Ready Player One (4/5 Stars)

Steven Spielberg, the father of blockbuster, made his splash in the genre in 1975 with the movie Jaws. In addition to being a great action movie, it had a great “making of” story. Apparently the main reason Spielberg kept the shark off-screen for most of the movie was because he couldn’t get his fake-looking mechanical shark to work. He spent most of the making of the movie innovating off of the top of his head various ways to accomplish the presence of a fearsome creature while not actually showing it. Contrast this situation with his latest Ready Player One, a movie backed by fully mature computer technology that can materialize anything Spielberg could possibly want and then some with an absurd ease. The climax of the movie is an insanely complex battle that takes place on an entirely digital snowscape with entirely digital characters, the most notable being Mecha-Godzilla and the Iron Giant. Think about it: only forty-three years ago, Spielberg couldn’t get his shark to work. The seemingly exponential progress of the visual arts in movies is absolutely mind-blowing.

Ready Player One seems preternaturally designed to exploit this new capability. The movie takes place in 2045 in a dystopic version of Columbus, Ohio. Apparently the outside world has turned to shit, so everyone now spends their lives in a virtual reality called the Oasis. The Oasis is everything you could possibly want it to be and you can be anybody you want to be in it (at least physically). It was dreamed up by a man named Halliday (played by Mark Rylance). It has rules much like World of Warcraft and leans heavily an ethos of ultimate freedom i.e. anarchy. Apparently if you kill someone in the Oasis, you get to keep all of their digital money and purchases. This lawlessness has seeped into the real world. A giant corporation has monopoly power on much of the Oasis and uses rent seeking to gain more. It also has a sort of debtor’s prison set up, where if you go into debt buying their stuff, you can end it up in a box in a warehouse in the real world spending your days mining virtual gold.

What drives the plot in Ready Player One is the last wishes of the Oasis creator. Apparently he hid an Easter Egg somewhere in the Oasis. The person who finds it, gets control of the entire thing. The Oasis creator also really loved 1980s pop culture, so every character who wants to find the Easter Egg has to steep himself in that stuff. In fact, there is a scene where the CEO of the evil corporation (who not coincidentally looks exactly like the principal in “The Breakfast Club”) tries to buy the services of our humble hero Wade. He attempts to do this by making a lot of 1980s pop culture reference, as if you know, he really cared about that stuff.

I for one do not care about 1980s pop culture references and believe that any author/screenwriter who believes that anyone in the 2045 would care is delusional. As Mr. Spielberg is responsible for many of the 1980s references himself, one could add the term narcissistic to delusional. And on a personal note, I have a general protest against metaness, in this case a heavy reliance on references to 1980s pop culture. Meta-ness is a bit like telling the same joke twice. It is remembering how great and/or funny some thing in the past was, which is generally an inferior experience to viewing something great and/or funny right now. (Why watch a movie that relies on your memory of past movies to work? Why not just rewatch the old movie? That is what I say.) But its not correct to simply attack the conceit of the movie without addressing how a movie is about it. Putting aside the silliness of the idea and the inferiority of meta-ness, the movie is well made. I mean that first car chase scene. Amazing.

My favorite part of this movie is the inclusion of a mercenary character named I-R0k, who is unmistakably voiced by the great T.J. Miller. The character looks like a bad ass. He has a cavity in the shape of a skull in the middle of his torso. However, he talks like a total nerd and gives away the underlying absurdity of this world, that however elaborate and mind-blowing it looks, it is actually just a bunch of people in trailer parks sitting on their couches wearing goggles.

Given how far the visual capabilities in movies have come in the last fifty years, it seems like it should continue to progress. But look at this movie, what is left to be accomplished in this field. What can be done visually that has not already been done before? Perhaps at this point, when visual delights like this become routine and maybe boring, the movies will come full circle and recreate the problem Spielberg encountered in Jaws. That is, the shark wasn’t working so he could not rely on anything visual to create action and suspense. Instead, he focused on story and character. If scenes like the war in Ready Player One become common-place, and there is nowhere bigger and elaborate to go, perhaps the movies will finally get back to the basics of storytelling.

Dunkirk (4/5 Stars)

 “Dunkirk” recreates of an early event in World War II when the German blitzkrieg flanked and encircled the entire British army at the beaches of Dunkirk while the German Luftwaffe bombed them from above and German U-Boats terrorized the British channel.

It is entirely possible that the large majority of the British army, around 400,000 men, may have died on that beach. The British navy was not sending the bulk of their destroyers to evacuate the men because of the superiority of the German air force and submarine fleet. The last and only hope was to draft all the “little ships” of the England, civilian boats, to cross the channel and pick up the boys. As a retreat it was so successful it became the stuff of legend. Only 40,000 men were expected to live. The British with the help of the civilian effort rescued ten times that amount and a good amount of the French army too.

Writer and Director Christopher Nolan treats the subject matter with solemnity and reverence. Individual stories are sacrificed to the events as a whole. (In fact, I can’t remember most of the names of the characters.) There is no back-story and no locations that are not on Dunkirk, therefore no characters that aren’t on-the-ground soldiers. This minimalism suits the sense of isolation and the impending doom felt by the men on the beach.

What is innovative is the structure of the story. Here, again, Director Nolan (Memento, The Prestige, Inception, Interstellar) engages his forte. The movie is divided into three parts and seamlessly switches between the three. The first is the Mole (french word for pier thing on the beach) and takes place over a week and covers the entire week that the evacuation took place in. The second is the Sea and takes place over a single day that the little ships were involved in the evacuation. The third is the Air and takes place over a single hour that the British Air Force provided a cover mission for the evacuation. The Air’s hour takes place during the Sea’s day which takes place during the Mole’s week. It is not necessarily intuitive that these stories could seamlessly move back and forth between each other, but Nolan once again proves that he knows how to clearly tell a seemingly convoluted story. I was not particularly confused as to what was happening when.

