Disclosure Day

Perhaps because the film is set in a present parked up and ready to plunge into the kind of nuclear conflict we were warned against in The Abyss, director Steven Spielberg's latest, Disclosure Day, is best enjoyed as throwback: a pre-war on terror thriller that has convinced itself there could possibly be a development - an all-consuming societal shift - that would bring everybody together, instantly putting all of humanity on the same page. Josh O'Connor plays Dr. Daniel Kellner, a shadow government whistleblower with a backpack full of portable hard drives that, it is implied, will be instantly discredited and deleted should he attempt to file share them. Emily Blunt deploys her governess charm as Margaret Fairchild, a weather girl whose ambitions to sit in the anchor's chair are complicated by a sudden onset of uncanny insight into the interior landscapes of everybody she comes into contact with. To lock eyes with this woman is to lay your secrets bare; revealing the treacherous interpersonal structures that prop up the persona you present to the world. 

Colin Firth's Scanlon, Kellner's former boss, is hot on their trail. This high-ranking agent in an off-the-books intelligence service is a remote viewer, able to transmit thoughts and murderous action into oblivious accomplices half a country away. In the fullness of Disclosure Day we learn that Scanlon's Possessor-like hold over others is the brute force aspect of an attempted summit between humanity and another, extraterrestrial race. Scanlon's efforts - most of which are focused around transforming Eve Hewson's blameless ex-nun into an unwitting assassin - may be indicative of a military-industrial mindset that sees any technological scrap from beyond the stars as an opportunity to crush its enemies but, plainly, all communion in Spielberg's film is expressed in traumatic, involuntary episodes. The abilities developed by Kellner and Fairchild, as well as the blocked memories that bleed into their subconscious minds, were all placed there in horrifying childhood events premised on an invasive and unwelcome change being visited upon these shivering youngsters. Although both adults are treated like the twin prophets of a new faith, this status isn't one they've made any conscious decision to pursue. 

Unlike, say, ET the Extra-Terrestrial, there's no sense in this film that these space men are inherently good then, only uncannily powerful and perhaps even indentured to some secretive department within the American government. That their grand plan to establish a shared understanding with us is indistinguishable from the false memories that can be constructed around childhood sexual abuse seems pretty notable too. Are Kellner and Fairchild supposed to be grateful? Or is the wreckage of their lives just a means to an end? Naturally, this terrifying narrative about the malleability of mankind in the face of a wheezing master race resides in an expertly arranged chase film that even begins in medias res. Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kamiński consistently link together beautiful, successive perspectives on human and mechanical action. There are performance car interludes - in which farmhouses are driven through and the camera snakes around the straining drivers - that firmly underline why Spielberg was eager to take Michael Bay under his wing twenty years ago. Similarly, televisual techniques picked up while young Spielberg was making his bones with the parlour mysteries of Columbo - specifically an ability to find multiple, illustrative shots within an unbroken sequence - sing here. The restlessness of Spielberg's frame feels atypical now; even spritely compared to the increasing theatricality of the computer-generated epics that clog up the cinema screens. Not showy per se, simply indicative of an expert craftsman. 

Jurassic World Rebirth

Find in Jurassic World Rebirth two competing plot lines. The first is premised on the kind of pitch-think that sees a real movie star, like Scarlett Johansson, hired to take up an enormous amount of one sheet real estate and play a mercenary hunting for blood samples on an island packed with tooth and claw. The second, and less obviously showy strand, concerns itself with an injured and extremely divorced father attempting to keep his tween and teen daughters, as well as a layabout boyfriend (and eventually a tag-along pet who's the spitting image of Cera from Don Bluth's The Land Before Time), alive after they are shipwrecked in the exact same neighbourhood. So while the more experienced players can set up rope harnesses to descend into Pterosaur lairs or blast hand-held shock guns at thrashing sea creatures, the civilians that are along for the ride, the Delgado family, are able to have separate (and far more entertaining) sequences built around a terrifying jungle expedition. 

Set an enough amount of time following Jurassic World Dominion that the new normal proposed by that fossilized stinker - that mankind must learn to co-exist alongside prehistoric beasts of every stripe - has been jettisoned in favour of an equatorial containment that has dinosaurs only able to thrive on the tropical islands where they were genetically engineered in the first place. Rebirth then, despite the more expansive language used in its title, is far more interested in following up concepts and ideas present in the Park-era, Michael Crichton-adapting instalments. Directed by Gareth Edwards with a returning David Koepp on screenwriting duties, Rebirth underlines this conceptual shift with an ailing Apatosaur being scraped up off the tarmac in New York while tardy commuters grumble. Unlike the more striking, camouflaged examples that appear later in Rebirth, this dinosaur has the flat, grey texture of a lower resolution ancestor and the drooping clumsiness of Winsor McCay's Gertie the Dinosaur. It is, as it dies, marked as both technologically primitive and archaeologically outmoded. 

