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Film, Movie Reviews

Movie review: ‘Ready Player One’ engages despite virtual overload

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VIDEO: See Tim’s review of “Ready Player One” with Ellery McCardle on KARE 11.

“Ready Player One” (PG-13)

You’ll need a speedy internal processor to completely absorb “Ready Player One,” director Steven Spielberg’s overly-ambitious yet entertaining foray into the world of virtual reality video game playing. A high stakes game of life and death set in a dystopian future where virtual vistas and avatars offer people their only true chance to escape the depressing doldrums of everyday life, the film no doubt boasts a unique concept and impressive visuals throughout. Yet while it embodies Spielberg’s youthful spirit, it largely will only appeal to the film’s key demographic and leave others struggling to keep up in the virtual world that envelops them.

“Ready Player One” is set in the not-so-distant future, in 2045, where just enough time has passed where the world’s population literally has humanity stacked on top of each other in mobile home parks, and technology has advanced to the point where virtual reality gaming is the only recreation of choice. It’s the only way 18-year gamer Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) can escape the harsh surroundings of Columbus, Ohio, which for reasons unexplained, is the fastest growing city in the country. Everybody from the haves to the have-nots like Wade all venture daily into the OASIS, a haven for 70s and 80s pop nostalgia, which was invented by a Steve Jobs-like eccentric named James Halliday (Spielberg’s new go-to actor Mark Rylance).

But when word breaks that Halliday has passed on and has created a three-part challenge as a way to bequeath his half-trillion-dollar fortune and control to the OASIS to the winner, everybody from Wade to IOI — the second-most powerful corporation in the world after Halliday’s — embark on the treasure hunt. Employing an army of players to hunt down the Easter Egg that Halliday has hidden, IOI’s ruthless leader, Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), instantly shows his muscle, and proves that he has no problem going to extreme lengths to secure the prize and control of the OASIS.

Not surprisingly, “Ready Player One” is loaded with eye-popping visuals, giving Spielberg a chance to unleash his inner-kid once again, which he probably welcomes following the heavy narrative of his awards season true-life drama “The Post.” Populated with too many pop culture references to keep count (many of them Warner Bros. and Spielberg properties since it’s a Warner Bros. and Spielberg film), the film is wonderful trip down memory lane for children of the ’70s and ’80s and early ’90s, and perhaps enough to keep them interested in a film that, despite a fairly straightforward plotline (seek prize, find prize, rule the virtual world), has a lot of data to process. Seasoned gamers will no doubt get all the jargon that helps propel “Ready Player One,” but for everyone else, keeping pace with what’s going on can be a chore.


AUDIO: Hear Tim’s review of “Ready Player One” with Tom Barnard on “The KQ 92 Morning Show.”

The other issue is that because Spielberg’s involved, he has the clout to make it a 2-hour, 20-minute adventure when it really doesn’t need to be that long. With two-thirds of the film set in the virtual world, “Ready Player One” already suffers from sensory overload, but thankfully grounded players like Sheridan, Olivia Cooke as Wade’s virtual and real-world teammate, Rylance, Mendelsohn and Simon Pegg (in a pivotal supporting role) give the film just enough heart to keep things interesting on a human level.

Lammometer: 7 (out of 10)

Tim Lammers reviews movies weekly for The KQ92 Morning Show,” “KARE 11 News at 11” (NBC), WCCO Radio, WJON-AM, KLZZ-FM, “The Tom Barnard Podcast” and “The BS Show” with Bob Sansevere.

Copyright 2018 DirectConversations.com

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Film, Movie Reviews

Movie reviews: ‘Star Trek Beyond,’ ‘Ice Age: Collision Course’

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Paramount Pictures

By Tim Lammers

“Star Trek Beyond” (PG-13) 3 stars (out of 4)

Following the underwhelming response to the Khan narrative in “Star Trek Into Darkness,” the Starship Enterprise is back on course with “Star Trek Beyond,” the third chapter in the reboot of the classic film and television franchise.

Once again starring Chris Pine at the helm as Captain Kirk, this ‘Trek’ finally finds the Enterprise on its five-year mission into deep space. Answering a distress call to a distant planet, the ship is destroyed by the vindictive villain Krall (Idris Elba), who takes most of the crew members hostage as he prepares to execute a deadly plan of revenge on the Federation.

Interview: Simon Pegg talks ‘Star Trek Beyond’

While the “destroy the Federation” narrative feels familiar, “Star Trek Beyond” has all the elements you’d want in a “Star Trek” film: smart dialogue, exciting action, spectacular visual effects and moments of poignancy, all while maintaining a sense of humor about itself. Most importantly, it maintains the tone of the franchise, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year.

You can’t help but be saddened throughout the film every time Anton Yelchin pops up on screen as Chekov, showing once again the brilliance that was cut short by his tragic death last month.

