Reviews

Ready Player One's runtime is a quite long 140 minutes, and not a single one of them is boring; the film passes in the blink of the eye. Not only it's a good entertainment containing very spectacular action sequences (and you don't want to blink during them if you don't want to miss one of the gazillions pop culture references), but its thematic is dealt with a certain intelligence that makes it not a dumb fireworks show, but rather a clever, familial show. That is the least you could expect from Steven Spielberg.

That base being covered, I couldn't help myself from finding a list of oddities, disappointments and other narrative weaknesses. First of all, I didn't quite like the appearance of the characters' avatar in the "OASIS". Most of the movie takes place inside this video game, and we therefore watch the characters evolve mostly through their avatar, which is a CGI, fanciful, version of themselves. I found the avatars very childish and lacking elegance. I can understand why they preferred making the official poster with the real-life characters and included none of the avatars, because that would have made it look like a very silly movie, like "Arthur and the Invisibles". To make it worse, one of the theme in the movie is that the main female character doesn't want to be met in real life because she's insecure about her appearance, which she thinks would be disappointing in comparison to her (supposed to be) attractive avatar. This whole subject was a bit ridiculous, because in real-life she's a very cute woman, and absolutely more attractive than her odd alien-looking avatar. I can imagine women playing video games and not having a standard beautiful physical appearance (unlike Olivia Cooke, the actress in Ready Player One) being frustrated with the hypocritical way this thematic is dealt with in the movie.

The sentimental story that is developed between her and the main character is very awkward. It feels like the film was originally 4 hours long and they decided to cut on the love story to make it fit inside a more reasonable runtime. Some scenes are just really, really wrong. In one of them, the main character explains that he's in love with her because they "finish each other's sentences" (the old romcom cliché), but they have just met each other and interacted with each other's in a few scenes, discussing game strategy and logistics! This makes no sense. Later, when they meet each other in real life, and he notices that she hides a birthmark on her face with a strand of hair (which explains the insecurity about her appearance), he proceeds to put the strand of hair aside and stroke her face in an affective gesture. This is such an out-of-place thing to do with a woman he just met, and she seems fine with it, it's all so awkward and weird!

This weak sentimental story is rooted in the fact that the personality of the main character in real life is inconsistent with his personality in the video game. In real life, he's portrayed by a serious-looking Tye Sheridan, whose eyeglasses only add to the apparent maturity. In the game, his avatar is all excited, shy, and at times borderline childish. Now, this looks like this is actually an assumed theme from the movie, the fact that when you play an avatar you don't display your actual self and can communicate emotions you don't want to communicate in real life. It is, in any case, supported by the directing: in the scenes where the character expresses his teenager's emotion-fueled love for the girl, we only see it from inside the video game; but in the scenes where he, with assertiveness and no innocence, confronts the CEO of the evil corporation about his evilness, we see him in real life in his van with the VR goggles on. So this could actually have been a great treatment of the theme, if only it hadn't lead to this contradiction where a character is in a quantum state, both too shy to dare kiss a girl and also visibly too mature to pull out this kind of crap.

I spent a good time watching Interstellar, although to be so I needed to constantly remind myself that I wasn't following a realistic story, but rather some sort of fable. The story is repetitively implausible.

There's an ex NASA pilot who hasn't trained in years who get himself ready in weeks to undertake an interstellar travel mission. The film makes it look like piloting spaceships is like driving cars. Current NASA missions requires around 5 years of training for one specific mission; enough time for an astronaut to see his children become teenagers. In the future, NASA operates undercover because the government is in denial of the spatial program. Somehow they already have astronauts in another solar system! The idea that an undercover version of NASA could undertake such missions in secret of both logistically and financially absurd. Those are grandiose missions, the kind of which require billions of dollars of funding, thousands of employees, years of research and development, and manufacturing deals with the private sector.

Once in space, astronauts explains to each other some aspects for space travel, which is a way for the screenplay to convey such information to the spectator, but which is unfortunately very clumsy because astronauts are supposed to know those things! There is a scene where some astronaut explains to the astronaut played by Anne Hathaway how a wormhole is supposed to work, by folding a piece of paper and making a hole with a pen in it. The character listens in awe because she apparently discovers how that works. This is the kind of explanation that anyone can find in any educative YouTube channel about science. It is unthinkable that an astronaut would not know that, for the simple reason that it would mean such astronaut is catastrophically under-skilled for the mission in the movie.