And it makes sense story-wise. If Nolan had told the story straight chronologically, the second and especially the third story-line would have been sandwiched unfairly near the end, thereby reducing the historical importance of the sea and air efforts. This way, they are all given equal time (even though the their times are unequal) and the movie has this interesting relativistic effect. The faster the characters move, the slower time seems to move for them, and an hour in a British Spitfire roaring across the channel equals the time spent by a man walking on the ground.

Most of the actors, though talented like Tom Hardy (airplane) and Cillian Murphy (ground), could have been replaced because of the deliberate motive of the movie to have the scenario overpower any one individual story. There is one exception and that is the civilian captain of one of the little ships, played by Mark Rylance (Bridge of Spies). The nobility of the man shines through and gives incarnate form to the humble and collective spirit of Dunkirk that became the stuff of legend. His interactions with a shell-shocked soldier (Cillian Murphy) provide the heart of the movie. “There’s no turning back from this, son,” he states and there is a power in the understated yet unwavering purpose behind his intonations. Keep Calm and Carry On indeed.

Bridge of Spies (4/5 Stars)

Steven Spielberg has been around so long now that it is fair to say that his style isn’t like old school filmmaking as much as it is old school filmmaking. His fluid framing, the polish of the dialogue, and the frequency of virtuous themes represent the Platonic ideal all other filmmaking either imitate, elaborate upon, or reject. “Bridge of Spies,” has all the hallmarks of a very by the book movie. There are no missteps mainly because the movie takes very few chances. If you are acquainted with Spielberg, you will recognize a lot of his signature moves that he has already proven are effective in many other movies. “Bridge of Spies” is the safest movie in theaters right now. I doubt there will be many people who won’t like it. But isn't like this is Spielberg's best movie as much as it feels like a breather between great movies.

“Bridge of Spies,” is a historical period piece set in the Cold War late 1950s about an admirable man named James Donovan. He was an insurance lawyer who was summoned to represent in court a captured soviet spy named Rudolph Abel (played by Mark Rylance). Nobody really wants Abel to not be anything other than guilty but at the same time there is this whole American Constitution thing and everybody deserves a capable defense. Donovan proves capable enough to save his client from execution.

Then things take an interesting turn when an American spy named Francis Gary Powers is shot down over Russia. Donovan is called upon to negotiate an exchange of spies. This will all know from our history books, he succeeds at doing. What makes this story new (and probably why Spielberg chose to make a movie about it) is the revelation that Donovan went out of his way to also exchange a release of an American student named Prior from East Germany at the same time. The U.S. government really doesn’t care whether the student gets released as long as Powers comes back so Donovan’s mission is entirely altruistic and self-imposed. He is in fact negotiating not only with the Soviets, the East Germans, but also the C.I.A. And he deserves every bit the title of master negotiator. Donovan is played by Tom Hanks perfectly cast as a smart idealistic American everyman.

The movie is but a series of conversations and it is to the credit of Spielberg and the writers (which happen to include Joel and Ethan Coen) that there is an intriguing amount of trick storytelling that interrupt the what could have been easily stale scenes. Actually we can look a little further into some specific scenes because it is a really good example of superior filmmaking. Take for instance the scene where James Donovan brings up the idea of representing the spy to his wife and children around the dinner table. What needs to happen in this scene is he has to tell his wife about the case and she has to voice the reasons not to do it: social shame, helping the soviets, somebody else’s problem, etc. The scene has a subplot to it. In the previous scene Donovan has his assistant cancel a dinner date to work late on the new case (it is after all just a Tuesday.) At the family dinner Donovan’s daughter reveals that she was just stood up by her boyfriend. It becomes clear that the daughter and the assistant are dating but Donovan doesn’t know it. This is pretty funny and is good for a couple of laughs. Now the interesting part: the scene ends and the daughter and the assistant are never heard from again in the entire movie. That is to say the subplot is a red herring whose sole function is to provide some laughs during the dinner table scene not because these are important characters. Or take the scene where Donovan meets the East German ambassador for the first time. The ambassador pours two drinks while his back is to Donovan. He turns around with the two glasses. The camera tilts down to look at the glasses and then tilts back up to see Hanks’ quizzical expression. This camera move and the expressions stereotypically imply that the drink might be poisoned. The drink isn’t poisoned and there will never be a poisoning in the movie but Speilberg inserted those moves in for purposes of suspense for the sake of suspense. After all the audience does not know whether the drink is poisoned (or whether the previously mentioned romantic subplot goes anywhere) so it does not really matter whether it is or not as long as the audience feels that it might be for a moment and becomes more involved in the scene. This sort of thing shows off Spielberg’s knowledge of a movie audience's general attention span. Right when a talking scene might start to get boring he will figure out a way to instill some suspense or some joke whether it has anything to do with the storyline or not and it always works. 

 

One more thing should get some notice and that is the performance of Mark Rylance as the Soviet spy Rudolph Abel. He underplays the role in such a sublime way that it becomes almost comedic. He is not afraid of the U.S. government as much as he is just resigned to everything. He does not particularly care whether he gets a defense or not. At one point he comments, “The boss is not always right, but he is always the boss.” What an incredibly Soviet thing to say. Whereas when an injustice happens to an American he may actually get mad about it or worry about the outcome. The difference I suppose is that in America our ideals and rights give us hope that justice may prevail and so a fight for justice is worth it. 

Why do I feel like somebody is trying to teach me something. Anyway good movie, Dad.