Review: Ready Player One

Often the most interesting thing about a movie is the thing they don't want you paying attention to. When you're setting up an extreme scenario that you want to play around with, usually the easy thing to do is to set up an environment where that scenario seems reasonable; there's a reason why crime rules the streets in every Death Wish movie. So to have everyone constantly logged into a virtual world in Ready Player One, the real world has to be a crapsack. But why?

Movies have always struggled to make virtual worlds interesting. Movies themselves are a virtual world we willingly enter; add another layer to that and you run the risk of the audience feeling too far removed from the story. Inception made it work by having the layers of removal be part of the story; The Matrix set the bar impossibly high by making the virtual world the only place where the characters could be fully human. And here? It's important because that's where all the cool stuff is.

The original novel had a little more to it thanks to its creepy obsession with 80s pop culture. Emotionally it made sense: of course people are going to use virtual and augmented reality to escape into their obsessions, and of course people reading a novel in 2011 are going to know about and be nostalgic for 80s pop culture (people in the novel's setting of 2045 not so much, but that's what the scavenger hunt angle is for). Nostalgia is a dead end, but at least the book foregrounded it so much it couldn't help but make that obvious, even as it worshiped a past we can never return to.

Director Steven Spielberg, on the other hand, clearly couldn't give a shit. If he wants to get nostalgic for pop culture that means something to him, he can churn out another Indiana Jones movie. So the novel's focus on 80s pop culture as a way to solve the scavenger hunt for the keys to rule the Oasis instead becomes a much more general "pop culture" angle where the scavenger hunt problems are instead solved by focusing on the life of the Oasis' creator.  The references are much more general: The Iron Giant, which gets a lot of play in the marketing, is a 90s reference (just), while more recent games like Halo and Overwatch also get a look in - and the virtual world of the Oasis becomes a kind of pop culture junkheap without even the bonds of nostalgia to hold it together.

(presumably this is why a bunch of negative reviews have ended with movie quotes, as if to say "this is how to re-use pop culture, old man" - the problem for some reviewers isn't that this film is a celebration of nostalgia, it's that it doesn't celebrate nostalgia enough)

This version of the Oasis isn't even interesting on a "nerd showing you his action figures collection" level: at least those action figures mean something specific to one particular nerd. And with much of the "action" in the Oasis consisting of virtual characters just hanging out (which might have been fun when you were playing World of Warcraft but was as boring as hell to anyone watching you play) the narrative focus of the film drifts just enough to make the outside world seem worth a look. Which is a problem, because in this story the outside world is meant to be the frame, not the picture.

In 2045 everything has to be crap, because otherwise why would everyone spend all their time online? There's not even a hint of the much more likely reason: everything is crap because everyone spends all their time online. There's nothing more out-of-touch than an old man complaining that kids need to get outside and play more, so this is extremely careful not to even hint that cause and effect could work the other way. Our heroes would totally be out there changing the world, if only the world was worth changing.

Ready Player One sets up a virtual world that's a pile of random pop culture references thrown together into a meaningless junk heap, and then says that's the only escape from a real world that's a literal junk heap. The idea of there being anything to life beyond "I gotta get what's mine" has vanished; the biggest struggle is over who gets to run the world's biggest message board, only nobody has anything they want to say.

The real nostalgia here is for a time when nostalgia was possible, a world where things meant something and everything wasn't happening to everyone all the time. It's a film about a civilisation that's given up on both meaning and the future: Spielberg must be a whole lot of fun at parties these days.

Review: Mary Magdalene

Mary Magdalene is a quiet and sensitive film about a radical woman. Lacking the violent bombast of most biblical filmic narratives, and refusing to answer many of the questions it raises, it's a film that may perplex or underwhelm impatient audiences. But it's interesting precisely because of this quietness, and for the way it allows its central character, Mary (Rooney Mara, etherial and serious), a spiritual journey that's valid and plausible, whether or not you can believe in the mumbling Jesus  as the son of God or merely a gifted guru ahead of his times. This is a film that arguably allows both possibilities to exist side by side.

