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Review – Ready Player One (2018)

18th May 2021

Review – Ready Player One (2018) Directed by: Steven Spielberg Produced by: Steven Spielberg & Ernest Cline Written by: Zak Penn & Ernest Cline Starring: Tye Sheridan, Mark Rylance, Ben Mendelsohn and Simon Pegg Release Date: March 28th 2018 (UK) Writing a review for Ready Player one is a task that requires several viewings of the movie due to all of all of the references and Easter eggs etc that are present in the film to take in. So please take comfort in knowing that I had to suffer for the sake of this review. After watching the movie a couple more times and watching a bunch of Easter egg videos on Youtube, I now feel more equipped to discuss the film. First off, I have never read the book that this film is based on. It has been recommended to me quite a few times, but I have never gotten around to reading it, so I went into this movie with no pre-conceived ideas of what it was going to be other than what I had seen in the various trailers. Let’s start with the good stuff. Although I have some issues with the overabundance of CGI onscreen, as a 3D animator myself I was extremely impressed at the sheer quality of the animation in the movie. I know that this thing had a pretty high budget behind it, but still the level of quality in the animation is really high throughout the film. The references are also pretty cool, at least for the first third of the movie but the novelty of seeing some of your favourite pop culture characters does wear off after a while and ends up feeling like a cheap gimmick before too long. Finally, if all you are looking for is a big dumb fun blockbuster, then this movie provides that in spades. Ok, onto the stuff that bothered me. As I said above, although the quality of the CGI is pretty incredible, the vast amount of it gets tiresome after a while. I also didn’t like the character designs at all; Parzival looks like a rejected piece of Final Fantasy artwork and Art3mis looks like a stereotypical version of a what a middle aged man thinks a cool hacker looks like with a weird resemblance to a feline. Aech just looked chunky and awkward, like something from a last-gen Gears Of War game, I-R0k’s weird, edgy, fantasy-based design didn’t fit his voice or the tone of the scenes he appeared in and Sorrento’s avatar just looked distractingly like a dastardly Clark Kent for some reason. Also, these original character designs seemed oddly out of place being surrounded by other characters from franchises that we already know like DC and Mortal Kombat, none of it meshed well at all. It also really annoyed me how they kept touching on the idea that someone in the Oasis might not necessarily look the same as they do in real life and if you ever met them in real life you would be sorely disappointed, only for the reason for all of this to be a small birthmark on Olivia Cooke’s character’s face. The way that they make her out to some sort of beast-like monster because of a minor skin-irregularity is ridiculous and also slightly offensive. Also, we are told during the movie’s opening sequence that the Oasis is a worldwide thing, where people from anywhere on the planet can meet up online and fight together or kill each other for coins. Then halfway through the movie, all of the characters meet up in a small ice cream truck in the real world and it turns out that they all live within a few miles of each other. It just made the whole thing feel really small scale. Another issue is that the movie is only 3 years old at this point and it already feels terribly dated. I don’t see this movie ageing very well in the long term at all and this is both due to the CGI and the references that they choose to include. Lastly, as I said earlier, if what you want out of this movie is mindless fun, then you’ll walk away satisfied, but the problem with that is that the movie seems to want to be more than that. The way that the movie treats itself and the way it was marketed along with the fact that it’s got Spielberg in the director’s chair, signifies that the filmmakers were intending for this to be this generation’s Back To The Future or Star Wars and on that front it totally fails. In these other movies that this film is aspiring to be, you care about what happens to the characters and want to see where they go, whereas here the audience cares way more about seeing the next popular franchise references than anything that happens to the main characters at the heart of this story and once you’ve seen the film, you are going to leave talking about the characters that appeared from outside franchises rather than the ones created for this story. The characters are also instantly forgettable, for example I have seen this film more than five times now and still couldn’t tell you the real world names of any of the characters other than Wade Watts and Sorrento and that’s only because he has the same name in the real world as he does in the Oasis. I also don’t care if I never see any of these characters again if I’m being honest. Apparently there is a sequel movie to this already in the early stages of development, as the first movie made a bunch of money at the box office and there is apparently a sequel book in the works, but frankly I wouldn’t care if I never saw any of these characters again and I don’t care where the story is going either. In conclusion, upon revisiting Ready Player One for review, it

