If a mosquito bit Steven Spielberg around the time he was making “Jurassic Park,” then became trapped in amber until some nut with more money than forethought extracted the DNA from it and cloned an early ’90s version of Spielberg, well, that’s the guy I could see directing “Ready Player One.”
But for the actual Spielberg, now 71, to be able to tap into his boy-genius mojo after the likes of “Schindler’s List,” “Amistad” and “Munich” to deliver such a rousing technical achievement while incorporating the broken families and outsiders of some of his best-loved works is nothing short of phenomenal.
Based on the novel by Ernest Cline, who co-wrote the script with Zak Penn (“The Incredible Hulk”), “Ready Player One” is centered around young Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan, “X-Men: Apocalypse”). An orphan living with his aunt and her latest loser boyfriend in the Stacks, a series of mobile homes literally stacked like makeshift high-rises in Columbus, Ohio, Wade finds refuge in the virtual universe known as the OASIS.
It’s 2045, years after the corn syrup droughts and the bandwidth riots, and almost everyone, regardless of their income, practically lives inside the OASIS. And why wouldn’t they when they can do literally anything Spielberg and Warner Bros. could obtain the rights to, including climbing Mount Everest with Batman?
Inside the OASIS, Wade is known by his avatar Parzival. In real life, he’s never even met his best friend, whose avatar, Aech, is a massive, beastly mechanic. They’re mostly content to drive in street races for coins and a chance to unlock the first piece of the puzzle that the late OASIS designer James Halliday (Mark Rylance) left as a Willy Wonka-style inheritance. Whoever finds the three keys and the Easter egg hidden somewhere in the OASIS will control the virtual world as well as Halliday’s vast fortune.
It’s been five years since Halliday died, and no one has even cracked the first clue. Warner Bros. could sponsor a similar contest, asking moviegoers to spot all the pop-culture references in “Ready Player One” and it would prove nearly as difficult. (To give you a hint without ruining any of the surprises, the DeLorean from “Back to the Future” and the Iron Giant are on the movie’s poster.)
But after Parzival saves Art3mis (Olivia Cooke, “Bates Motel”), who resembles a sexy, anime porcupine, during a race, he starts to take the contest much more seriously. They’re determined to keep the OASIS in the hands of Gunters (egg hunters) like themselves and Aech and away from the Sixers, debtors who’ve been co-opted into hunting for the egg by Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn, “Bloodline”), the nefarious head of Innovative Online Industries.
They’ll also have to survive the bounty hunter known as i-R0k, who shares the voice and, most hilariously, the attitude of T.J. Miller (“Silicon Valley”) and looks like Skeletor ate another Skeletor and then coughed up a RoboCop.
The virtual world of the OASIS looks nearly as magical on screen as it must to the millions of its goggled users. To emphasize the contrast, Spielberg created the OASIS scenes digitally using computer animation and motion-capture technology and shot the real-world moments on film. The effect is like bouncing back and forth between the Technicolor wonderland of Oz and the drab black-and-white Kansas.
“Ready Player One” goes on a bit too long, and several of the non-OASIS scenes tend to drag. Moviegoers who aren’t obsessed with video games or didn’t come of age with Buckaroo Banzai may be left scratching their heads during the onslaught of pop-culture references that come across in various avatars. Many of them stem from the late 1970s through the early 1990s, the era with which Halliday, whom Rylance portrays as Bill Gates by way of an aging Garth Algar from “Wayne’s World,” identifies.
It’s tough to tell whether the Gunters are obsessed with that era because they’re obsessed with Halliday, or if they’re simply immersing themselves in the nostalgia to give them an edge in the contest.
Regardless of their intent, “Ready Player One’s” massive battle scene with trademarks colliding like rarely before, has taken an early lead for biggest geek-out of the year. It’s like “The Lego Movie,” only with more heart — and more joyous thrills, depending on how well you know your movie, music and video game history.
Just like Halliday’s contest, “Ready Player One” is designed to reward the nerdiest among us.
Devastating images of the Halifax Explosion, a cataclysm so great that some victims were blinded simply by looking at it.
“Hold up the train. Ammunition ship afire in harbor making for Pier 6 and will explode.”
These were the last words of Vince Coleman, the train dispatcher who met his end on December 6, 1917, in the Halifax Explosion. Seconds later, the ship would explode and set off the 3,000 tons of explosives inside. It would be the biggest and most devastating explosion in history until the invention of the nuclear bomb.