We first meet Mary as an empathic young woman living in a small fishing village where she doesn’t fit in with her traditional male-dominated Jewish family. She doesn’t want to marry or bear children and yearns for something intangible. Her independences leaves her open to accusations of demon possession and there are moments of real danger in the way her male relatives try to deal with this rebellion. But when she meets the travelling teacher (Joaquin Phoenix) and his band of disciples, she joins their radical social movement, travelling along the dusty roads to Jerusalem where Jesus meets his cross.

Written by Helen Edmundson and Philippa Goslett, and produced by the UK/Australian team who made The King’s Speech, Mary Magdalene is the second feature from director Garth Davis, who directed the sweeping and crowd-pleasing Lion (2016). As a viewer raised an Evangelical Christian and fed the gospel stories along with my mother's milk, it was a blessed relief to watch the way this film skips the well-worn greatest hits of the Jesus album – or at least comes at them from a side angle, only showing what Mary herself might have witnessed. The bickering and power plays between the male disciples are also convincing and well drawn (particular highlights include Chiwetel Ejiofor as Peter and Tahar Rahim as a sympathetic Judas Iscariot). These conflicts point towards the reason why Mary Magdalene has been sidelined in historical accounts and misrepresented (by the early Catholic church) as a prostitute. There's  nothing at all carnal in this re-telling, not even a smidgen of romance. And that's a relief.

Mary Magdalene is committed to showing the extreme simplicity and poverty of its times and setting: the labour involved in netting fish, drawing water or birthing babies, and the casual brutality of Roman occupation. Production design by Fiona Crombie and costumes by Jacqueline Durran emphasise the homespun beige calico and burlap world of the characters, though Greig Fraser's gauzy, gorgeous cinematography gives radiance to the stripped back palette.

There are moments here that feel too quiet, too slow. And Phoenix's Jesus is frankly underwhelming. With matted beard, and looking far older than the 33-year-old historical Messiah, his barely projected sermons and understated 'miracles' of healing are never quite as impressive as the gospels might have us believe. This Jesus suffers from palpable confusion and even self-doubt. And yet perhaps that's point. The real Jesus failed to fulfil the expectations of those who longed for a politicised revolutionary. And yet the revolution he undoubtedly started continues to shape the world, for better or worse. In Mary's escape from domesticity into the life of a religious follower, we see the birth of an escape route open to women in the midst of repressive patriarchal societies - the life of a nun who's allowed to evade biological destiny and pursue a calling more cerebral.

Review: Tomb Raider

Tomb Raider is an old-fashioned film, and not just because a large chunk of it takes place in a thousand year-old crypt: there’s next to nothing going on in this largely unambitious action-adventure that you couldn’t see in a movie twenty (forty?) years ago. Well, maybe one thing: at a time when the idea that simply taking another culture’s relics is a little dubious, the new Tomb Raider goes out of its way to present grave-robbing in a socially acceptable light. This time around the ones actually robbing the tomb are the bad guys, the tomb is Japanese (relatively safe to pillage culturally speaking) and it's also pretty much a death trap the Japanese didn’t want anywhere near their country anyway.

So with that safely taken care of, we’re free to enjoy the tomb-raiding clichés – of which there are many, and this gleefully includes all of them – under the steady leadership of Alicia Vikander, who as Lara Croft delivers a performance that gives just the right amount of emotional heft and intensity to all the running, jumping, crawling, diving, more jumping, arrow-shooting, bike racing, kick-boxing, swimming, and falling out of the sky. Not only is Croft not a superhero, she’s not an experienced adventurer: this is her origin story, and it’s refreshing to see her be exasperated or freaked out by the kind of rough and tumble that a more experienced heroine (or less engaged actor) would take in her stride.

