Ready Player One can't find meaning amid digital nostalgia

Parzival and Anorak in Ready Player One. Image courtesy Warner Bros.

Ready Player One tries to find meaning amid ephemera. It wants to have a heart and a story to tell about leaving fantasy behind to find value in the real world. Escapism, or at least an excessive amount of it, is a dangerous thing in Steven Spielberg’s Columbus, Ohio circa 2045. Yet the fantasy he renders is far, far more interesting than the reality he shows, and the character who pushes the heroic gamer Parzival (Tye Sheridan) to leave the digital cocoon has an unintentionally mixed message. The aesthetic flourishes and moments of inspired delight are hampered by Spielberg’s attempts to find meaning in the wrong place.

The timing for Ready Player One is just about perfect. The movement spurred by the Parkland students and the youth’s push for a voice in the social conversation mirrors Ready Player One’s story. The kids, Parzival, Art3mis (Olivia Cooke), Aeche (Lena Waithe), Sho (Philip Zhao) and Saito (Win Morisaki), are all right. They carry the burden of saving the digital haven called The Oasis from the evil Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), showing poise and courage beyond their years. That the fate of a digital world is at stake reduces the urgency and the importance of their actions. And the timeliness doesn’t obscure the fact the story has been done a lot, and often better than Ready Player One.

But the film is less about growth than regret, with Spielberg and writers Ernest Cline (who wrote the eponymous best selling book) and Zak Penn centering the story’s heart on lonely game designer Halliday, played in digital flashbacks by Mark Rylance. Halliday, who launches a Willy Wonka-esque hunt for keys and clues across his virtual universe upon his death, is depicted as a lonely, lonely man because he couldn’t sustain a human interaction. The idea has promise, and Rylance is wonderful when showing the heartbreak that drives Halliday. Yet Ready Player One defeats that message just based on the rules of the contest. In order to succeed, players have to relive his life to succeed, spending hours diving into his memories and analyzing every little moment of his existence. Players are forced to live in fantasy in order to embrace reality, forcing a growth experience through years worth of effort. And the nature of the contest is inherently solipsistic, focused on the passions and obsessions of its creator, following only his passion for pop culture from a very specific time frame.

At least Halliday's looming presence in the future explains the continued love of '80s culture by a much younger generation. What it doesn't explain is the insertion of contemporary franchises like Overwatch, Halo, and the current iteration of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. It's unclear why 12 year olds in 2045 would remain passionate about those franchises almost 30 years into the future without the presence of a figure like Halliday to maintain their popularity. What it comes down to, then, is a choice by the filmmakers, one that disrupts Ready Player One's thin sense of cultural logic. Where are the figures from 2045, or from either pop culture history or any history before Halliday became invested in the world? Why is cultural significance limited between the very late 1970s to 2018? This is the trouble with creating a nostalgia based film in a futuristic setting. Without defining those rules, it creates holes in its internal logic that fans of such nostalgia are trained to tear into.

What is easy to tear asunder is the nature of The Oasis itself. Admittedly, Spielberg's representation is visually gorgeous and brilliant, about as splendid as something so infinite could possibly be. What it is in Ready Player One's reality though is questionable. The film tries to sell The Oasis as a place to spend one’s time, but rarely shows it as something more than a video game platform. People don't really live in The Oasis as much as visit it regularly, still anchored strongly to a clear sense of reality. It's difficult to get lost in The Oasis when the filmmakers prevent their characters from getting lost themselves. It's a strange decision given how important that idea is to Cline's book. He should know better than anyone that The Oasis needs to be seen as an equal to reality.

It's one of a myriad of problems with the efforts from Cline and Penn, who deliver a story that was either edited to death or dead on arrival. Ready Player One has plot holes upon plot holes, decisions made by characters that make little sense at the moment, and even less after considering it shortly thereafter. The narrative is overly convenient, with key characters placed in close proximity to one another and security failures caused by sticky notes. The story's pace is wonky, especially with the relationship between Parzival and Art3mis, as well as the hyper-speed friendship developed between Parzival, Art3mis, Aech, Sho and Daito. The script's dedication to giving nearly equal time to the world beyond The Oasis is undercut by a fervent unwillingness to put the characters in any real danger. The ending is cheap, easy, and abrupt. The killer though is the exposition. The problem doesn't arise with how much of the plot is revealed via dialog; rather, it's the cultural references that get explained. Ready Player One lives on the expected knowledge of its viewers, who already speak the language and understand the references. Explaining the references is a cheat, a cop out that undermines the inherent universality of pop culture. Viewers speak the language; they don’t need a translator.

