by the late James Halliday (Mark Rylance), an eccentric combination of Walt Disney and Steve Jobs. It is five years since his death and nobody has yet solved the challenge he left behind. There are three keys hidden within the Oasis and whoever finds those keys and solves some clues will win control of his creation.
That’s the cue for a swashbuckling romp through a series of races, contests and puzzles in which Wade bonds with friendly rivals such as Samantha (Olivia Cooke) and Aech (Lena Waithe) and finds himself on a collision course with evil corporate baddie Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn).
The games within Oasis are a lot of fun as we whizz through multicoloured landscapes at breakneck speed, barely stopping to acknowledge the presence of King Kong, the Iron Giant, Beetlejuice, a dinosaur, a DeLorean car, a disco boogie in the style of Saturday Night Fever and so much more. It is as if someone has created a giant theme park largely devoted to half a century of Spielberg films and influences.
The most inspired sequence has Wade and his friends pitched into the frame of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, swept along corridors of blood or trying to escape an axe-wielding maniac.
What brings Ready Player One crashing back to earth is the simplistic story. Sorrento is just a standard-issue bad guy who wants to make pots of money out of the Oasis, regardless of the impact on individual lives and there is nothing Ben Mendelsohn can do to make him less one-dimensional.
The blossoming romance between Wade and Samantha is sweet but unexceptional and there is nothing that creates the sense of awe and wonder that Spielberg accomplished so memorably in ET.
There are thrills and spills aplenty in Ready Player One but not much heart and soul.
JOURNEYMAN (Cert 15; 92mins)
PADDY CONSIDINE pours his heart and soul into Journeyman, a boxing drama telling a very different story to the triumphalist Rocky films.
Writer/director Considine stars as Matty Burton, a middleweight champion preparing to defend his title. He is dedicated to his training, focused on the fight and devoted to his wife Emma (Jodie Whittaker) and their baby daughter.
Unlike other boxing films, Journeyman is more interested in what happens after the fight. Matty retains his title but he is at home shortly afterwards when he collapses and is rushed to hospital with injuries that require brain surgery. The true battle begins as he tries to regain his speech, movement, memory and any sense of the man he once was.
Considine cuts a convincing figure in the ring and is very touching through a gruelling recovery marked by mood swings, unpredictable acts of violence and a child-like dependence on others.
Whittaker is underused as his supportive wife and other elements of the story could have been more developed but this is still a sincere, heartfelt
saga of a valiant struggle against impossible odds.
bLOCKeRS (Cert 15; 102mins)
RAGING teenage hormones are on a collision course with deeply overprotective parents in Blockers, an adult comedy that mixes refreshing attitudes with an abundance of bad-taste jokes.
Julie (Kathryn Newton), Kayla (Geraldine Viswanathan) and Sam (Gideon Adlon) have been best friends since their first day at school. Now it is prom night and they are determined to have the time of their lives, making a pact to lose their virginity on the same night.
When parents Lisa (Leslie Mann), Mitchell (John Cena) and Hunter (Ike Barinholtz) learn of the pact they set out to do everything they can to prevent any hanky-panky.
Blockers has some funny moments but it is crude, the slapstick feels laboured and it turns preachy as the parents learn some valuable lessons about letting go and trusting their teenagers to make their own decisions. The film shows enough early promise to suggest it could have been better.
ISLe Of DOGS (Cert PG; 101mins)
WES ANDERSON doesn’t just make films, he lovingly creates entire worlds, painstaking in their attention to detail and celebrating the quirky and the profound. Isle Of Dogs is one of his most richly imaginative and fully realised delights, building on the stop-motion animation techniques used in his adaptation of Fantastic Mr Fox.
In the near future Japan has suffered an outbreak of “canine flu”. All dogs are quarantined on Trash Island where food is scarce and conditions are brutal. Twelve-year-old Atari Kobayashi (voiced by Koyu Rankin) is desperate to discover the fate of his beloved dog Spots (Liev Schreiber) so he undertakes a one-boy rescue mission.
Landing on Trash Island he encounters five dogs: Chief (Bryan Cranston), Rex (Edward Norton), Boss (Bill Murray), Duke (Jeff Goldblum) and King (Bob Balaban). They soon join Atari on a noble quest that unfolds with bravery, deadpan humour and the kind of selfless devotion that brings a lump to the throat. An original, beguiling and often witty treat of a film.
tHe bACHeLORS (Cert 15; 97mins)
A FATHER and son struggle to overcome their loss in The Bachelors, a tearjerker given conviction by a fine cast.
Widowed after 33 years of blissful marriage, teacher Bill Palet (JK Simmons) and his teenage son Wes (Josh Wiggins) try to start over in Los Angeles. Bill begins work at a fancy all-boys school run by an old friend while Wes attempts to make friends and fit in as the school’s newest pupil.
Whiplash Oscar winner JK Simmons is especially touching as a man lost in a fog of grief and unable to let go of the past. His gruff stoicism and quiet despair sets a restrained tone for the early stages of a film that grows increasingly sentimental as French teacher Carine (Julie Delpy) transforms both of their lives, befriending Bill and hiring Wes as a French tutor for her notoriously difficult student Lacey (Odeya Rush).
Thereafter the film is all too predictable but it doesn’t entirely ruin this touching drama.
tHe ISLANDS AND tHe WHALeS (Cert 12A; 80mins)
HUMANITY’S disastrous impact on the planet is illustrated in The Islands And The Whales, a documentary set amid the harsh beauty of the Faroe Islands.
Its 48,000 residents have always lived off the bounty of the sea and the skies. Now they are urged to stop hunting whales because their meat contains dangerous levels of mercury, the bird population is dwindling and there is plastic in the bodies of puffins and gannets that were once a staple part of the diet.
The threats to their way of life have implications for the planet in this thought-provoking film.
LOOK bACK IN ANGeR (Cert PG; 99mins)
IT IS almost 60 years since Richard Burton played angry young man Jimmy Porter in the screen version of John Osborne’s landmark play.
The film is revived as a part of a season celebrating Woodall Films, a company that did so much to nurture new voices in the British cinema of the 1960s.
Burton was too old to convince as young Jimmy but he brings an intense energy to the self-loathing of a disaffected graduate at odds with the establishment.