IT’S TIME TO BE AMAZED!
Spielberg takes us on an exhilarating sci-fi joyride into the world of videogames and the 1980s
Ready Player One (12A) Verdict: Mad, but entertaining ★★★★✩ Isle of Dogs (PG) Verdict: Barkingly original ★★★★✩
Anyone who wants to plunge back into the eighties this easter Weekend can either go to see nik Kershaw in concert in Bridlington, or, perhaps more conveniently, seek out Ready Player one at their nearest multiplex.
Steven Spielberg’s exhilarating sci-fi blockbuster might be set in 2045, a time when takeaway pizzas are delivered by drones, but in many ways it’s an inversion of his pal Robert Zemeckis’s 1985 movie Back To The Future. It is Forward To The Past. By way of homage, there’s even a nifty device called a Zemeckis Cube, which looks like the one designed by Rubik that was all the rage 30-odd years ago, but here is used to turn back time by 60 seconds. The film is gleefully stuffed with other references to popular culture in the eighties and early nineties, including Chucky, the maniacal doll in the Child’s Play films, and Spielberg’s own Jurassic Park.
Spielberg was also close to Stanley Kubrick, and there is a cherishably weird sequence inspired by Kubrick’s 1980 masterpiece The Shining.
Meanwhile, Wham! and Duran Duran are among the acts on a soundtrack that will either make you weep for your mullet hair and leg-warmers, or weep that you ever had them.
Ready Player one is based on ernest Cline’s 2011 novel of the same name, and Cline helped to write the screenplay, too. yet it’s clear from the start whose hand is on the joystick.
In a narrative driven by video-game avatars ( the computerised alter ego of the human being at the controls), Mark Rylance, playing a genial, ageing, super-wealthy nerd, is surely intended to be Spielberg’s own digitally-generated self.
Rylance is James Halliday, a computer-programming billionaire who long ago, with his business partner ogden Morrow (Simon Pegg), conceived a video game called OASIS.
In the dystopian world of 2045, OASIS has become a universal form of escapism, an exciting virtual society that offers a seductive alternative to life on an over-populated actual planet blighted by ‘the Corn Syrup droughts’ and ‘the Bandwidth riots’.
our hero is young Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), who was born after humanity ‘ stopped trying to fix problems and just tried to outlive them’. Wade lives with his aunt (Susan Lynch) and her abusive partner (Ralph Ineson) in a kind of vertical shanty town in Columbus, ohio.
WADE’S own Oasis avatar is a super-cool character called Parzival, who effectively becomes the Charlie Bucket to Halliday’s Willie Wonka when the latter lets on that he has hidden three elusive keys in his virtual universe.
The three keys are part of an ‘easter egg’ hunt (the geek term for secret message), which will yield (don’t ask me how) immense riches and control of the OASIS. Wade is therefore an egg-hunter, abbreviated to ‘gunter’.
He enlists the help of a small, resourceful gang of fellow gunters and their avatars, including sexy Art3mis (olivia Cooke), but naturally there is a fiendish villain to contend with, a corporate slimeball (splendidly played by Ben Mendelsohn) called nolan Sorrento.
Will Sorrento find the eggs before Wade’s alias Parzival and his chums? you can guess the answer, but it’s a whole lot of CGI fun going along for
the ride, even one that lasts two hours and 19 minutes.
If Steven Spielberg is one of the world’s greatest mainstream film directors, Wes Anderson is one of the greatest ploughing a furrow somewhere diagonal to the mainstream. I loved his last feature, 2014’ s singular the grand budapest Hotel.
Isle Of Dogs is a notch or two stranger still, but beguilingly clever and funny. like Anderson’s 2009 film fantastic Mr fox, it is a stop-motion animation, but this one ambitiously, and triumphantly, combines classic cartoon anthropomorphism with a respectful (if not quite reverential) bow to Japanese popular culture.
the main setting is a godforsaken island, used as a rubbish dump, just off Japan’s coast. All the canine inhabitants of Megasaki City have been banished there in ‘a tidal wave of anti- dog hysteria’ following epidemics of dog flu and the even more dreaded snout fever.
Among them are a stray called Chief (voiced by bryan Cranston), and the more respectable rex (edward norton), boss (bill Murray) and Duke (Jeff goldblum). then there’s the refined nutmeg (Scarlett Johansson), for whom Chief falls in a sweet echo of the 1955 Disney classic lady And the tramp. He is her bit of ruff.
When Atari (Koyu rankin), the 12-year- old ward of the city’s corrupt mayor, decides that he wants to be reunited with his own doggie bodyguard, his beloved Spots (liev Schreiber), he steals a light aircraft and flies to the island, where he makes some valuable mutt allies.
He is further helped in the search by an apparently psychic pug called Oracle (tilda Swinton). In the meantime, back in Megasaki City, a backlash against the mayor is led by an American exchange student called tracy Walker (greta gerwig).
If all this sounds somewhat surreal, that’s because it emphatically is, even before Yoko Ono pops up, voicing a scientist called Yoko Ono.
by all accounts, Anderson intended Isle Of Dogs partly as a homage to great Japanese directors such as Akira Kurosawa. Certainly, it’s one for cinephiles, but don’t let that put you off. It’s silly, charming, exquisitely animated and gloriously original, if just a little bit barking.