Movie Review: Ready Player One

Ready Player One **** / *****

Directed by: Steven Spielberg.

Written by: Zak Penn and Ernest Cline based on the novel by Cline.

Starring: Tye Sheridan (Wade Owen Watts / Parzival), Olivia Cooke (Samantha Evelyn Cook / Art3mis), Ben Mendelsohn (Nolan Sorrento), Lena Waithe (Aech), T.J. Miller (i-R0k), Simon Pegg (Ogden Morrow / Og), Mark Rylance (James Donovan Halliday / Anorak), Hannah John-Kamen (F'Nale Zandor), Win Morisaki (Daito), Philip Zhao (Sho).

Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One is a mess of contradictions – but in the most wonderful way possible. It’s both a celebration of pop culture, nostalgia and fandom as well as a condemnation of those three things at the same time. It’s a film that probably only Spielberg could make – and make work – at least in the way it’s currently constructed. It’s an interesting move for Spielberg – and seems like a direct response to those who want him to go back and do the kind of fun adventure films he used to make in the 1970s and 1980s – proof that he can still do that if he wants to, while acknowledging why he doesn’t do that much anymore. He’s a different filmmaker than he used to be. A Steven Spielberg version of Ready Player One made in 1982 (which isn’t really possible, but you know what I mean) would be much more aligned with the main character of Ready Player One – Wade Watts, an orphan with a horrible home life escaping into a world of his obsessions. The Ready Player One Spielberg made in 2018 is more in line with Halliday (Mark Rylance) – the creator of the digital play world Wade (and nearly everyone else) loses themselves in. In many ways, he is responsible for the situation, but knows how dangerous it all is.

The film is set in 2045, and the world has essentially become a giant trash heap. To escape from the dreary reality of everyday life, people spend most of their time in the Oasis – a giant computer simulation where you can be pretty much whatever you want to be. The creator of the Oasis was Halliday – and he became incredibly rich. When he died – 5 years ago – there was also an announcement. The first person to win three keys – from three different games – would inherit everything from Halliday – who was a lonely, single recluse. In all that time, no one has even won one key – everyone knows you have to win a car race, which is impossible, to get the first key – but no one can do it.

The main character is Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) – who goes by Parzival in the Oasis – and he is obsessed with Halliday and his life, and Halliday’s own obsession (which is basically 1980s pop culture) – and determined to win the keys. Eventually, he will team up with others – the beautiful Art3mis (Olivia Cooke), his best friend Aech (Lena Waithe) and a couple of Japanese brothers – Daito and Sho (Win Morisaki and Philip Zhao). They want one of them to win – because the alternative is that IOI – a greedy corporation, who want to infect the purity of the Oasis and is led by Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn) – wins. Sorrento will do anything to win.

You can pick apart the flaws in Ready Player One if you want to – there are quite a few nits to pick here. The storytelling is more than a little sloppy here – there are plot holes, and plot contrivances, weird moments of character motivation (Wade doesn’t seem too broken up by a key death for instance – the next scene, it’s like it never happened). Spielberg’s film usually click along like a fine Swiss watch, but this film is messy. Part of that is by design – the film is awash in 1980s references that crowd nearly every frame in the film, there is switching back and forth from the completely digital world to the real world. The movie is based on a very popular book by Ernest Cline – and I think Spielberg wants to give fans of the book – and those coming from action and spectacle – what they want. He delivers of course – Spielberg directs action better than most, and uses special effects better than just about anyone.

In this vein, there is one sequence – about halfway through the movie – that will go down as one of the best things Spielberg has ever done. This is a sequence where the characters have to go inside the world of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining – and it is an absolute blast. Spielberg, a huge Kubrick admirer – clearly loved recreating parts of The Shining, and twisting other parts of it for this warped version of it – and it something truly special.

I think pointing out those flaws are more than fair in regards to Ready Player One – even if I think part of the reason the film does work is because of its messiness – that doesn’t make up for some of the lazy writing in the film, but I think it does point out the things about the movie that Spielberg found most interesting – the things he wanted to get across, instead of focusing on the story. I do think this is the grown up Spielberg version of the old childlike Spielberg movies (in his excellent review of Ready Player One – the best piece of film criticism I’ve read this year – Bilge Ebiri makes the fascinating case that the dividing line isn’t Schindler’s List, as many think, but actually halfway through the much maligned Hook – when the story changes from a middle aged man trying to recapture his youth to that of a father, who realizes he needs to be there for his kids). I think Spielberg clearly sees parts of himself in both Wade and Halliday (note the glasses on Wade in the real world scenes – he looks kind of like a young Spielberg). Spielberg has always been a movie geek – in love with old movies and their directors. He also clearly sees that it is not the whole world – and that getting lost in it is a way to live a lonely existence.

Ready Player One works as spectacle for me – a fine, fun blockbuster ride by a filmmaker who does this type of thing better than just about anyone. Its storytelling if messy, the message is admittedly muddled – they are selling the film as the biggest crossover event ever, and playing off that nostalgia, while also arguing against that nostalgia. But the whole messy package is wonderfully fascinating to me – and makes me think that even though I don’t think Ready Player One will go as one of Spielberg’s best films, it may well become one of his most studied films. Spielberg isn’t quite the “creator who hates his creation” as one person referenced in the movie is – but he has his doubts.

