Ready Player One (2018): adapted from the Ernest Cline novel by Zak Penn and Ernest Cline; directed by Steven Spielberg; starring Tye Sheridan (Wade/ Parzival), Olivia Cooke (Samantha/ Atr3mis), Ben Mendelsohn (Forgettable Corporate Villain), Lena Waithe (Helen/ Aech), T.J. Miller (I-R0k), Mark Rylance (Halliday), and Simon Pegg (Ogden Morrow):
Steven Spielberg's latest is also the latest in a now never-ending stream of movies to Break the Internet, Ready Player One is an enjoyable, slight adventure that improves upon the novel by virtue of being able to show some of the adventures inside virtual reality.
Our boilerplate young hero, aged-up to 18 from high-school age and made slim because God forbid some goddamned fat kid should be the hero of a $175 million movie, wanders the virtual reality Oasis in a dystopic, corporate-controlled future.
He's on a quest to find three Easter Eggs left in the Oasis by its late creator (Mark Rylance, game as ever but woefully too old for the role). He teams up with four other freedom-fighting young whippersnappers online and then in the real world to find the Eggs and gain control of the Oasis before nightmarish corporation IOI wins the hunt and puts ads everywhere. I guess. Net neutrality forever!
A sequence set 'inside' Stanley Kubrick's The Shining is the showstopper, after which things seem to go on forever to rapidly decreasing effect. That Spielberg and company added a gratuitous, lengthy, real-world car chase intercut with the virtual climax of the movie isn't so much gilding the lily as it is covering it in lead.
Ben Mendlesohn is about as forgettable a corporate villain as one can imagine, which seems to be the point. That his online avatar appears to be the Berni Wrightson-designed Captain Sternn from the Heavy Metal movie just seems baffling. Due to rights issues, the entire film takes place in an alternate future in which Disney, Marvel, and Star Wars never existed. Lightly recommended.
Dunkirk (2017): written and directed by Christopher Nolan; starring Fionn Whitehead (Tommy), Damien Bonnard (French Soldier), Mark Rylance (Mr. Dawson), Tom Hardy (Farrier), Kenneth Branagh (Commander Bolton), and Cillian Murphy (PTSD Soldier): Between May 26 and June 4 1940, about 400,000 troops from Belgium, the British Empire, and France were trapped on the French beaches of Dunkirk. Then, for various reasons still argued about by historians, Nazi Germany chose not to overwhelm those trapped forces with infantry, tanks, and heavy bombing.
The result was the greatest and most important Maritime evacuation in military history as a fleet of British military and civilian ships of about 800 evacuated approximately 350,000 of those troops to England. Lose those troops and the Allies probably lose the war long before the United States of America joins it.
Christopher Nolan doesn't attempt a wide-reaching, expository historical epic here. Instead, he focuses his film on three targets operating on three different but converging timelines. That would be a week on the beach with the waiting troops, a day on a civilian-piloted boat helping with the evacuation, and an hour in the air with RAF pilots engaging the Nazi air force over sea and land.
It all works beautifully. The only drag is a fictional sub-plot on the boat that seems clumsy and obvious. Otherwise, Dunkirk is a war movie that portrays the fear and tension of warfare in a number of set-pieces. The only traditional war-movie 'release' comes with the RAF's battles with the German fighters and bombers. Otherwise, Dunkirk is the war movie as psychological horror, with groups of men listening for the sounds of bombs dropping through the air, pinned down under fire from an enemy they can't see, or struggling to escape the flooding compartments of a sinking rescue ship.
Civilian boat captain Mark Rylance and Commander-on-the-beach Kenneth Branagh supply the personable acting here, with smaller turns from several of the young actors who portray the troops and Tom Hardy as one of the RAF pilots. The aerial combat scenes are thrilling and expansive; the rescues at sea are thrilling and horrifying. It's a marvelous, focused movie (less than 2 hours long!), and it may come to be regarded as Christopher Nolan's best. Highly recommended.
