Rampage; yeah, of course the wolf can fly

The trailer for Rampage had me with that line, because Dwayne Johnson has all the charm it needed. And also because it proved that the movie understood that it was dumb, which makes a nice change.

The actual movie’s great fun. It’s idiotic and it doesn’t make any sense, but it hangs together better than a lot of Marvel movies I’ve seen. It also knows when to throw a character away or down the gullet of a big monster. In most movies I’ve seen, Dwayne’s team of zoo dweebs would have stuck with him throughout the movie; in Rampage, once Dwayne’s busted and crammed onto a military transport, the dweebs are left stuck in San Diego and we never see them again. Similarly when the bad guys send bad guy mercenaries into the wild to hunt down a thirty foot flying wolf they aren’t expecting to meet, they get et to the last man, helicopter and all. Sure, their leader looks like he’d have been fun to see more of, but they were completely outmatched; there was no way he was going to make it. This cheery willingness to put interesting people on the screen, and then not keep them around is something I wish other people would learn from.  No-one wears out their welcome.

And the action setpieces work. The movie opens up with a space station full of genetic lunacy exploding while the last survivor tries to get out with a couple of samples. She does not make it, but for her brief time on screen, we’re rooting for her, and there’s just enough action to keep our pulses racing and not so much that we forget there’s a person in the middle of it. Which pretty much sets the tone for proceedings, equal part Dwayne being Dwayne and stuff getting trashed for no especially good reason. 

And there’s Jeffrey Dean Morgan in the role of sinister yet good hearted government fixer Russell; I’d watch a whole movie about Russell if it weren’t for the fact that Morgan makes him so effortlessly effective that there would be no real stakes in Russell: the Movie. Victory would be inevitable, with nothing left to wonder about other than just how many low key wisecracks Russell could fit in before his opponents shot their own feet off. Morgan’s so much fun that each time he shows up you welcome the cameo instead of wondering just how he always knows where to be at the right moment, and how he gets there without breaking sweat. It’s a shame Morgan’s been tied up playing Negan these last couple of years, because he’s far too much fun to waste on a bummer like Walking Dead.

Rampage isn’t a great movie, or even a particularly good one, but I wish there were more simple crowdpleasers like it.

Ready Player One: Spielberg is better than this.

Traditionally, when you see an adaptation of a book, you have to take some kind of stance on which was better, or you’re just no kind of a commentator at all. Sue me. I tried to read the book, and kind of ran out of energy by the time Wade gets the first key. It’s not that it’s a bad book; it’s just that it wasn’t good enough for me to stick with it. There’s no way that I can work up an interest in pop culture trivia and computer games for their own sake. And Ernest Cline doesn’t have much of a style. I found his downbeat slow-motion apocalypse US all too believable. I liked the fact that Wade was fat. What I didn’t really like was Wade. And when you’re not really that fussed about the narrator; well, I was only reading the book to inform my experience of the movie, and it wasn’t that much of a priority.

So I dunno how true to the book the movie is. Probably not a lot, going on the bit I read. Same setting, same over-arching plot, but all new adventures, compressed into a shorter time and much more cinematic. And Wade’s not fat any more. Kind of a schlub, but good looking and well put together. It’s all a lot more … Hollywood than the original, I suspect.

But is it good Hollywood? This is Spielberg, the only reason I even bothered. Apparently it was his hardest movie since Saving Private Ryan, which is something I can’t understand but only take on faith. The effects shots took so long to render that Spielberg had time to go and make The Post while he waited for them to finish. They’re technically impressive, and yet, as is always the way with CGI, uninvolving no matter how good they look. A world where everyone can be whatever they want to be is somehow a world without any real stakes, no matter how flashy it looks. 

This despite the fact that the movie is going crazy trying to get you to invest. Everyone’s competing for a hidden easter egg in a computer game, and the winner will get half a trillion dollars and absolute control of a hideous mashup of Facebook and virtual reality in which apparently the whole world spends all its free time. So clearly, this shouldn’t fall into the wrong hands, or something. But we’re watching this movie uncomfortably conscious that most of this stuff doesn’t so much fall into the wrong hands as start out from there and then fall apart after a few years.

So, stakes that are hard to understand, visuals which are impressive without being emotionally resonant. Have we characters to believe in? Most of the time we’re watching avatars in VR, who are purposely heightened cartoons of what their people want to look like. And because they’re supposed to look kind of fake, they never really start to stick as people for us to care about. Then we swap out to their people, and there’s really not that much going on there either. A lot of the time, all that holds the attention is little moments when a character pulls out a gun and you recognise it from another movie. 