Although not the totality of a piece that still clings to the misguided notion that audiences demand fresh, mutated creatures and expert contrivance to get themselves engaged (see also: Alien: Romulus) Rebirth is best when the audience are allowed to luxuriate in the company of dinosaurs who are behaving more like curious animals in search of their next meal. A first act sortie involving a massive and highly prized Mosasaurus apportions space to a pack of streaked Spinosaurs who swim in her wake, gobbling up leftovers. Despite Jurassic Park III's big bad being relegated to a scavenger picking up after the real apex predator, this more crocodilian take on Joe Johnston's featured theropod allows Edwards' film to not only correct now discredited takes on antiquated beasts but also to indulge himself in Spielbergian conceits that reach beyond that director's Jurassic predecessors. Briefly, we're in Jaws territory with hurried chatter about astronomical taxonomy and wincing inserts of human blood lapping at uncharted shorelines. Even better still is a creeping interlude in which the sodden Delgado family attempt to retrieve a raft from underneath a slumbering (but not sated) Tyrannosaur, a sequence dreamt up by Crichton for his 1990 hardback but left out of the original Jurassic Park feature. 

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

James Mangold's Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny doesn't make the best first impression. The film's opening gambit is visually unappealing in ways that are both brand new and unnervingly ancient. Set in 1944, Harrison Ford's two-fisted archaeologist fights up and down a speeding Nazi plunder train, hoping to lay his hands on a religious artefact famous enough to have already inspired a mid-90s movie tie-in comic. The relic turns out to be a forgery (although this film's conclusion does allow for the idea that metal wrought in the twentieth century could be raised to the level of sainted icon after having slipped into the ancient past), so attention quickly turns to an incomplete, Archimedean gear; an item so complicated and out-of-time that it must conceal some terrible power. The flashback allows the Disney corporation yet another opportunity to scrub the mileage off a person of advanced age; in this instance, the actor who holds sway over one of their most prestigious pop culture purchases. 

This exorbitantly expensive makeover aims to fossilize bankable nostalgia in computer generated amber, a digital veil that conceals the flaws accumulated by time while also reversing perceived mistakes made by filmmaking regimes less obsessed with the relentless issue of instalments. Any spell the sequence could hope to conjure is immediately thwarted though when Ford opens his mouth and the gravely voice of a much older man is heard. The effect is very similar to that of the artificially extended version of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly that outstayed its welcome on home video formats: for scenes where only an Italian language track had been recorded, elderly actors were press-ganged into booths to record comparable English lines. The disconnection is compounded by the rubbery action a digital Harrison Ford is then subjected to. His body is tossed around, and comes to no harm, in a house-cracking explosion while a noose dangles around his neck. While a shot of him skipping along the length of a moving train reads as oddly (and obnoxiously) weightless, as if the stunt was undertaken by a half-stuffed rag doll. 

These blips might be a bit more excusable when considering Marvel characters, who spring from two-dimensional cradles, but Indiana Jones is a series famous for exemplary examples of real-life tuck-and-roll stunt work. Therefore the disapproval is instant and intense. Strangely, the highlight of this opening sequence is that the digital trickery employed conjures up a style of photography knowingly similar to the day-for-night shooting seen in the men-on-a-mission films of the 1960s and 70s - a genre that Ford has priors with thanks to Guy Hamilton's Force 10 from Navarone. Fortunately this derailment does eventually end, hurling us forward in time to a New York in the midst of celebrating the first moon landing. Dial of Destiny may retain the ungainly rhythms established on the treasure train - a tempo better suited to films asking to be considered on their dramatic, rather than hyperbolic, components - but the film does at least perk up when considering a much older, and physically present, adventurer. 