The Halifax Explosion started when two ships collided in the harbor of the Nova Scotian capital of Halifax. A Norwegian ship, the SS Imo, had slammed into the SS Mont-Blanc, a French ship filled to the brim with TNT, picric acid, benezole, and guncotton.
The collision cracked open the barrel of benezole, dousing the ship in flammable chemicals. Then the SS Imo’s engine kicked in, setting off a spark that would kill thousands.
All 3,000 tons of explosives then went off at once, burning with a heat of more than 9,000 °F. In seconds, the flames eviscerated every building in a half-mile radius, while a brutal shockwave tore through the rest of the city, traveling more than half a mile per second and shaking the city to its bones.
The inferno tore through Halifax, burning so bright that some were blinded just from looking at the light of the explosion. Others were trapped inside their homes by the roaring fires around them. They had no way to escape from the smoke that slowly choked them and the flames that left nothing but ashes in their wake.
“The sight was awful,” one witness said. “People hanging out of windows dead. Some with their heads missing, and some thrown onto the overhead telegraph wires.”
By the end, the Halifax Explosion had ended 2,000 lives and seriously injured at least 9,000 more.
As horrible as it was, though, it would have been worse if it wasn’t for that one final message from Vince Coleman. He stayed at his post to make sure the train bound for the harbor wouldn’t come in. He gave up his chance for one last mad dash for survival to save the lives of the 300 people on board that train.
“Guess this will be my last message,” Coleman said as he watched the flames burn through the hull of the SS Mont-Blanc. “Good-bye boys.”
Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice is a superhero film that has been in production for several years, with its controversial cast being announced all the way back in the fall of 2013. Since then, due to the hiring of Chris Terrio to help write the screenplay, the film was pushed back a full year to fully realize the greatness that is America’s two biggest superhero icons duking it out to the death. The film is directed by Zack Snyder (Watchmen, Man of Steel, 300, Sucker Punch), written by Chris Terrio (Argo) and David S. Goyer (Batman Begins, Blade), and stars Ben Affleck as Bruce Wayne/Batman, Henry Cavill as Clark Kent/Superman, Gal Gadot was Wonder Woman, Jeremy Irons as Alfred, Amy Adams as Lois Lane, and Jesse Eisenberg as Lex Luthor. Laurence Fishburne, Diane Lane, and Holly Hunter play other characters. The story centers on the controversy in Metropolis surrounding the man-god Kryptonian savior Superman in the aftermath of the events of 2013’s Man of Steel, a film that was lambasted for compromising its protagonist’s heroic image with his blind destruction of the vast majority of the city in the name of beating up one dude he didn’t like, resulting in thousands of civilian casualties and probably a couple 9/11’s worth of property damage. This was a problem that Batman v. Superman promised to address, as Bruce Wayne/Batman, resident and vigilante protector of the neighboring and similarly crime-ridden Gotham City, sees the destruction firsthand, and thinks Superman is flaunting a lot of unchecked power and posing as a hero without understanding the consequences of his other-worldly power. The United States government seems to agree with Batman on this one, as a Kentucky senator is trying to propose (incredibly vague) restrictions on Superman’s hero activity. Superman has problems with the Bat as well, criticizing his vigilante justice practices. So, they have a little spat. Add a ton of other shit and you have this movie.
Batman v. Superman is an absolute mess. I want to make that clear from the get-go. Let me first, though, say the things that this movie does well (don’t worry, this won’t take long). First of all, the casting of Ben Affleck, which three years ago seemed to some as a sin against humanity, ends up being the most reliably good thing in this movie. Affleck brings his A-game, as does Irons as his assistant Alfred, who provides all two of the amusing parts of the entire movie. The cinematography has Zack Snyder’s signature touch, in that it’s dark and often very pretty, and yes, there is ample slow-mo. The action sequences are hit or miss (more on that later), but a number of them are fairly well-done, curiously all of them having Batman at their center. Not only is Batman an inherently more interesting and malleable character, but also seems to make for much more compelling action. The actual fight with Superman is suitably tense and pretty exciting, as are the scenes, both real and imagined, of Batman throwing down with armored baddies – even if they are a tad excessive in brutality. The score is also decent, even if the choir sections are pretty ridiculous.