Over on the grown up side of the table, Mark Rylance is thrown away as the creator of the whole schemozzle; and when I say thrown away, I mean that it takes a very particular kind of mind to slap a wig on Mark Rylance and then tell him to play as spectrum as he can. Rylance has a rare charisma; he steals Bridge of Spies from Tom Hanks by somehow out-warming him. Telling him to dial that down is like duct-taping the Mona Lisa. Ben Mendelsohn, on the other hand, must be getting worried that he’s only ever going to play hapless creeps running empires of nerds who secretly hate him.

And as so often, I’m struggling to make sense of the economics. The US economy has collapsed, yet somehow a fortune of half a trillion dollars has retained its value in a world where no-one has a job or any spending power. The whole world’s living in a virtual reality as much of the time as it can, yet the big corporate bad maintains huge factories in which people slave away at virtual tasks which they could just as well do from home. There’s an enormous pervasive network with the bandwidth to let everyone participate in cinematic high definition shared spaces, but no real sign of the servers and transmission systems which would make it work.

 None of this is puzzling as the way in which Spielberg can’t make the world or the people come to life. There’s an assured sequence at the beginning, as Wade expositions the world of 2045 and the role of VR, and the camera roams around the high rise slum he lives in. Everyone in sight is hooked into VR, goggles strapped to their faces and waving their arms and legs around to make something happen in an imaginary world, and Spielberg finds ways to suggest that everyone is doing something different, and feeling all kinds of different things about it, from drudgery to desperation to elation. And then the camera settles on Wade, and the sense of the world falls away, never to come back.

Isle of Dogs: Wes Anderson hates cats

I’m not sure what’s the worst thing about my Isle of Dogs experience. Is it that I kept trying to figure out which dog was George Clooney when he wasn’t even in the movie, or is it that I fell asleep in the first twenty minutes and kept having to shake myself awake?

Isle of Dogs is apparently the longest ever stop-motion animated movie, and based on that, I’d say it’s probably not a sound strategy to try to break the record. Stop motion may not be suited to long form. A big problem, especially the way Wes Anderson does it, is that there’s not a lot of, you know, actual motion. Stop-motion’s not suited to action, or dynamic editing, or any of the things which we’re conditioned to expect in a movie. It does static setpieces and simple movements in a single plane. And because it’s puppets, you’re not getting much subtlety in expression or characterisation. So as everyone yacks away without ever really doing anything, you start to fade out. I’m not sure what I missed; I’m pretty sure that I didn’t miss anything which mattered hugely to the plot.

Still, it’s a Wes Anderson movie, so it’s different. Wes is not like the other kids. The more movies he clocks up, the more I realise how much Rushmore was autobiographical. Wes is doing things the hard way just for the sake of being different, not because it necessarily adds anything important to the emotionality of what you see. And definitely not because there’s any internal consistency to it. All the Japanese characters are voiced by Japanese actors speaking Japanese, with a variety of contrivances to provide an English gloss when Wes thinks you’re going to need it. But the contrivances are so stupid that subtitles would have been less distracting. For all the big political speeches about the background there’s an English language interpreter. But why would there even be an interpreter? This is Japanese local politics, which is to say local politics in a country which famously has no interest in letting foreigners have any kind of role or input in their community. They’d be just as likely to set themselves on fire in mid-speech as lay on English language interpretation.

And why is it happening in Japan at all? For all the effort to have Japanese actors speaking Japanese, it’s hard to see how this is a story which could only be told in Japan. 

Eh. I dunno. 

I was distracted by the fact that there was an Assistant Hatchetman to the Mayor of Megasaki, which left my literal little mind waiting for the Hatchetman proper to make an appearance. Spoiler, he doesn’t. Nor is there any real explanation for the sudden appearance of four cats in the middle of the aftermath of the climactic battle between Spots and the robo-dog. Were the cats inside the robo-dog? I was hoping that they had actually been inside the Mayor, operating him all along like the mythical eight squirrels in a raincoat. So many pointless questions. 

But in the end, it’s a deliberately weird Wes Anderson movie, full of visual oddity and forced quirkiness which almost make it worth watching just to see what he’s done this time. But it’s not got the panache and rewatchability of something like The Grand Budapest Hotel, and I’d almost say in a choice between watching Hotel again and watching Isle of Dogs for the first time, Hotel might be the better use of your time. The trailer for Isle of Dogs tells you everything you need to know about the look of the movie, and there’s not so much to it beyond the look that you’re losing a whole lot by never seeing it in full.