Many aspects of the mission are improvised in space. During one of such improvisation, Cooper, the main character, elaborates a plan by drawing rough lines and circles on a whiteboard, like he was playing some strategy game of something. Everybody agrees that the plan will work and that they're good to go. Such things require very precise calculations, adjustments, checking, double-checking, designing a protocol to ensure everything will go fine, etc. Maybe this development phase of the plan can be considered to be included in an ellipsis, but I find showing the spectator only the whiteboard drawing session to be so coarse.

On the science side of things, there are many bizarre things. So-called "gravitational anomalies" belong more to the domain of fantasy than of science-fiction. One of the pillar concept of science of that no matter what new discoveries are made, what worked one day continues to work under the same assumptions and limits in the future. This is why we're still using Newton's laws to make calculations on Earth even though Einstein proved them to be incorrect. They're only an extremely good approximation when you don't approach the speed of light, which wasn't even under consideration at the time Newton was alive. This is also why we'll never go faster than the speed of light under conditions in which it's currently known to be impossible (which is all conditions we know). So, whatever we discover about black holes I can assure you than the day gravity on the Earth's surface start having anomalies scientists are gonna shit more than bricks.

In the movie, there is a wormhole near Saturn. Wormhole are giant celestial bodies that are supposed to be taking thousands of years to form. I didn't feel like the film was set in thousands of years. It would mean they look back at the Apollo missions like we look back at the Great Pyramids, which wasn't really the way the movie conveyed the sort of nostalgia about those missions. When the astronauts embark in their spaceship to travel to the wormhole, the film chooses realistic travel speeds and accepts that it takes months (maybe years, I don't remember) to reach out to Saturn, but when they appear on the other side of the hole, in another solar system, then suddenly travel from one planet to another is only a matter of hours.

I could probably continue with more and more such paragraphs. While watching the movie I think I made myself such remarks at a rate of about one every 10 minutes. There's just no detail or even no medium-importance plot device that makes sense or is plausible in this movie. Yet somehow I mildly enjoying watching it, for the simple reason that it is a fable. Like in a fable, individual pieces of actions can be implausible, but the point isn't such details, the point is the overall story. Interstellar is the kind of material that should have been developed with care over an entire saga of science-fiction books a thousand pages each, but it's a 3 hours movie instead. At such, it's some sort of science-fiction high-density package of interesting concepts that aren't developed in much deep nor rendered very plausible. But it works on a high-level. You just need to imagine that instead of watching a movie you're listening to Christopher Nolan on a 3 hours road trip telling you about his last big science-fiction idea. You can feel how touching and grandiose it is, it only remains to be actually done.

I thought this movie could only surprise me in a good way, as from the poster and various images I had a pretty bad feeling about it and wasn't expecting anything great, yet it somehow managed to be even worse than I imagined. Not only does it have the typical shortcomings of all those same shitty adaptations, but it desperately tries and fails to submit a feminist icon.

Let me introduce you to Wonder Woman.

Coming from an island of women only, a man has to show her how to behave in the real world. He also makes sure she's not too much distracted by cute babies or wounded soldiers she wants to help. When she tells about some bizarre God stuff, the man needs to filter out the bullshit and convert it to an actual goal. When she's making a big scene because too much violence in this world and peace is better than war, the man needs to calm her down. She wakes up from a night in a basic boat, her mascara perfectly made. She enters the battlefield like she entered a fashion podium, in slow motion please. She charges at a bad guy, destroying the bell tower of a church, creating a havoc full of dust and dirt, but her hairstyle is still up to an advertisement for a shampoo. She's trained to fight with a sword, but her costume leaves most of her skin uncovered for some reason.

When one tries to make a feminist movie, one should ask oneself how many 14-year-olds will pause in the middle of a dramatic scene to fap to the lead character, because that's what happens when the focus is on sexiness of costume design rather than on depth of character development. Maybe choosing Zack Snyder as the writer, author of Sucker Punch, were a group of girls looking like dolls fight a bunch of Nazis, wasn't such a great idea. The power that Wonder Wonder holds in the movie is purely physical. This is not what feminism needs. Where are the scenes where WW has a brilliant idea, takes a game-changing decision (apart from what starts the movie), or gain deep respect from her peers? There is none.