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Review – Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

Review – Rogue One: A Star Wars Story Directed by: Gareth Edwards Produced by: Kathleen Kennedy Written by: Chris Weitz & Tony Gilroy Starring: Felicity Jones, Diego Luna & Alan Tudyk Release Date: December 15th 2016 Half a decade after its release, I decided that it was time to go back and review Rogue One, (aka the best Star Wars movie to be released following the Disney acquisition of Lucasfilm.) Upon its release, the film recieved rave reviews; with one review of Rogue One going as far as to compare it in quality to Empire Strikes Back, (widely considered to be the superior Star Wars film.) It actually also garnered a fair amount of Oscar buzz for that years awards ceremony. All of this, – along with the fact that it was following the positively received Force Awakens, – meant that audience expectations were set pretty high going in. For me, the film lived up to my personal expectations that I had for it at the time and in the years with every subsequent viewing, it has actually grown on me even more. That doesn’t mean that I’m going to write an entirely glowing review for Rogue One, as the movie still has its flaws. There are some parts of the film that I loved and some that I didn’t and to really get into the meat of that, I am going to have do delve into spoiler territory. The movie is 5 years old at the time of writing this review, so everyone should have really seen it by now. One of my favourite things about the movie is how well it ties into the start of A New Hope and how it actually fixes that movie’s biggest plot-hole by explaining that the weak point in the Death Star was installed on purpose by Galen Erso while designing the battle station under the Empire’s thumb, so that the Rebels would have a chance to destroy it. I also loved the fact that the movie had the guts to kills off the entire Rogue One crew at the end, which is something that they really had to do since none of these characters are ever mentioned at any point in the original trilogy. And that corridor scene at the end with Vader was possibly the best scene I’ve seen in the cinema in the last 5 years, but I will talk more about why I love it so much later in the review. Those are the stand out positives of the movie for me, however there were also a few flaws throughout the film. First of all, that Grand Mof Tarkin CGI recreation of Peter Cushing is awful, the whole thing looks like a character from the Clone Wars animated series. When he is first introduced it is through a glass reflection on a window he is looking out of and in that part of the scene it was fairly convincing, however he then turns around and the camera moves to a medium close up shot and all of a sudden it feels like watching a video game cutscene. Guy Henry was the actor who did the motion capture for Tarkin and he actually looks relatively similar to Peter Cushing, so why they didn’t just apply some makeup to Guy Henry and dye his hair gray to resemble Cushing more and recast the Tarkin role is beyond me. It would also have also been a lot cheaper than the CG method that they decided to go with. Either that or he should have only been seen in the reflection of the glass, since that was the only time that the CGI effect actually looked convincing. However, I do think that the CGI recreation of 1970’s Carrie Fischer at the end of the movie is slightly more convincing and if it wasn’t for her eyes and the movement in her mouth, it would be way more difficult to tell that that is a CGI character. Another flaw I have with this movie is the how rushed and choppy the first act feels. The characters are all introduced quickly and vaguely, then it takes a good while for them to actually form up as a team. I get that introducing a whole cast of brand new characters in a short space of time isn’t always easy, but they could have handled it better than how they do here. In a lot of ways Rogue One actually works as a contrast to Force Awakens. In Force Awakens, the plot is essentially the same as A New Hope and is a fairly by the book, traditional Star Wars story, but the characters were what makes that movie entertaining. If the characters in Force Awakens weren’t as well written, that movie would have been mediocre at best. In Rogue One, the characters are pretty shallow and underdeveloped. They are introduced quickly and by the end of the movie none of them have really had a proper character arc. However that is not what this movie is about. This film is about a team of people coming together in order to complete a task that sets up the events of the original trilogy and in that sense this movie does what it sets out to do. An example of this is the robot character K2SO, who I thought was going to start off with no humanity, then over the course of the movie realize the value of human life and then sacrifice himself for the greater good at the movie’s climax, but it transpires that the only real reason that he is helping the Rebels, is because he has been programmed to do so. This I feel sums up the level of character development present in the movie and demonstrates that it is not necessary in the film as that isn’t the movie’s purpose. What Force Awakens lacked in an original plot, it made up for in character development and what Rogue One lacks in