This Indiana Jones is suffering through bereavement and an acute feeling of redundancy as his working life draws to a close: Jones' students no longer sit enraptured, batting their eyelids at him, they're bored and restless. It's difficult not to sympathise with their drifting attentions. Dial of Destiny barks at it audience, gussying up the film's would-be peaks with information and dangling stakes that it, often, has no real intention of delivering on. Mangold's film careens from set-piece to set-piece, never quite finding the right gag or angle to really make any of this death-defying stick: a tuk-tuk chase through endless Moroccan streets doesn't registers as anything other than a pile-up of green-screened dodgems. A misjudged self-seriousness also permeates Dial of Destiny, with the light, comedic touch of franchise originators George Lucas and (most especially) Steven Spielberg almost completely absent. What yuks remain are largely apportioned to Phoebe Waller-Bridge's flirtatious Helena and Ethann Isidore's Teddy, a pair of bickering grifters designed to conjure up pleasant memories of Karen Allen's Marion or Ke Huy Quan's long absent Short Round. 

Dial of Destiny would be a thankless chore then where it not for its concluding chapters. Once we are deep in an elevated and undiscovered tomb - one that lies above a hollowed-out tourist trap - the film (finally) begins to click into place. The uncanniness of the ancient computer, that has has been laboriously tracked throughout the piece, begins to wash back over proceedings, sprinkling incongruity and mind-bending uncertainty into the well-worn situations of a series premised on tomb raiding. Mads Mikkelsen's true believer Nazi is certain he has in his possession a tool that will bend to his own, genocidal whims. As with the Ark of the Covenant or the cup of Christ, this ancient treasure has an agenda of its own and is unwilling to deviate from that specific function. The resulting folly, as expected, chews up and spits out avaricious trespassers but not before it has allowed a bloodthirsty American, dressed up as a Gestapo officer, the opportunity to fire on the invading armies of the first Reich. Indiana Jones receives rare reward too, a fleeting chance to babble in the presence of human antiquity. In its final few moments Dial of Destiny diverges from the pack, heaping hosannas on a real-life scientific genius rather than the mist and fog of myth. 

The Fabelmans

Steven Spielberg's autobiography-cum-confessional, The Fabelmans, describes a person besotted with destruction and their ability to, eventually, have some control over the ways in which it is captured or expressed. We experience this bewitchment first in crude terms: the mix of horror and pleasure derived from witnessing a runaway train coming off its tracks then piling up in a heap. A young Sammy Fabelman (Mateo Zoryan Francis-DeFord, a blue-eyed cherub not completely dissimilar in look to Empire of the Sun era Christian Bale) gets the zap put on him by a luxurious appointed derailment from Cecil B DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth. This special effects sequence spooks him to such a degree that he longs to repeat the sensation, eventually leveraging a series of Hanukkah gifts into a scale approximation - one that Sammy blasts directly at his own face. Later in the film this fixation is expressed in interpersonal terms. During the argument that marks the dissolution of his family our eyes are directed to a mirror where we see a teenage Sammy (now played by Gabriel LaBelle) standing over his weeping sisters, prodding at them with his camera. 

This glimpse, an intrusive thought given an accusatory physical life, momentarily chides the young man for being unprepared to document this real-time collapse, before the conscious, present mind actually experiencing this trauma wakes up and banishes these cold-blooded insinuations altogether. Spielberg and Tony Kushner's screenplay revolves around a certain kind of loneliness then, one achieved through a lifelong dedication to emotional passivity all while possessing an incisive grasp on that which makes other, separate people tick. Michelle Williams' Mitzi Fabelman dominates both her son's life and the first half of this film; a mother churning through a slow-motion nervous breakdown. Her crumble marked by varying gradients of grinning terror. Mitzi's neuroses are so obvious and relentlessly acted out that they have, inadvertently, subordinated every other member of her family into the role of an appreciative audience. They are the extras or background players, condemned to swirl around this subject to very little effect. Mitzi is a sitcom character trapped outside of her natural habitat and suffering for this cruel displacement. Her husband (played with a strange, extraterrestrial heroism by Paul Dano) and children, are so numb to this never-ending performance that any recognition of impending doom is imparted solely to us, the audience, to note. 

Raiders of The Lost Ark

Following an opening couple of minutes that, via the clashing fonts that appear over tropical wilds, promise a knowing synthesis of old-fashioned adventure and modern filmmaking technologies, we're introduced to a hero who literally moves from darkness to light, then back again. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Indiana Jones character is consistently defined through contrast and conflict. Steven Spielberg's film containing a series of checks and balances that allow Harrison Ford's weather-beaten daredevil to push at a tougher, more morally complicated portrayal simply by quickly countering any question of perceived devilment with a less obliquely brutal answer. Agents, pursuing similar dramatic ends, are habitually deployed to instantly correct any lingering doubts the audience may have about Jones. Indy is always made the hero by these (often immediate) comparisons. Screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan, working from a brief provided by George Lucas and Phillip Kaufman, structures key moments around opposing forces and ideologies that, naturally, track together towards violent antipathy.