Review: Three out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 140 minutes

Genre: Sci-Fi

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Target audience: Steven Spielberg devotees and fans of '80s pop culture.

Take the whole family?: The violence might get a little heavy for young kids, but kids 10 and older will be fine.

Theater or Netflix?: If you're going to see it, be cheap and go to a matinee.

Is the book good?: It really depends who you ask. Ready Player One has a fair mix of diehard fans and people who hate it, due largely to the Ernest Cline's nostalgia overload and issues with the portrayal of Art3mis. The criticisms are fair (and still infect the movie), but the writing is solid when Cline escapes his childhood. And his depiction of The Oasis is addicting and reinforces how difficult it can be to leave such a place.

Watch this as well?: Some of the scenes when the characters from multiple franchises interacted reminded me of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Some of the movies referenced in Ready Player One, most notably The Shining and The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8^th Dimension, are definitely worth seeking out.

Pacific Rim sequel falls short on action, monsters

Cailee Spaeny and John Boyega in Pacific Rim: Uprising. Image courtesy Universal Pictures.

Sequels should very, very, very rarely start off by reusing footage from the original film. It shows the filmmakers have little faith in their audience's ability to keep up with the changes in the sequel while showing a lack of narrative enterprise or ingenuity, lazily rehashing previous efforts. It hurts even more when the previous footage is better than anything the movie has to showcase from its own stock. Which is the case with Pacific Rim: Uprising, a movie that starts off on the wrong foot and is never able, or particularly willing, to steady itself.

What makes the choice strange is how much of the time invested in rehashing old history could be used to improve the sloppy narrative Pacific Rim:Uprising tosses together. At the film's heart is a redemption tale for the very lost Jake Pentecost (John Boyega), the son of a legendary Jaeger pilot who died in the first film. That narrative is more than enough to build out a quality movie, providing a pretty solid actor a showcase to build out a character while interspersing some desirable robot versus monster action. But the filmmakers plug in little bits of additional plot lines to muddy the story up. Inserted into the story are a precocious Jaeger cadet Amara (Cailee Spaeny) and her fellow cadets, an ambitious billionaire business owner Shao (Tian Jing), Jake's old friend and current rival Nate Lambert (Scott Eastwood), and a few returning players (Rinko Kikuchi, Burn Gorman, and Charlie Day) engaging in some shenanigans. There's also something that resembles a love triangle between Jake, Nate and a woman named Jules (Adria Arjona), but nothing really comes from it. Pacific Rim: Uprising throws together so many plots and subplots nothing is able to stick. Characters aren't given adequate room to grow and evolve the way the filmmakers (four writers, among them director Steven S. DeKnight) expect. Those stories advance in fits and spurts, with little increments that conclude almost immediately without any actual validation. Amara, for example, has a major crisis caused by a bad memory with the villainous Kaiju that causes a legitimate breakdown that is ripe for character development. Instead of showing her growth, the character moves on with minimal effort made to overcome the obstacle. Everyone effectively has their own version of that problem. Character growth isn't earned in this movie, it's told and shown.

It really is hard though to escape the lack of impetus the writing team has put into Pacific Rim: Uprising. The stakes for most of the movie are surprisingly low, especially given the fate of humanity was in danger in the first movie. This movie de-escalates the danger, hiding the threat until the third act, with acts one and two dedicated to establishing the characters poorly while setting up what resembles a political thriller. Without that stake, that hook for the audience to grab onto, Pacific Rim: Uprising is frightfully dull.

In theory, the hook should be the fights between the Jaegers and Kaiju. It's a really, really simple formula to follow, pitting giant fighting robots against monsters rampaging their way through metropolitan areas. This is the kind of idea that appeals to the inner 7 year old because it is fun and awesome. Even a modicum of good spectacle could easily have redeemed Pacific Rim: Uprising, at least enough to overlook the tremendous story and character flaws. And, yet, the movie skimps on the monster action until the very end of the film, providing less than a handful of monsters to fight against the giant robots. The filmmakers effectively had one job to do, but their push to incorporate so many stories in less than two hours prevented them from supplying an adequate amount of monster time.

It's easy to say the film's problems are connected to the absence of Guillermo del Toro from the creative process. And, yeah, Pacific Rim: Uprising would be a much better movie with del Toro helming it, although that can be said about a lot of movies. But this film shouldn't really need his presence to succeed either. What the new filmmakers had was a fun, interesting premise to build at least a good popcorn flick from. They never found a direction, using the original as a crutch and releasing a boring movie. And a boring monster movie is a damn tragedy. 

Review: Two out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 111 minutes

Genre: Action

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Target audience: People who watched the original Pacific Rim and the growing John Boyega fan club.