The film, probably thanks to having one-half of its writing team be a pretty good screenwriter (Terrio), does have a story that lends itself to some themes that are interesting on paper, and are what primarily got me excited about the movie in the first place. The idea of essentially an indestructible god being among humankind and how mankind would deal with that is inherently intriguing, as is the theme of what limits should be placed on and what litigation should be allowed in regards to the activities of superhumans (although this idea was much better examined already in The Incredibles). Especially in the first half of the movie, these themes are given some light as we get to know the motivations behind Batman and Superman and try to understand their philosophical squabble. This is where the list of the good things about the movie ends. On to the excrement.
Now, like I just said, this movie’s story, when handled well, lends itself to some inherently very thought provoking themes regarding the relation between gods and men, conflicting ideas of justice, and the political implications of a superhero in the modern world. The first 100 minutes or so of this movie are largely action-free and are almost entirely devoted to setting up these ideas. The remaining 50 minutes are mostly allocated toward brainless, poorly put together action sequences underscored by character decisions that not only completely bury any semblance of cohesion or conclusiveness to the themes harped on so aggressively in the first act, but also actively make these themes make no sense at all.
One of the most intriguing things about BvS’s premise was its seeming legitimizing of the mind-numbing pointless cataclysm at the climax of Man of Steel. It almost covered up for one of that movie’s biggest flaws by making it the starting point for the entire plot, seeing as how Batman sees that destruction as reason enough to try and destroy Superman. Unfortunately, the ethical codes of these characters are completely muddled and nonsensical in the last two-thirds of the movie. Batman suddenly becomes a vicious, remorseless murderer despite his claims for superhero accountability for collateral damage, and Superman (with the help of Batman and the two minutes Wonder Woman pretends to matter on screen) causes and/or facilitates arguably even wider destruction and casualties in his “heroic” efforts, yet these are conveniently glossed over. Lex Luthor had the opportunity to have an interesting motivation regarding his borderline atheism and fear of a godlike creature, but it ends up getting lost in Jesse Eisenberg’s weird, twitchy monologues that end up coming off goofy instead of menacing the majority of the time. When your main villain’s haunting final scene gets laughs from the audience, your villain is not working.
All of these motivations and themes are completely devoid of cohesion, and the film instead elects partway through to pull a complete 180 from a tense, dark, outwardly political (not necessarily good) superhero movie to a loud, obnoxious video game. My mind has become completely numb to almost all computer generated imagery, and yet these superhero movies seem to be having a contest to one-up each other with how many virtual fireworks displays they can shoehorn to the film’s climax. The already pretty muddled and empty attempts at depth made in BvS are made even more shallow and pointless as the third act tries scene by scene to best itself by how much shit it can clutter the frame with. The inky Instagram filter lighting, break-neck editing, and smudgy punk rock color palette turn the majority of the latter half’s action sequences into pure sensory overload, and by the end the action had become so tensionless and numbing to me that I was really just waiting for the credits to start because I’d already basically decided how I felt about the movie.
If the irksomely under-realized thematic material wasn’t enough to drag the already thin plot to its knees, there’s also the fact that Snyder’s self-indulgent slow-motion and inclusion of repeats of pretty imagery we saw before bloat the already insultingly huge running time even further, and the one potentially risky story move toward the end (and also the only thing about the entire movie not shown in the trailer) is completely negated in the sequel-guaranteeing final shot. Oh yeah, we also have some sequels to set up for, which results in a number of incredibly rushed, forced, and groan-inducing flash-forwards to the Justice League that honestly felt really hammy. Remember how Age of Ultron was like the middle-point movie for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and had to kind of move all one thousand of its characters’ stories along by like an inch so they can each have their own movie, and as a result it was kind of a big jumbly mess? Yeah, well the DC Cinematic Universe has already had that movie now and we’re only two movies in, which is not a promising foundation for your dozen-odd-film meta-franchise.
Speaking of the Marvel movies, let’s use them as a means of illustrating what is probably the biggest surface-level problem with this movie – it’s not fun. At the very least, Age of Ultron was quippy, fast-paced, and had some characters we liked. Even if the action grew tiresome, the thought-provoking themes weren’t explored very well, and it was kind of overstuffed and overlong, at the very least I can say it’s a fast, fun movie to sit through. Batman v Superman tries to take a page from the Nolan Batman trilogy and take superhero stories more seriously, but somehow translates that into making the film overly grim, dark, and completely devoid of fun – yes, Batman v Superman makes Christopher Nolan seem subtle by comparison. Besides some small quips by Alfred (which seem super out of place within the rest of the movie), the only fun things are the cool action bits the trailers spoiled for us and unintentionally funny lines by the villain. Especially after seeing a movie like Deadpool, it’s really hard watching a superhero movie that doesn’t just take itself seriously, but is just brooding and dull and dreary. It’s dudes in spandex punching a swamp demon. You’re not directing fucking Hamlet, Zack Snyder. Have some fun with it.