                                                    

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Movie Review: The Post

The Post **** / *****

Directed by: Steven Spielberg.

Written by: Liz Hannah and Josh Singer.

Starring: Meryl Streep (Kay Graham), Tom Hanks (Ben Bradlee), Sarah Paulson (Tony Bradlee), Bob Odenkirk (Ben Bagdikian), Tracy Letts (Fritz Beebe), Bradley Whitford (Arthur Parsons), Bruce Greenwood (Robert McNamara), Matthew Rhys (Daniel Ellsberg), Alison Brie (Lally Graham), Carrie Coon (Meg Greenfield), Jesse Plemons (Roger Clark), David Cross (Howard Simons), Zach Woods (Anthony Essaye), Pat Healy (Phil Geyelin), Michael Stuhlbarg (Abe Rosenthal).

 

The Post is a good example of why Steven Spielberg is arguably the most successful filmmaker in history – he makes everything he does look effortless. The Post is a film that could very well get mired in prestige movie cliché, and there are times when it seems like it’s about to slip down that slope and get there – and every time Spielberg and company pull it out. The movie moves at a brisk pace for not quite two hours, and makes exciting a story that is basically people in rooms talking, based on a true story in which we all already know the result. Yes, the screenplay by Liz Hannah and Josh Singer occasionally strains for contemporary resonance a little too much – the film wants you to think about current President Donald Trump as much as the President at the time in the movie, Richard Nixon, and isn’t overly subtle about it. But it’s all wrapped up in such an entertaining package, you hardly care.

 

The film is about the Pentagon Papers – those Top Secret documents, that Daniel Ellsberg smuggled out to try and get to the public so they could know the truth about the Vietnam War – essentially, that the government knew in 1965 the war was unwinnable, but they kept right on sending troops to fight and die anyway for years, because no one wanted to be at the helm when they had to admit America lost a war. The New York Times started publishing stories based on these papers, and then were barred by a court awaiting final decision. This movie is about The Washington Post – who get their hands on the same papers, after the Times is barred, and has to decide whether or not to publish. Doing so could result in the Washington Post being shut down, and criminal charges for those involved.

 

The movie focuses on two characters. The first Kay Graham (Meryl Streep), the publisher of the Washington Post, who has had to take the job over after her husband’s suicide, and feels tremendous weight to keep the paper her father founded running. The second is Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks), the now infamous Editor of the Post, whose goal is to publish, to uphold the First Amendment, and keep Nixon’s feet to the fire. Between them is an army of reports and lawyers and advisers, pushing and pulling them in different directions.

 

This is Streep’s best performance in years. I’ve been struck over the years that although Streep is undeniably one of the greatest actresses of all time, she hasn’t always been in great films, or worked with great directors. Part of this is undeniably the sexist nature of Hollywood – the biggest directors are men, who make films about men, so Streep is stuck either being a supporting player to inferior men, or the lead in somewhat lesser films. Part of it is Streep though – she loves to do these larger than life roles – and sometimes that results in her sucking all the air of a film for herself – the movie becomes about the Streep performance more than the film itself. Here, she gives a quieter, more nuanced performance – as a woman who is unsure of herself, in large part, because she is surrounded by men, all of whom think they clearly know better than she does how to run her business. She has to trust her own judgment when nobody else does. She’s a strong woman, no less so because of the vulnerability she brings to the character.

 

Hanks isn’t quite as good as Bradlee – but he’s close. Normally Hanks plays good guys – and Ben Bradlee is one too – although he’s also more of a stubborn asshole than Hanks normally plays (the fact that he’s right doesn’t make him less of an asshole). There aren’t as many notes for Hanks to play as Streep gets – and he doesn’t come close to topping Jason Robards in All the President’s Men in terms of the ultimate Bradlee performance – but it’s more solid work from Hanks, who like his director here, specializes in making things look effortless. The two are supported by a great cast – Bob Odenkirk, David Cross (Mr. Show reunion!), Tracy Letts, Carrie Coon, Matthew Rhys, Jesse Plemons, Bradley Whitford, and on and on – there isn’t a weak performance in the cast. My favorite of these small roles may just be Sarah Paulson – who for much of the film looks like she is not going to get to do anything except be Bradlee’s supportive wife, who gets to make sandwiches when the reports come to her home – and isn’t that a waste to get someone of Paulson’s talent to do that. But then she delivers a short monologue to Bradlee that makes him see Graham in a different light – and really, all women at the time. No, it’s not Michael Stuhlbarg in Call Me By Your Name – but it justifies the casting of the great Paulson.

 

Yes, the movie can feel too on the nose at times – the last few scenes are way too heavy handed, and the few depictions of protests on the streets feel like we’re watching narcs in hippie costumes, not legitimate protests. But The Post is the type of Hollywood movie that no one seems to remember how to make anymore. Spielberg, Streep and Hanks do though – and they pull off a really excellent, entertaining piece of mainstream cinema for adults. That’s one of the rarest things in Hollywood these days.

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