Taking its lead from the successful 2013 reboot of the game, here Croft is 21, a London bike courier, and actively avoiding taking on the mantle (and vast wealth) left to her by her father, Lord Croft (Dominic West). He vanished seven years ago on a vague and mysterious quest to prevent the bad guys – an organisation named Trinity – from finding something evil, and when Croft decides to finally sign the papers that’ll officially mark her father as dead she stumbles upon a clue that inspires her to go looking for him one final time.

This isn’t particularly jet-setting, with only a brief stop-over in Hong Kong for a thrilling but superfluous foot chase scene before she’s off with drunken sailor Lu Ren (Daniel Wu) to find the mysterious island where both her father and his vanished. It’s hardly a spoiler to reveal finding the island is both surprisingly easy and extremely hazardous, and that once there the somewhat unhinged Mathias Vogel (Walton Goggins) is running the kind of archaeological dig where sloppy workers get shot.

For a story that basically runs on rails there are enough twists here to keep things moderately fresh, but who’s watching a Tomb Raider movie for the story? Norwegian director Roar Uthaug strings together an entertainingly varied range of action sequences to keep the excitement levels up before they get into the tomb (even if, as is common these days, the quality of the CGI is variable). 

Once there he manages to make the fairly clichéd and uninspired run of death traps seem more like a camp reunion with some old favourites – spikes! pits! puzzles! deadly swinging things! – than something we’re meant to be taking fully seriously. It’s definitely not a high point of the film, but it’s a Tomb Raider movie; if there isn’t some old school breaking and entering then what’s the point?

The “jungle adventure” genre has been having a mini-revival of late (remember Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle?) as something of an antidote to the superhero genre’s increasingly bloated dramas. The best of the Indiana Jones movies remains a peak nobody’s going to be scaling in a hurry, and this isn’t anywhere close: the story is thin, the comedy (largely from a brief appearance from Nick Frost) is so-so and the supporting cast are largely forgettable. But as a rollicking old-fashioned adventure – the kind where going over a waterfall is a serious threat – this is a whole lot of fun. For once, a franchise film ending on a cliffhanger seems totally appropriate.

Anthony Morris

Some rushed love for Female Film Critics

It's International Women's Day.

You can go elsewhere to find reams of appalling statistics and analysis telling us just how far we've got to go before there are equal opportunities for women behind the camera and in front of it. This inequality extends, of course, to women film critics, commentators and scholars. I'm not here to talk about that.

Me, I'm struggling to stay in the game.  Freelance film writing is poorly paid, sporadic, and takes far longer to do properly than most people realise. Like most journalism, it's a struggling profession (if film reviewing ever was a profession) and most of us, men and women, do it for the love of it. I reckon I spend 20 hours a month watching films for a one-hour unpaid podcast, Hell is for Hyphenates. It's a fun gig, I enjoy working with my hilarious co-host, Lee Zachariah, and it stretches me to watch both old and new films.

I know how lucky I am to be able to afford keep writing about film while I'm working on my novel. I do the odd film review for SBS Movies, write a quarterly column on the Australian film industry  for Metro magazine, and I've been doing some creative film-related features for Neighbourhood. I don't really have a job, though.

Right this minute, I'm juggling the demands of a teenager home from school with a homework-related migraine, a partner with a serious illness, and a darling dog who seems to need as much attention as a toddler. I feel grateful if I manage to get to the cinema two times a week, and I watch most things at home on a laptop. Not ideal.

One of the ways I keep myself sane and interested in current cinema is by reading and listening to what others have to say about it, and especially what other women have to say about it.

In celebration of International Women's Day, here are just five of my favourite young women writing and talking about films right now. Look up their work, follow them on Twitter, listen to their podcasts. Apologies to all the other amazing women I haven't mentioned. There are multitudes of you, including festival directors, programmers, academics and agitators Keep up the good work and thanks for making the conversation about cinema so intelligent, informed, nuanced, personal, angry, funny and freewheeling.