A straightforward example of this method of characterisation comes early in the film when describing Jones' reunion with Karen Allen's Marion, a former flame that the rough and tumble archaeologist left heartbroken. Operating without the benefit of a source material or an extant franchise behind it, Raiders has to be rather blunt in how it establishes its hero. Jones has to be dangerous and desirable but, unlike say Sean Connery's James Bond, not quite a full-on cad. Considering that the couple are quickly at each other's throats - as if resuming an argument that hadn't ever reached an adequate conclusion - there is clearly bitterness between Marion and Jones. Ms Ravenwood holds the adventurer responsible for her diminished station, accusing him of taking advantage of her youth and, very likely, driving a wedge between her and her father - Indiana's mentor, the late Abner Ravenwood. Jones barely argues back, defaulting to insincere apologies and an all-too hurried talk about remuneration.

In these moments Jones directly acknowledges a sincere debt to Marion, one that he believes runs to thousands of dollars - life-changing amounts of money in the 1930s. Marion's use of the word 'child' sticks as well, especially since we've not long seen Jones as a university lecturer not exactly courting, but certainly enjoying, the attention of a classroom full of besotted students. It's crucial here that Jones' reaction is steeped in bemusement. An earlier and rather damning aside that had Jones packing off one particularly beautiful undergrad to his office, asking her to wait for him while he takes a meeting with Army Intelligence, was wisely jettisoned from the final edit of the film. In Raiders as released, Jones is consumed by his work to such a degree that the unresolved relationship with Marion is allowed to take on a larger significance both within the film and in Indiana Jones' life.

Far from a reconciliation, Jones and Marion's meeting is rough, instantly arriving at a fraught emotional pitch. Jones' clumsy talk of money is judged offensive when weighed against the sacrifices and disappointments that have defined Marion's life. The couple quarrel, lie to each other, then break - Jones apparently departing - before more guests arrive. Ronald Lacey's Gestapo spy Toht and a gang of assorted heavies saunter in from the cold, all loaded down with pistols and sub-machine guns. This intrusion provides an instant example of disparity. While Jones' offer may have been inelegant or emotionally inert, Toht's is instantly homicidal, quickly dispensing with aimless pleasantries to knuckle down to Marion's imminent torture. Thankfully, Jones intervenes and a shoot-out ensues - Spielberg and cinematographer Douglas Slocombe using long set-ups filed with crisscrossing action to emphasise just how close these warring parties are to each other. Eventually, Jones and Marion work together to rout the Nazis and hired thugs that have invaded Ravenwood's smouldering bar, cementing an uneasy alliance. 

It's not just Toht who is offered up as a misshapen reflection of Jones either. Raiders is filled with people that allow the filmmakers to drive at an idea of comparison when considering their own hero, Paul Freeman's rival graverobber Belloq being the most obvious example. Older, similarly charming, but damned by his willingness to work with the Nazis, Belloq uses the knowledge he has acquired to exert dominion over those suffering from an inferior preparation. This manipulative Frenchman is first met in the Peruvian jungle, his smoky entrance packed with visual allusions to (then recent) works that deal with unscrupulous and unchecked colonial intent - from the spears that hurtle straight into the camera, as in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, to the notion that a white invader can leverage his willingness to lie to an indigenous people and incite them to advantageous violence (as in Heart of Darkness, the Joseph Conrad novella that inspired Coppola's bad acid trip). Belloq is drunk - quite literally at one point - on his own power, an egotistical self-assurance that powers his eventual undoing. 

These call-and-response contrasts are just one arrow in Raiders of The Lost Ark's quiver though, a subliminal pulse that provides clues and context around a never-ending succession of bravura action sequences. The film's latter half is truly breathless. Scenes and situations bleed into each other; on-screen excitement behaving like a series of musical movements rather than strict, or even logical, incident. The strongest of these passages begins with Marion and Jones trapped in the snake-filled crypt that used to house The Ark of the Covenant. Indy manages to topple an enormous statue of Anubis, opening up an improvised exit out of this writhing mausoleum. Marion ventures forth first, stumbling into a chamber filled with desiccated horrors straight out of a Lucio Fulci film. Shrunken and shrivelled bodies wheeze then collapse out of their cluttered coffins, crowding and clawing at our shrieking heroine. 