Take the whole family?: Kids 10 and older should be fine.

Theater or Netflix?: Just stay at home and enjoy it there.

What is up with that love triangle?: This is the plot that bothered me the most about Pacific Rim: Uprising. The filmmakers added an unnecessary love triangle between Jake, Nate and Jules without any justification or true motivation behind it. Even worse, Jules does little else in the move besides serve as an object of mild affection for Jake and Nate. She’s effectively a reason for Jake and Nate to argue, which is an absolute waste of a character.

Watch this instead?: It's cheesy as all heck, but Independence Day is still a pretty fun blockbuster that's worth a trip through memory lane. And you can’t go wrong with the original Godzilla.

Tomb Raider fails Lara Croft

Alicia Vikander as Lara Croft in Tomb Raider. Image courtesy Warner Bros.

There is something at least moderately superb about the reboot to the Tomb Raider series. The fundamental idea for what the movie is capable of being is at least on screen long enough to draw the interest of viewers, before they are swept away by pablum ripped off from far better movies. It eventually devolves into mildly competent action flick, a movie with nothing interesting to see and little to say about the capabilities of its protagonist. Tomb Raider neither overwhelms nor underwhelms; it’s pretty placid for an action movie.

The good stuff occurs in spurts in acts one and two, when Tomb Raider centers the story on its neophyte adventurer Lara Croft (Alicia Vikander). It's an origin story, but one in which the character's inexperience feels appropriate because the movie portrays her as someone clearly over her head. Her first moments on screen come in the midst of her losing a fight handily, which is followed by yet another loss in a bicycle chase through the streets of London. The set up is there to show a woman evolving into a hero, brave enough to put herself into difficult situations but not savvy or strong enough to pull off a victory. It's interesting to see a character take their lumps in the early going, plow through the difficulties as they level up and improve their strength, stamina, and experience. The culmination comes in act two, where Lara brutally murders a man for the first time. It's a moment of surprise and agony for Lara, the fact that she killed a person and the realization that she's capable of doing such a terrible thing in the first place, and Vikander sells the moment quite well. It’s brutal and effective, an abbreviated window into an action movie.

For some reason though the movie largely abandons that story. Tomb Raider's undercuts Lara's growth by taking a lot of the action and courage out of her hands. She's protected by the male characters around her, whether its her new friend Lu Ren (Daniel Wu) or by her father Richard (Dominic West). Instead of letting Lara fight for herself, the men are always on hand to save her. The change from letting Lara get beaten down to protecting her is abrupt and damaging, undermining one of her defining character traits. If the movie is going to put her in a dangerous situations, it needs to allow her to get out of it on her own accord and not rely on someone else to do it for her. Even Richard's presence in Tomb Raider hurts Lara as a character. Richard serves as a narrative crutch, a figure to both get Lara to go on the adventure and to protect her from making difficult choices. He's not that interesting of a character, or at least allowed to be that interesting of a character aside from some random discussions about hallucinations. Richard only exists because the filmmakers couldn't come up with a better way for Lara to improve, and because tossing in daddy issues is a really easy way to build a character.

Throwing parental problems at an action character has been done, just like the rest of Tomb Raider. As the movie goes on the similarities to the Indiana Jones series become more and more notable, to the point where certain plot points are ripped off blatantly. The action sequences exist, functional and largely uninteresting. The final twist is ultimately asinine, as is Lara's fight with the movie's villain Vogel (Walton Goggins) at the en. Although it is pretty nice to have Boyd Crowder around, Tomb Raider misses a great opportunity to build out a fascinating in concept villain. Perhaps without Richard the movie might have built Vogel into the villain it needs.

Calling Tomb Raider another indictment against adapting video games into movies is a little unfair. This movie was not done well, but the fault lies with the method and not the quality of the source material. After three movies (two campy adventures with Angelina Jolie and this one), there still remains a lot of potential with the Lara Croft character. She's still a great adventurer, smart and strong and very dangerous because of it. Tomb Raider shows the material is there for a good adaptation; it's the filmmakers who keep bringing it down.

Review: Two and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

 

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 118 minutes

Genre: Action

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Target audience: People who like video game adaptations and those who hope Alicia Vikander becomes the next big action star.

Take the whole family?: This is pretty violent and it has enough body horror toward the end to discomfort young kids.

Theater or Netflix?: Stay home.

Is Vikander an action star?: Maybe with better material. She sells the painful moments pretty well, although she does succumb to an epic case of Tom Cruise running and spends a decent amount of time shrieking. I'm not sold on her as an action star, but she's good enough to deserve a closer look.