Love you. xx

Joanna Di Mattia: Blogs at In a Lonely Place. Tweets at @JoannaDiMattia

Christina Newland: Writes for places like Sight & Sound. Website at The Betamax Revolt. Tweets at @Christinalefou

Eloise Ross: Podcasts at Cultural Capital and Senses of Cinema. Tweets at @EloiseLoRoss

Mel Campbell: Podcasts at The ReReaders. Tweets at @incrediblemelk.

Rebecca Harkins-Cross. Website. Tweets at @Rharcross.

Want to shout out to some others? Leave us a note in the comments.

Review: Red Sparrow

Dominika Egorova (Jennifer Lawrence) is the prima ballerina at the Bolshoi Ballet until an on-stage accident (note: not an accident) ends her career. Her options to support her ill mother (Joely Richardson) rapidly narrow; working for her sleazy security chief uncle (an extremely Putin-like Matthias Schoenaerts) becomes the only way to keep from being thrown out onto the street.

Of course, once she agrees to his offer she’s dropped into a nightmare where the only way to stay alive is to become a Sparrow, a spy trained to use sex as a weapon against the enemies of the state – enemies like CIA agent Nate Nash (Joel Edgerton), who’s been booted out of Russia for blowing his cover. Nate is a spy who cares too much, and when the high level mole he was handling won’t make contact with anyone else he’s sent back to Europe to re-establish contact – and Dominika is sent to “make contact” with him.  

You're seeing this for Jennifer Lawrence, and fortunately she's excellent here. Unfortunately, she’s playing a blank slate, so while she constantly and skilfully suggests that something’s going on under the surface, she can’t make clear what that is - for the plot to work her character has to be a cypher. If we knew how she was feeling beyond “I’m under duress”, then we’d know what she was thinking, and as the entire film is building to the kind of shock reveal supposedly gritty and realistic spy movies love, this can’t happen.

That wouldn’t matter if the film – like last year’s Atomic Blonde – provided surface pleasures like snappy dialogue and exciting action. But Red Sparrow features no shoot-outs, no car chases, and surprisingly for a film whose lead was originally a ballerina, no scenes where Dominika kicks someone in the face.

Instead of action, this has is sex – or as the rating warns us, “sexualised violence”. Remember the gritty realism mentioned earlier? That’s the frequently rapey sex scenes. But the realism only goes so far: this is a film that features what Dominika memorably refers to as “whore school”, which is so hilariously lurid the presence of Charlotte Rampling as the head mistress must be some kind of in-joke.

The fact that Dominika gets sent on a mission without graduating (and isn’t much of a student) suggests that even the film knows the sex school is a silly idea. If the Russian secret service is so all-encompassing that it can make anyone its servant, why don’t they just hire conventionally attractive women who enjoy sex to staff their Sparrow team? Why do spies need to be sent to a special school to learn how to pick up drunken lonely diplomats anyway? Nobody sent James Bond to sex school -  unless it was to learn how to track down women with absurdly suggestive names.

In a smarter film, this could be a critique of the usual spy clichés. For men, spy sex is fun; for women, it’s a tool of oppression – she’s bluntly told at Whore School that her body belongs to the state. But Dominika is such a blank we have no idea what any of it means to her as a person. She's trained to become a sex spy, but the film has zero interest in her personal attitudes to sex beyond a fairly universal distaste for being raped then having her rapist murdered while on top of her. Is this former top athlete liberated by her training, enjoying her new role as a sexual aggressor? When she uses her naked body to show that a would-be rapist she beat up was more interested in power than sex, is this something new to her or something she knew all along?

It’s not until past the half way mark that she gets to have a sex scene that isn’t on-the-job rape, and by then we’re expected to wonder if she’s not merely using sex to get what she wants. In Red Sparrow, good sex is about emotional connection, while bad sex is about power and manipulation; if we could make a connection with Lawrence’s character maybe this wouldn’t be such a dud root.

Anthony Morris