Eventually Jones takes her hand, dragging her out of this nightmare. They topple an enormous sandstone block and find themselves on an impromptu airfield. The transition is clearly absurd - the Nazis have never thought to have even a brief nose around the crumbling catacomb that overlooks where they have settled their experimental aircraft? - but the passage from one problem to another is carried by how this new puzzle is presented and arranged: an undulating groan from the twin engines of a flying wing, an anachronistically futuristic craft surrounded by sand-caked staff who hurry back and forth. We hear the obstacle, and the danger it implies, long before Indy has had a chance to scurry all over it. A panting lunge directly into another fight might've lurched, instead Spielberg and editor Michael Kahn allow assessment to assert itself in these scenes. Jones and Marion sneak away from a sunken tomb towards a collection of barrels housed in a quiet corner of the airstrip. They discuss the imminent flight of the Ark away from this place before the film cuts to gloating Nazis, drinking and sunning themselves while their destinies are about to be cemented by gee-whiz machinery. 

The resulting mayhem is a series of mounting and intersecting calamities, with characters repeatedly thwarted and frustrated when attempting to deal with larger, impending perils. The inexpert-but-enthusiastic Marion and an increasingly swollen Indy slowly pick away at Afrika Korp arrogance until the attendant heavies are either whisked up the side of the prototype plane or riddled with bullets, all while flames lick at petrol dumps. The inevitable detonation is a physical effect, captured on the day from a telescopic perspective that tracks a white shockwave as it carries along the desert floor and underneath our fleeing heroes' feet, making every grain of sand stand on end. After a couple of brief asides, one of which invokes the Jones name as a spectre of calamity, we're being ushered towards the next spectacle. John Williams and the London Symphony Orchestra launch into Desert Chase, a seven minute musical cue that batters back-and-forth between two voices: a galloping heroism ascribed to Indiana Jones and his horse and the mechanically regimented bark of a trundling German truck convoy. 

The sequence that follows provides a bridge between the seminal rodeo stunt work seen in John Ford's Stagecoach and The Road Warrior's (released six months after Raiders) description of a Neolithic biker gang hunting down a leaking Mack truck: Indy (Harrison Ford, as doubled by stunt men Terry Leonard, Charles Waters and Vic Armstrong) dismounts his horse, at speed, to scramble around the canvas cover of a mocked-up Mercedes, fighting off all-comers. Raiders hinges on the idea of a Godly historical artefact not only being real but actually physically obtainable in this present of 1936. It is a link to humanity's distant past - when we conversed with a higher power - that promises to confer unimaginable boons on its possessor. And so an idea of ownership drives this desert chase; the Ark as a touchable object that is traded back-and-forth between two warring parties. The crux of Raiders then - denying Hitler his prize - is expressed literally through action with Jones violently commandeering the vehicle housing the sacred testimony of the Israelites. As with the airfield fight, the sense of danger is not simply derived from one source. 

As well as the other Nazi trucks, cars and their mounted machine-guns, Indy must avoid collapsing building sites while driving along dirt roads that overlook bottomless chasms. He's not just hauling the Ark either, his truck also contains a squad of grizzled infantrymen, equally able to navigate the flapping carapace of a swerving semi. Jones isn't safe in the truck's cab. Although he is able to shake off several of his creeping foes, one assassin slips through the crashing palm leaves to blast a hole through Indy's arm. The injury is accompanied by fizzing blast of blood, the sort of visceral punctuation completely lacking in the rubbery conflict of modern blockbusters. Jones is now wounded and noticeably weakened, just in time for the most sensible, and therefore most dangerous, DAK trooper to make his way towards the head of the vehicle. Stunt man Sergio Mioni plays the tough who comes sailing in through the driver's window, crashing into Indy before quickly recognising that his opponent is wincing and clutching at his oozing arm. The soldier hammers on the bleeding limb - staining his knuckles red - then hurls Jones out of the windshield head-first, narrowly avoiding the camera. 

