Mark Rylance – Memphis Flyer

When future digital archeologists look at the internet, I wonder what they will make of the millions of pages of stories about Kirk and Spock having sex. Or Buffy and Hermione’s doomed love affair. Or the novel-length work about wrapping Roy Orbison in cling film. (Google it and weep for humanity.)

Fan fiction, as this stuff is loosely called, predates the internet, but it was only with the coming of the world wide web that the art form could flourish. It’s not true that no one wants to read my carefully thought-out story of R2-D2’s rich inner life — maybe a hundred people would like it, and since they’re all on LiveJournal writing robosexual fantasies, I know where to find them.

Fanfic is a way for the consumers of popular culture to take control of it, even if it’s in a small, limited way. Its reputation for bad writing is well-earned, but it’s not all amateurs out there. The entire Fifty Shades of Grey franchise started life as as an extremely popular BDSM Twilight fanfic — author E.L. James just changed vampires to rich people. But discounting Roy Orbison in cling film, fanfic’s crowning achievement is Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One.

Cline’s protagonist Wade Watts lives in the teeming slums of the ruined future, but escapes into The Oasis, a fully immersive virtual world populated by billions who act out their fantasies in real time. Wade is one of thousands of other players on a years-long quest to solve a series of puzzles set out by James Halliday, the system’s creator. Halliday’s obsession was popular culture he loved as a kid, so Ready Player One’s great game is steeped in 1980s references, from Advanced Dungeons and Dragons to Zork. The first to find the three hidden keys can unlock the “easter egg” and be awarded ownership of the entire system.

The late creator envisioned a Willy Wonka scenario, but control of this virtual world would be fantastically lucrative, so Innovative Online Industries (IOI) CEO Nolan Sorrento is spending a lot of money and manpower to leverage gaming as a form of hostile corporate takeover. When Wade makes a breakthrough in the game, he becomes the target of Sorrento, who pursues him in both the virtual and real worlds.

Ready Player One is no literary masterpiece, but it is a good beach read. Once it became a bestseller, it was kind of inevitable that the film adaptation would be directed by Steven Spielberg, the man responsible for much of the ’80s aesthetic Cline is nostalgic for. Spielberg got Industrial Light and Magic on board, and worked his wizardry. He and screenwriter Zak Penn sanded off the book’s rough edges and worked around the inevitable intellectual property licensing conflicts inherent in a story that climaxes with Voltron dueling Mechagodzilla. (There’s a glaring lack of Star Wars, for example, and Voltron is demoted to just “a gundam.”)

Eager as I was to see the director of Raiders of the Lost Ark bring D&D creator Gary Gygax’s trap-tastic Tomb of Horrors to life, Spielberg’s virtuosic comedy-action sequence built around The Shining more than justifies his decision to dial back the book’s more esoteric digressions. But you don’t have to be a hopeless geek like me to get it when everything clicks, like when Wade (Tye Sheridan) and his Magic Pixie Dream Girl Art3mis (Oliva Cooke) float into an ethereal zero-G dance club with “Blue Monday” booming over the sound system. Cline’s book wants to be edgy YA dystopian fiction, but in Speilberg’s hands, it’s more Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

As long as he delivers the goods, Spielberg could be forgiven if he just made a delicious confection. But this film, though steeped in nostalgia, feels very much of the moment. As Sorrento, Ben Mendelsohn is doing a sly imitation of Principal Vernon from The Breakfast Club, but he’s also Mark Zuckerberg, seeking to control the world through domination of information flows. Mark Rylance plays Oasis creator Halliday as the archetypal computer geek hero who wants both information and people to be free. The characters believe their assumed online identities are more real than the ones they’re stuck with IRL.

Ready Player One is a lot of fun, but it also feels like the end of something. Now that Spielberg is filming his own fanfic, maybe postmodernism has reached its final form. Remixing the past is all fine and good, but now it’s time to go back to the future.