“Ice Age: Collision Course” (PG) 3 stars (out of 4)

The fifth film in the “Ice Age” film series is probably more of a screwball comedy than any of its four predecessors, yet it has the most dire of circumstances: an asteroid is hurtling toward the planet and threatening extinction, and the woolly mammoth Manny (voice of Ray Romano) and his pre-historic friends, including the one-eyed weasel Buck (Simon Pegg), must find a way to deflect it off its collision course.

Despite the end-of-the-world storyline, “Ice Age: Collision Course” is hardly a film that will have younger viewers fretting. In fact, the film is very kid-friendly, especially when it comes to the subplot involving Scrat the sabre tooth squirrel.

Continuing his quest to get that ever-elusive acorn, Scrat sets off the chain of events that puts his fellow creatures in peril. It’s easily his most entertaining adventure yet.

Reviews of “Star Trek Beyond” and “Ice Age: Collision Course” starting 10 minutes in on “The KQ Morning Show.”

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Film, Interviews

Interview: Simon Pegg talks ‘Star Trek Beyond’

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Paramount Pictures

By Tim Lammers

Without question, Simon Pegg’s career trajectory of late has catapulted him into the stratosphere. In the past seven months, he’s appeared in a “Star Wars” film with “The Force Awakens” and now, another “Star Trek” film — a pretty amazing feat, considering most actors don’t get the opportunity to be in one film in either franchise, much less both of them.

But the real thrill, Pegg said in a phone conversation from New York Wednesday, was an opportunity to co-write the screenplay for the latest adventure of the Starship Enterprise in “Star Trek Beyond.”

“It’s been a heck of a ride. It’s been a privilege to me as a fan and getting a chance to manipulate the ‘Star Trek’ universe and add details to it,” said Pegg, who, of course, also plays Scotty in the reboot of the film franchise. “It’s also great to add new characters and new situations for those beloved characters we know from 50 years of ‘Star Trek’ history.”

Opening on 2-D, 3-D and IMAX 3-D screens Thursday night, “Star Trek Beyond” finds the crew in the third year of its five-year mission, forced to confront a malevolent villain, Krall (Idris Elba), after his forces destroy the Enterprise and captures its crew. In addition to playing Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott, Pegg shared screenwriting duties with Doug Jung. Pegg said while he and Jung felt an “enormous responsibility” to deliver, they weren’t necessarily intimidated by the assignment.

“As fans of the show, we felt, ‘Yeah, we can do this.’ This is something that we’re eminently qualified to do since we’ve been around a long time and felt plugged in,” Pegg said. “It felt right, even though I knew it would be daunting at times, and incredibly frustrating since we had a short space of time to write it in. I knew that eventually, if we could pull it off, then it would feel like a wonderful thing to have done. As the cliche goes, ‘It’s always better to regret something that you did do instead of something you didn’t.’ I didn’t want to say, ‘No way I’m doing this.’ It felt like it would be silly not to have grabbed the opportunity.”

While Pegg knew from a narrative standpoint that the “Star Trek” saga was moving forward, he also wanted to give his take on the franchise a different spin, creatively. Oddly enough, while the spin would be fresh to the timeline of the new trilogy of films, it’s essentially an idea that makes up the core of the TV franchise.

“First and foremost, we wanted to get the Starship Enterprise trekking. It hadn’t even started its five-year mission in the first two movies,” Pegg said. “The first two movies were pretty much in their own solar system with a few little jaunts outside of it. It felt like we need to get this film to be what the original TV series was about, which was a mission to explore the galaxy.”

Another thing that was important to Pegg was to make sure the film didn’t take itself too seriously.

“We wanted the film to feel fun, and not dark and ponderous,” Pegg, 46, said. “That seems to be the mood these days, to make everything so dark and serious, almost as if to justify us watching these things as grown-ups. In actual fact, these stories should be celebrated for what they are. If the stories are light and fun, the movies should be light and fun. I think the original ‘Star Trek,’ aside from having a vein of social commentary and seriousness to it — which is an important part of it — also did embrace its humor, and people sometimes forget that. It was important to Doug and I that the film had a fun side, too, in addition to being an exciting and thoughtful adventure.”

Produced by J.J. Abrams, directed by Justin Lin and featuring the return of Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Zoe Saldana, John Cho and Karl Urban, “Star Trek Beyond” has an inherent bittersweet feeling to it since fellow core cast member Anton Yelchin died tragically in June at the age of 27. Pegg said the loss of Yelchin has naturally been weighing heavy on everybody’s minds, even as they get ready to premiere the film for fans at San Diego Comic Con this week.