Indy's path back to the driver's seat is a sublime series of stunts built around the idea that Jones cannot catch a break. The hood ornament bends then breaks when Indy attempts to hold on; the grill snaps and crumbles when his panicked hands grasp at it. The truck speeds up, intending to crush Indiana Jones against the backside of a lead automobile carrying the archaeologist's most senior enemies. A mixture of quick-thinking and suicidal bravery takes Jones underneath the vehicle, his body pained and rigid as it bounces along not so much a road but a track that has been impressed upon jumping, gravelly debris. Back on the topside of the truck Jones races back to the front, making short work of this motor vehicle climbing frame. Indy enters the same way as the tough who dethroned him: by kicking the usurper in his face. Jones batters the soldier's head against all available surfaces, then sends him out through what remains of the shattered windshield. Mioni's panicked invader is much less successful than his American enemy, quickly ending up as a smear on the truck's tires. Relentless but never exhausting, Steven Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark dances confidently from set-piece to set-piece, finding new ways to trap and exasperate its disheveled subject. Victories are won through luck and a teeth-baring resilience - rather than the all-conquering might of syringe pricked musculature - by a hero who is the human embodiment of a bad penny. Easily in the conversation for the greatest of all American action films.

The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn

Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn describes peril as a constant force acting upon its characters; a manufactured propulsion unencumbered by physics or the genuine danger of having to actually perform these ludicrous stunts. Jamie Bell's motion-captured reporter is allowed precious little inactivity in Secret of the Unicorn, the film's expansive, computer-generated stages allowing for long, unbroken takes of hair-raising motion. Even basic camera set-ups take full advantage of the absence of cumbersome photographical equipment, often beginning at impossible vantage points before pressing deep into their image, arriving at an always in-focus face, chattering away.

Purely in terms of the character's likeness, this Tintin isn't the greatest looking interpretation of Hergé's creation. The Belgian cartoonists simple but expressive brushwork is nixed to push at a plastic action figure that seems designed to cater to the emerging strengths of digital performance recording. Instead of a faithful render we have a mannequin, trapped between Georges Prosper Remi's figure and the data culled from Bell's time in a mocap suit. Takashi Yamazaki's recent Lupin III: the First, although positively arthritic by comparison, did a much better job of transcribing Monkey Punch's linework into solid shapes, then transposing them onto beautifully rigged CG environments.

As convincing as his production was, Yamazaki does not possess anything like Spielberg's flair for action, The Secret of the Unicorn gifting the American director a digital chemistry set that allows him to explore his more cartoonish instincts. Weightless, swirling camerawork is immediately provided a lenient context by the film's baked-in unreality. 3D animation then proving the ideal venue for the elastication that marred the latter half of Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Here the possibilities seem both endless and, crucially, natural, motivated by storytelling solutions rather than a simple desire to show off. Why wouldn't desert mirages become incredible sea battles to Andy Serkis' sobering Captain Haddock? The sozzled sea captain broadcasts visions of enormous warships falling on, then colliding with, each other. Masts ensnare, transforming the battling vessels into an impromptu pendulum ride for opposing armies of swashbuckling pirates. A cartoon dreaming in cartoon.

Ready Player One

Discombobulation doesn't quite cover the experience of watching Ready Player One, a film that posits eternal poverty and the total defeat of imagination as acceptable prices to pay for the human race to live in a Funko-Popped wonderland. Everything in Steven Spielberg's film is a reference, from feature players to props and laser gun foley. Not the kind of massaged, satirised call-backs you might find in a Bush Sr era episode of The Simpsons either, this is the cold, naked replication of Family Guy. Characters and ideas are torn out of their original context then played, at length, as subordinate structural mulch in a narrative that revolves around an unstoppable trivia bore.

Strangest of all, Ready Player One presents your standard heroic journey freed from an overarching sense of defiance. Tye Sheridan's Wade Watts isn't trying to sweep away the dominant culture of zapped-out destitution. He's complicit; a collaborator. A zealous fanboy deep in the thrall of a dead billionaire who couldn't navigate a conversation unless it explicitly catered to what he wanted to hear. There are asides about food riots and ruinous ecological shifts but it's Mark Rylance's James Halliday that appears to have done the most damage to mankind. Apart from creating an accessible drop-out box, he's tied up trillions and a generation of thinkers trying to decode his death bed tantrum. To wit, the wealthiest company in the world is dedicated to propagating Halliday's (almost) unwinnable treasure hunt while the second wealthiest company in the world runs Victorian workhouses committed to pulling this task apart. Pizza Hut's still pumping out pies though.