At this point, Christopher Nolan is a lot like Led Zeppelin. Both the English director of brainy blockbusters and the deans of English classic rock had a talent for big, crowd-pleasing riffs. Nolan dominated the multiplex box office of the aughts and early teens the same way Led Zeppelin dominated album-oriented rock radio in the 1970s. And both Nolan and Zep are taken very seriously by both their fans and themselves.

Nolan and Zeppelin’s technical mastery of their respective forms turned out to be mixed blessings. Jimmy Page had an idiosyncratic style that worked extremely well for him, but as the ’70s gave way to the ’80s, the audience was bombarded by mediocre imitators. Zep was great, but those who came after were not so great, and there were so many of them. Nolan likewise constructed a unique style combining classical technique with modern digital technology. It was great in Inception but not so great when it was regurgitated in The Maze Runner.

Nolan-itis hit the superhero genre especially hard. Somewhere on the backside of the two-hour mark in The Dark Knight Rises, watching a hyper-realistic depiction of a guy dressed like a bat punching out masked terrorists started to get old. But the grimdark wouldn’t die. From Hunger Games to Man of Steel, assaultive mirthlessness was the order of the day. After Nolan hung up the batarang, Warner Brothers wouldn’t make another watchable superhero movie until this year’s Wonder Woman, and even Patty Jenkins’ instant classic lifts the ending from The Dark Knight Rises.

newest feature film, the WWII-era Dunkirk.

Rather than weeping because he had no more worlds to conquer after Interstellar, Nolan decided to go small — only small for Nolan means recreating the Battle of Dunkirk, IMAX-size, with as little CGI as possible. Artistically, it was a good decision. By bringing Dunkirk in at a brisk (for him) 106 minutes, Nolan rediscovers his gift for concision that made his early gems like Memento so pleasing.

Nolan sets up the situation swiftly and nearly wordlessly. It’s May 1940, and Tommy (Fionn Whitehead) is a British soldier retreating from the Nazis in northern France. When his squad is attacked while looting for food and water in the abandoned French port town, he is left as the only survivor. Looking to find a place to relieve himself, he stumbles onto the vast beach where tens of thousands of British troops are waiting for rescue from the German blitzkrieg. For a moment, the assembled might of an army waiting to go home looks imposing, but once the German dive bombers arrive, their true vulnerability is revealed.

In real life, 400,000 British and French soldiers were trapped on the beach until an ad hoc flotilla comprised of practically every seaworthy vessel in the British Isles sailed to the rescue. Nolan’s cast isn’t quite that big, but I don’t envy the extras wranglers who had to find places for everyone to relieve themselves on the French beach. Like Spielberg, Nolan has an almost Soviet talent for visualizing great movements of people. There is no lead actor, per se, in this film. Nolan’s screenplay follows three groups: Tommy and his mysterious comrade Gibson, who repeatedly try and fail to get off the beach; the crew of the Moonstone, a modest pleasure vessel captained by Mr. Dawson (Mark Rylance) who volunteers to ferry soldiers across the channel; and a flight of Spitfires, led by Tom Hardy, whose numbers dwindle as they try to keep the Luftwaffe busy while the evacuation proceeds. The three storylines proceed linearly but at radically different paces until they all come together for a finale above, on, and below the English Channel.

Aside from Rylance’s warm humanity and Cillian Murphy as a shivering PTSD case, the characterization is paper thin, but the plotting and editing is as tight as is expected from Nolan. From balletic dogfight sequences shot with IMAX cameras and real airplanes, to the horror inside a capsizing troop ship, the images he conjures are among the best of his career. There are also moments of almost accidental political relevance, such as when a squad of soldiers in a leaky boat has a miniature version of the Brexit debate, only with guns. Nolan’s vision of war is not sweeping, heroic action and sacrifice. It’s fear, foggy goggles, and ratty comms. The victors are the ones who make it home alive.