“We knew it was going to be an effort to promote the film with any degree of enthusiasm because we’ve lost somebody that we loved,” Pegg said. “We’ve been a family for a long time and I feel for anyone who’s lost anybody in circumstances that were premature. It’s an unspeakable pain, and we’re all utterly, utterly undone by it.”

Pegg said when he saw the film for the first time recently, he expected to be in tears the whole time, only to be gripped by the magic of a performer who was clearly in his element when he was onscreen.

“To see Anton alive, to see him feel alive, vital and brilliant like he was, it made me realize that he will live forever,” Pegg said. “For people who didn’t know Anton, things haven’t changed. You’re still going to be able to see him and still be able to enjoy what he did. For us who knew him, there’s going to be a hole in our lives forever, but we decided to move forward in the promotion of this film because it was coming out whether we liked it or not.

“Rather than withdraw from it and not engage, we decided to get out there and work hard because it needs to be seen and not missed because it stars Anton,” Pegg added. “He was our brother and we loved him very, very much.”

Film, Interviews

Interview: Director Christopher McQuarrie talks ‘Rogue Nation’

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Acclaimed filmmaker Christopher McQuarrie has officially worked on four projects with actor-filmmaker Tom Cruise, from writing “Valkyrie” and “Edge of Tomorrow,” to directing the action superstar on “Jack Reacher.”

Yet no matter how convicted Cruise was on those projects, McQuarrie said there was something extra special watching Cruise come to life as Ethan Hunt in their latest collaboration, “Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation,” and proving that the life of a legendary super-spy isn’t as perfect as you would expect.

“What was especially great in this one was Tom’s ability and his willingness to not only to have fun with himself, but with the character,” McQuarrie told me in a recent phone conversation. “It was fun to direct Tom in a scene where he was supposed to jump over the hood of a BMW. Your expectation is that it’s going to be this movie star hood-slide, but instead, he trips and takes a face-plant on the hood. That part was improvised. He said, ‘I got something, just roll the camera,’ and he did this great sight gag.”

Photos: Paranount Pictures

New on Blu-ray and DVD on Tuesday (Paramount Home Media Distribution), Cruise again embodies Hunt, a rogue agent of the Impossible Mission Force (IMF) and bane of CIA honcho Hunley’s (Alec Baldwin) existence. Tired of the destruction Hunt continually leaves in his wake, Hunley finally manages to convince the government to absorb — and effectively, abolish — the IMF program. Apart from his past misgivings, Hunley is also fed up with Hunt’s obsession with the terrorist organization known as “The Syndicate” — a group that the CIA claims is a product of Hunt’s (Cruise) imagination.

However, a deadly encounter with The Syndicate’s head (Sean Harris) confirms Hunt’s suspicions that the group is indeed for real, and he needs to enlist the handful of his IMF colleagues (Simon Pegg, Jeremy Renner and Ving Rhames) to bring the group down. The situation is so desperate that Hunt is forced to take a leap of faith and trust Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), a Syndicate agent who for reasons unexplained, helps him escape torture and certain death at the hands of her employer.

“Rogue Nation,” like the previous “Mission: Impossible” installments, is chock-full of death-defying stunts, not the least of which Cruise’s heart-pounding scene as he clings to the outside of a cargo plane. Despite all of the planning that went into the scene, McQuarrie doesn’t deny that it’s the stuff nightmares are made of, especially for the guy directing the film.

“His falling off the plane was actually the least of my concerns,” McQuarrie said. “It was the debris on the runway and potential bird strikes that made me worry about him being torn off of the plane rather than falling. We realized as we got closer and closer to that stunt that there was really nothing we could do about it. You were really doing something that had never been done before, and you had to go with a ‘Let’s see what happens’ approach. It was pretty terrifying.”

The interesting thing about the shot is that the cat was let out of bag early about it. Not only was the sequence heavily featured in the film’s trailer and TV spots, it was depicted on the film’s theatrical poster. Because of that, McQuarrie used the scene very early in the film, and surprised many viewers in the process.

“We knew instinctively that it was the right thing to do to put the scene where we did,” said McQuarrie, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of “The Usual Suspects.” “If we built the whole movie about that shot and put it at the end, it simply wouldn’t be fresh or satisfying.”

Perhaps one of the freshest surprises to come out of “Rogue Nation” is Ferguson, a Swedish actress relatively new to the Hollywood film scene. McQuarrie, who will be back with Cruise for yet another “Mission: Impossible” film in 2017, said he hopes Ferguson will be a part of it.

“Since I had such a great experience working with Rebecca, I would love, love, love to work with her again,” McQuarrie enthused.

Then, the writer-director suddenly remembered how “Rogue Nation” effectively catapulted the actress to superstardom.

“Unfortunately, everybody else in the world loves her as much as I do now. I only hope she’s available,” the director added with a laugh. “I just hope she returns my calls.”

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