Ready Player One's ceaseless use of propulsive movement does, occasionally, threaten to capture the imagination though. Spielberg taking a similarly chaotic tact with computer generated cataclysm as his pal George Lucas did with Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith's opening space shoot-out. Layers and layers of detail are baked into each other resulting in big money shots absolutely swimming with animated actors, each devised to attract your attention. Action in Ready Player One is seldom used to excite in terms of character or accomplishment. It's plotted to overwhelm, rolling over its audience like a crushing wave of hyper-expensive magma. As the film cascades towards its conclusion, the seizure-inducing vistas begin to numb. The prevalence of licensed properties - that turn up to look pretty then do nothing - inspire nothing less than the acute disinterest felt watching an overplayed sponsored ad.

007 - Octopussy

Octopussy represents a series in creative free fall. Director John Glen could excel if he was given brisk, ninety minute tales that learned heavily on stunts. Unfortunately, he's steering something much more ungainly: a series piled high with expectations, choking on formula. Cubby Broccoli and pals squeezed up in the back seat, barking out directions and demanding diversions. Two and a quarter hours or bust. So instead of an airtight plot to install Bond in a circus that smuggles priceless jewels and nuclear bombs on the side, a squad of screenwriters serve up another mind-numbing travelogue. India is the target of their worldliness, the country sketched with all the authority of a half-remembered RKO potboiler. 

Moore matches the ugliness of this tone with a 007 enjoying his second adolescence. Women are not merely bedded, they are ogled and spied upon. Moore permanently seconded in some bush getting his grot on. Eventually Bond finds himself on the fission bomb express, leaping from carriage to carriage, Octopussy finally playing to Glen's strengths. For the climax 007 plants himself on a departing Twin Beech aeroplane then inches around the exterior, fighting off assassins and sabotaging the engines. John Glen and his stunt team lock horns with Steven Spielberg and Vic Armstrong's genre-defining work on Raiders of the Lost Ark, Glen leaning on length and anxious intensity were Spielberg opted for stuttering verisimilitude.

Jackie Chan in the 1980s - Miracles

Jackie Chan brings an intense, career-defining run to a close with Miracles, a light-hearted identity swapper about a naive mob boss who takes pity on a doddery rose seller. Since this is a film by fine, upstanding Hong Kong citizen Jackie Chan, the lead's brush with extralegal affairs is accidental and played for comedic effect.

Chan's character, Kuo Cheng-Wah, is made head of a crime family after the previous leader's death rattles are misinterpreted by the gangster's lieutenants as a plea to anoint Kuo. Since brothels and opium dens are alien to the scrupulous mainlander, Kuo has his men open a lavish night club instead. The Ritz set provides Chan the director with an opportunity to pursue his interest in leading ladies and complicated camera set-ups.

Miracles' most impressive section is a sequence charting the twin successes of The Ritz and Anita Mui's showgirl Yang Luming. Chan shoots his then-girlfriend in a series of sumptuous outfits singing Mandarin pop standard Rose, Rose, I Love You. Chan employs crane shots that dart around the club, dropping in with several interesting parties. Chan invests the frame with the same kinetic clip he brings to his action scenes.

The film then slips into a montage detailing Luming and Kuo's developing relationship, as well as a violent turf war with local toughs. Chan and editor Peter Cheung cut on drum beats, transitioning between Luming's increasingly moneyed performances and Tommy Guns being emptied. Besides an aside about a car bomb, Luming's singing is kept high in the mix, drowning out all on-screen sound.

Like Steven Spielberg before him, Chan puts his paramour front-and-centre, stopping the film dead to drink her in. Mui's incessant wardrobe changes might even be a conscious attempt to one-up Kate Capshaw's turn in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Mui's fleeting importance to an unfolding plot that is content to dully replay Frank Capra beats doesn't undermine the segment either. It's a pointed, personal digression, Chan seeking to capture a moment or feeling. In a career noted for a chasteness that, at times, borders on asexuality it's as close to romantic as the megastar-director has ever gotten.

Jurassic World

Jurassic World takes place in an appalling alternative universe in which bratty teenagers are completely numb to the sheer magic of a real-life Tyrannosaurus Rex grinding a goat to mulch. Pre-release press and Universal's ad campaign seemed to share this detached indifference, selling hard on the kind of corporate cynicism that dictates we need a brand new Super Dinosaur and a pack of rehabilitated Velociraptors in we are to enjoy this belated Jurassic Park sequel. JP4's mammal characters then are split between the real fans and the seen-it-all cynics. Gray Mitchell (Ty Simpkins) and raptor handler Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) are the enthusiasts, allowing themselves to be wowed. They react to the animals as they are, rather than how they might want them to be. Gray's older brother Zach (Nick Robinson) and his Auntie Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard), the resort's Operations Manager, understand the dinosaurs as abstracts that confer different kinds of value. Claire sees them as interchangeable assets to be managed; Zach gets to throb around the shrieking girls they attract.