Watch this instead?: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is the basis for a lot of Tomb Raider's plot, so it makes sense to just go to the source.

Dark comedy Thoroughbreds reveals the importance of appearances

Anya Taylor-Joy and Olivia Cooke in Thoroughbreds. Image courtesy Focus Features.

In reality, the importance of maintaining appearances would prevent the two protagonists in Thoroughbreds from associating with each other. Lily (Anya Taylor-Joy) is wealthy, popular, and privileged, a teenager bound for an elite lifestyle. Amanda (Olivia Cooke) is an emotionless outcast with no notable aspirations beyond eating chips. This is a pretty formulaic setup for a generic, cheap teen movie where the shed their differences and bond to become better people or whatever. And, well, that sort of happens in a backward sense in Thoroughbreds. Whatever improvements they make results in some horrible consequences, and their most notable bonding moment involves blackmailing a loser drug dealer (Anton Yelchin) to commit murder. It’s sort of funny in the humorous way, and funny in the uncomfortable way, with the joke being how easy it is for awful people to get what they want with minimal, if any, true consequences.

Thoroughbreds is a masterful little bit of filmmaking, an incredible feat for first-time write/director Cory Finley. Finley frames his shots effectively, maximizing the distance between his characters by showing a lot of empty space between them. Rarely are they allowed to even touch one another, let alone show any true emotional affection for the others. Once the divide is broken the moment is small but momentous, a moment of growth for the characters despite the darkness surrounding them. Finley opts to show the characters' isolation to one another, visually conveying the theme and not forcing the dialog to carry the brunt of it. Thoroughbreds is an exhibition for showing and not telling, as well as implying without showing, amounting to some terrific subtle filmmaking.

There's also a lot of rule breaking in Thoroughbreds. Finley violates very basic standards for tension and suspense, spurning Chekhov's dramatic principle for showing what amounts to irrelevant things on screen. Sometimes it amounts to a very strange but effective joke, a little bit of mocking from the film to defy these rules because the joke is there isn’t really a reason something ever has to happen. But, really, Finley cleverly violates those rules to build dramatic tension and obfuscate the inevitable ending to his movie. With hindsight, it's clear the Thoroughbreds has to end the way it does, because otherwise it would ruin the arcs for Amanda and Lily, but in the moment Finley makes it difficult to know for sure which way the movie is going. He breaks the rules for a reason, because following them would be too easy and to convenient.

And, really, nothing is that easy in Thoroughbreds. Lily and Amanda are awful for each other, enabling the worst aspects of their personality and justifying their pursuits. Yet, strangely, they both come out for the better at the end of everything, each evolving into a somewhat better version of what they wanted to be. What Lily becomes is pretty horrifying, but she's more honest with herself, a bolder capable person eager to pursue her wants and desires. Amanda gets what she needs from their relationship and is punished and rewarded for it in equal measures. Her last moment on screen is sad and joyous, showing a woman who is trapped but finding feeling after years upon years of emptiness. It's my favorite part of the movie, Amanda in a room by herself with just an inch of emotion cropping on her face, revealing the possibility she might have some feeling somewhere deep down.

The movie makes that moment honest by clearing the room of anyone but herself, removing the need to put on an act for someone else’s benefit. Few moments in Thoroughbreds are designed to be that honest because appearances matter as much, if not more, than truth. Lily has to appear perfect because she is defined by that idea of perfection, living the life of a spoiled girl in an upper-crust part of Connecticut. Amanda had the same life until she gave up on trying to fake that perfection, adopting a more honest persona that is still a bit of facade, acting odd to prove she doesn’t care about being perceived as odd. Thoroughbreds makes the point that those fakeries serve as a glue to keep society together, because being honest to yourself can be a dangerous thing. Amanda and Lily become honest with themselves, and the result is dangerous for the people around them. It’s a rather odd coda for a movie to end on, but one that feels right for something as complicated as Thoroughbreds.

Review: Four and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: R

Run time: 92 minutes

Genre: Dark Comedy

Ask Away

Target audience: People who like dark teen comedies.

Take the whole family?: Definitely not.

Theater or Netflix?: It is good and odd enough for a trip to an art-house movie theater.

RIP Anton Yelchin: This is one of Yelchin's final roles before he died, and it reinforces just how much he could have contributed as an actor. He's not in this film for very long, but he takes advantage of every minute he has on screen to bring life to a skeevy loser. Yelchin sells him as a young man with aspirations for greatness, despite being too incompetent to ever realize them.

Watch this as well?: Thoroughbreds is the dark alternative to Heavenly Creatures, Peter Jackson's fantastical movie about two teenage girls who fall head over heels for each other.