Overall, Batman v Superman raised my expectations in its first act with some clever writing and themes and even some good action sequences, then proceeded to instead deliver exactly what the trailers made me believe beforehand that I would get, and also usurped all fun and advertised future movies in the process, all while completely ditching its potential to be powerful and drowning it in an incoherent, inconclusive 40-minute eyefuck. This movie isn’t complete shit. It’s just a blockbuster that tries to be ambitious, gives up, then tries to go by the numbers, and then gets the numbers wrong. Good thing I’m not a comic book fan so I only see this as a shitty movie and not some kind of act of sacrilege.
On my way out of the theater, I saw a 12-year-old girl walking out next to me that had a Batman shirt on that said, “That was probably the best movie I’ve ever seen.” And that’s a pretty good way to look at it. This movie will probably satiate the hunger of the least demanding of die-hard comic fans, and will probably give Zack Snyder fans a huge boner to add to his trophy room, but if you don’t fit in one of those categories, I don’t think it’s worth the trip to the theater. Just wait for Civil War like I’m doing.
With each passing day of the impeachment crisis, the distance between the official reasons for the conflict in Washington and the real reasons grows wider.
It has become increasingly clear that the central issue is not Trump’s attempt to “solicit interference from a foreign country” by “pressuring a foreign country to investigate one of the president’s main domestic political rivals,” as alleged in the whistleblower complaint that triggered the impeachment inquiry.
Rather, the conflict raging within the state centers on Trump’s decision to temporarily delay a massive weapons shipment to Ukraine.
The ferocity with which the entire US national security apparatus responded to the delay raises the question: Is there a timetable for using these weapons in combat to fight a war against Russia?
A New York Times front-page exposé published Monday, coming in at 5,000 words and bearing six bylines, makes it clear that Trump’s decision to withhold military aid—over a month before his phone call with Ukrainian President Zelensky—triggered the conflict that led to the president’s impeachment.
As the Times reports, “Mr. Trump’s order to hold $391 million worth of sniper rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, night vision goggles, medical aid and other equipment the Ukrainian military needed to fight a grinding war against Russian-backed separatists would help pave a path to the president’s impeachment.”
The newspaper states that Trump decided to hold up the distribution of military aid to Ukraine on June 19 after he read a news article saying that the “Pentagon would pay for weapons and other military equipment for Ukraine, bringing American security aid to the country to $1.5 billion since 2014.”
Trump’s action sparked a “fiery internal debate,” according to the Times, leading to an intervention by the “national security team” arrayed in a “united front” around National Security Advisor John Bolton, an architect of the Iraq war.
After Trump rejected the officials’ calls for the aid to be released, saying, “We are pissing away our money,” details of the hold on the military assistance were leaked to the press and a high-ranking CIA official submitted a “whistleblower” complaint accusing Trump of soliciting “dirt” on his political rival.
The CIA spun up its “Mighty Wurlitzer.” The intelligence agencies and the media began promoting the narrative that Trump held up the military aid to hurt his political rival, even though Trump made his decision on the aid package a month before he asked Zelensky to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden.
These actions would ultimately lead to only the third impeachment of a president in the history of the United States, throwing the country into a constitutional crisis with an unknown outcome.
All of this begs the question: Given the enormous political cost of impeachment to those who initiated it, what could possibly explain the urgency and ferocity with which the entire national security establishment responded to a delay in the distribution of weapons to Ukraine?
Is there a timetable for using these weapons in combat? Is the United States planning a provocation that would thrust Ukraine into a major new military offensive?
The Russian military is certainly drawing such conclusions. In a statement earlier in December, the chief of the Russian General Staff, Valery Gerasinov, said the increased tempo of US exercises in Eastern Europe indicates that the US is making plans for “using their forces in a large-scale military conflict.”
“Military activities are increasing in the Baltic States and Poland, in the Black and Baltic Seas,” Gerasimov said. “The intensity of the [NATO] bloc’s military exercises is growing. Their scenarios point to NATO’s deliberate preparation to use their forces in a large-scale military conflict.”
