Rampage (2018)

I have recollections of the Rampage arcade game. I don't think I ever played it, but at the time it was an interesting enough concept to draw my attention.

Of course video games have come a long way since then, and what might have been vaguely interesting to a 15-year old is not quite as much a draw to someone in his late forties.

So Rampage would have been a miss for me. Only it starred Dwayne Johnson, whom you could place in one of those Yule log fire videos and it would be a billion times more watchable. And it was directed by Brad Peyton who made San Andreas (also starring Johnson), which was big, dumb and incredibly fun.

Placing Johnson in the movie definitely makes it much more watchable. And Brad Peyton manages to produce a few decent set pieces. But the movie really failed to work for me in a couple of key areas.

The first might be a result of disaster fatigue. Every big budget movie these days seems to destroy at least one American city. Those that best succeed for me are the ones that bring in the destruction at a ground level - Cloverfield, Godzilla, even Peyton's San Andreas all remember the human element. With Rampage I never felt the sense of real world consequences to the carnage. The hyper-kinetic editing didn't help in that regard either, with some scenes being lit too poorly for such quick cuts, so it was difficult enough to follow what was occurring to feel any genuine sense of peril.

The second was the escalation. The film starts relatively small - a bust up in the zoo, a hunt for an over-sized wolf in a forest, but then when it gets to the city the carnage ramps up to 11 and really has nowhere to go from there. I was sitting in the cinema, wishing for some sense of climax to the film, but it was probably less satisfying than watching someone playing the old arcade game.

For the most part I didn't actively dislike the movie, but after walking away from it, I was left with a rapidly increasing sense of dissatisfaction.

The Quiet Place (2018)

There's a lot of buzz about The Quiet Place being the best horror film of the year (we're only into April, so that might be a bit premature). Fortunately, I hadn't heard much of this before I saw it, which meant I saw it with no expectations. In fact I nearly didn't watch it at all, as I was feeling lazy and didn't know if I wanted to bother.

Ninety minutes later and I was practically bouncing out of the cinema wanting to tell everyone how much I enjoyed the film.

For those who who can't stand the gore that has proliferated through much of modern horror, The Quiet Place will come as something of a relief. It isn't entirely blood free, and there's at least one wince-making moment (that's telegraphed so far in advance that I was fully prepared to be looking away when it happened - so I don't actually know what was shown on screen at that point), but for the most part it's about the tension and the fear, not voyeuristic depictions of bodily harm.

It's also notable that for all the tension and the scares, it's a movie that doesn't leave you walking away feeling battered senseless. There's a careful management between tension, action and the slower moments (I would have written quieter moments, but in the context of the film, that wouldn't make sense). It feels like a roller coaster horror film lensed through an Indie film-making sensibility.

The story plays on primal fears - be quiet or the monsters will get you. It appeals to childhood fears, inhabiting the same landscape as the Grimm Fairy Tales, but it's also very much an adult tale about protecting your family.

Like last year's Get Out, The Quiet Place should do a lot to redeem the image of horror as a respectable genre. In fact, I can see future generations of filmmakers being inspired by this - although hopefully they'll take away the right lessons from it.

Perhaps I'm over-selling it, but I genuinely loved this film. For a relatively novice director, John Krasinski has crafted something very special, which should do wonders for his directing career, if he ever gives it a chance amid all the acting gigs.

Ready Player One (2018)

Ready Player One has been on my radar for a while now. I read the book several months ago and enjoyed it, although I was mildly irritated by the juvenile-toned wish-fulfilment aspect to the writing. Knowing that Steven Spielberg was supposedly directing it (although he was also supposed to be directing Robopocalypse, which had been MIA for five years, until being handed over to Michael Bay), I held out the hope that the film version might address some of those issues.

Ove the past couple of months, the trailers started arriving. At first, I wasn’t particularly interested, until the release of one with a cover version of Pure Imagination playing over it managed to push all of my geek buttons. I quickly moved from being mildly interested to completely obsessed, even though I knew there was every chance that I was going to be completely disappointed.

Unfortunately, I had decided to go away for the weekend when the film was being released, which meant I had to wait for a full FOUR DAYS before being able to see it.

I had one or two problems while watching it. The first was that I managed to tip my seat up in the cinema to the point that I almost crushed the person sitting behind me. That has no bearing on the film at all, but I thought I’d mention it anyway.

The second was that I really needed another couple of hours sleep to be able to concentrate properly. As a result, parts of the film felt like a particularly vivid dream.

Aside from that, Ready Player One pretty much met all of my expectations (the optimistic ones at least). Aside from the advances in the technology used to make the film, it felt like a leftover from the 1980s (the last decade when they really knew how to make sci-fi blockbuster films that weren’t part of a franchise). Ernest Cline, the author of Ready Player One, was born one year after me in 1972, so it’s not surprising that many of his cultural touchstones intersect with mine.

The story is a cross between Tron and The Last Starfighter (the latter being an inspiration for the author’s second (and lesser) novel, Armada), covering some of the same territory as Tad Williams’ Otherworld books and the Sword Art Online anime series. While the script isn’t particularly deep, it does neatly reflect some of the concerns about the direction today’s society is taking – particularly in the ever-increasing divide between ultra-rich and trailer park poor (in this case trailer parks are now mini-cities with trailers stacked vertically on top of each other).

Geek-culture references come thick and fast. Chucky, Back to the Future, Batman, King Kong, Akira, Silent Running, The Shining, Star Wars, Jurassic Park are some of the few that come immediately to mind, but there’s so much more than that. In terms of copyright clearance, Ready Player One makes The Lego Movie seem a mere dilettante in comparison.

When I was fourteen, this would probably have been among the best films I had ever seen. As it stands, it’s a film that I liked an awful lot. It’s not perfect, but it’s more than good enough. And I’m looking forward to seeing it again.