In February, the United States will ship some 20,000 soldiers to Europe to participate in a military exercise that will be the largest deployment of forces to the European continent in a quarter-century. The exercise, dubbed Defender 2020, will include 17,000 European troops and, according to Breaking Defense, see NATO forces “extend their logistics trains and communications lines from the Baltic to the Black Seas.” The exercise will cost $340 million.
The National Defense Authorization Act, passed with overwhelming bipartisan support within days of the House vote to impeach Trump, includes an additional $300 million in military aid to Ukraine as part of a record-shattering increase in US military spending.
Overall, the United States and its NATO allies have provided more than $18 billion in military and other aid to Ukraine since the 2014 US-backed coup that overthrew the pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, and installed the current pro-US regime. This was on top of what Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland bragged in 2013 was “over $5 billion” in aid to “ensure a secure and prosperous and democratic Ukraine.”
The bags of money handed out by the CIA via various “civil society” pass-throughs in Ukraine helped overthrow its elected government and bring to power a US proxy regime supported by the extreme right.
In 2013, the US supported a measure that would integrate Ukraine into a political association and trade pact with the EU. This was intended to pave the way for Ukraine joining NATO. When the Yanukovych government opposed the agreement, the US launched the 2014 coup, installing a puppet regime viciously hostile to Russia.
The 2014 coup was a pivotal point in the efforts of the United States to militarily encircle and ultimately carve up Russia. Since the dissolution of the USSR, the United States has led a systematic drive to expand NATO right up to and beyond the borders of the former USSR.
As Foreign Affairs notes:
In March 2004, NATO accepted into its ranks the three Baltic states—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—which were once part of the Soviet Union, and four other states. The accession of the Baltics signaled that NATO enlargement would not halt at the former border of the Soviet Union. The EU followed suit in May 2004, extending its border eastward to include a number of former Soviet republics and allies, including the Baltic states, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia.
But the US was taken aback by Russia’s determined response to the Ukraine coup. Russia annexed Crimea following a referendum in which the overwhelming majority of the population of the enclave supported leaving Ukraine. Moscow at the same time backed a secessionist movement in the country’s east.
Given these circumstances, Foreign Affairs writes:
In fact, that Ukraine is at the center of this storm [the impeachment crisis] should not be surprising at all. Over the past quarter-century, nearly all major efforts at establishing a durable post–Cold War order on the Eurasian continent have foundered on the shoals of Ukraine. For it is in Ukraine that the disconnect between triumphalist end-of-history delusions and the ongoing realities of great-power competition can be seen in its starkest form.
Despite the unforeseen and disastrous consequences of the CIA-backed coup in Ukraine, the United States is determined to continue its efforts to militarily encircle Russia, which it sees as a major obstacle to its central geopolitical aim—control of the Eurasian landmass, which would give it a staging ground for a conflict with China.
The relentless drive for military escalation has brought the Democrats into an alliance with the fascistic right in Ukraine, which has held street demonstrations to pressure President Zelensky to continue and escalate the US-backed proxy war against Russia.
One thing is clear. If there is indeed a timetable to use the hundreds of millions of dollars in weapons being transferred to Ukraine, such a war risks a nuclear escalation. In 2018, Elbridge A. Colby, one of the principal authors of the National Defense Strategy issued by the Pentagon in January of that year, published an article titled, “If You Want Peace, Prepare for Nuclear War.”
He wrote:
The risks of nuclear brinkmanship may be enormous, but so is the payoff from gaining a nuclear advantage over an opponent.
Any future confrontation with Russia or China could go nuclear… In a harder-fought, more uncertain struggle, each combatant may be tempted to reach for the nuclear saber to up the ante and test the other side’s resolve, or even just to keep fighting.
Amid a growing upsurge of the class struggle all over the world, the Trump administration, representing a despised and isolated capitalist class, can see in war a means to tamp down, as one comment in the Financial Times recently put it, the “class war” at home, and “make domestic antagonism seem beside the point, if not unconscionable.”
But it is the international growth of the class struggle that provides the means to oppose the war drive of the ruling elite. As mankind enters the third decade of the 21st century, the advanced stage of war preparations on the part of the ruling class makes it all the more urgent, in the immortal words of Leon Trotsky, to counterpose to the “war map” of the capitalists the “map of the class struggle.”
This means unifying the growing struggles and forging a common movement against war and attacks on democratic rights, as an essential part of the struggle for socialism.