Director Colin Trevorrow falls in with the enthusiasts, elevating the special effects to featured players with personality detailing that actually rivals the human characters' admittedly slim pickings. Owen and Claire are, you understand, closer to premises than fully-rounded people. Their interactions have a similar irritated frisson as Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas in Romancing the Stone, but that's about it. Claire's big character moment is outrunning an apex predator in the heels she has stubbornly refused to relinquish, while Owen is an all-purpose action man relegated to the role of babysitter for the finale. Claire and Owen's relationship never really adds up to anything more important than a way for the filmmakers to ape an iconic shot from Raiders of the Lost Ark. The real stars then are, obviously, the dinosaurs. Jurassic World's latest attraction is the Indominus Rex, a committee shaped chimera that gobbles up its siblings and is blessed with a suite of camouflage techniques on loan from Michael Crichton's barely adapted The Lost World. 

There's an open contempt at work in how Indominus has been designed, her outline is essentially that of a Tyrannosaur but with muscular talons replacing that species' puny, vestigial arms. Owen, speaking with the authority of God, describes the Indominus as being the prehistoric equivalent of a psychopath. She isn't just isolated, she knowingly resides outside any prescribed social order. She's never existed before so she doesn't know any limits. It's an interesting point about the resumption of sociological roles in completely new, modern contexts. Is it expected that these resurrected beasts are functioning with a race memory? Do they instinctively slot themselves into the food chain or are they remembering these hierarchies from their original, pre-extinction lives? In this sense, it's easy to enjoy the Indominus' rampage. The park scientists cooked up a truly satanic dinosaur in an attempt to impress Verizon Wireless enough to part with some eye-watering amount of money. Everyone expects it to play ball, being just threatening enough that the communication giant's executives are pleased to be associated with this monster via sponsorship. 

Indominus should therefore be a product that confers a sense of phony dynamism. Instead it's a crocodile mawed hag that rends anything it comes into contact with. She's not even defending herself from the shock her new environment, she's actively, aggressively seeking conflict. How's that for a company mascot? Glimpsed as pliant missiles tracking alongside Chris Pratt's motorcycle in early trailers, JP4's raptors are, thankfully, very far from being domesticated. The crackpot plan to use them as bloodhounds to track the Indominus, of course, fails miserably, handing the Indominus a pack of stooges to take the fall while she makes her bone-strewn escape. This solves one of the bigger conceptual hurdles Jurassic World has to mantle: there can be no good or bad dinosaurs, they should all instead be barbed mouths that flex and snap for chaotic reasons. Fortunately, Trevorrow and his special effects teams approach the feature monsters with a sense of reverence. The Tyrannosaurus Rex in particular is treated with the kind of awe and affection you'd expect for an ageing star. It's not unlike how Terminator: Salvation presented its digital Arnold Schwarzenegger: an indefatigable icon that shoulders some truly tremendous punishment because these filmmakers know that they have a great idea on loan from a much better film.

Jurassic Park III

The Jurassic Park films have real issues mounting a satisfying finale. Each is apparently operating under an undisclosed agreement to never actually have the humans and dinosaurs go claw-to-claw. Instead the tiny, pathetic fleshlings must mantle obstacles and flee. Few of these characters ever think to pack a gun when jetting off to any of the series' dinosaur islands, even if they do it's usually junked before they can unload on any advancing threat. Either this is an attempt at an animal rights informed, conservation angle or the filmmakers just really want to keep their adventurers forever on the back foot. Mind you, it's not like you could blow the arm off a raptor and still maintain a family friendly certificate. Not in 2001 when Jurassic Park III was released anyway. 

Director Joe Johnston continues this passive trend with an airless finale that sees the malevolent new apex threat frightened off by the brief whoosh of petrol igniting. Similarly, a pack of Velociraptors are placated with, essentially, a flute. Johnston is fine when it comes to arranging the specifics of hazard-based action but a little lacking when the time comes to go in for the kill. Unlike Spielberg who, let's face it, is a bloodthirsty savage, Johnston is just not particularly interested in the gruesome, consumptive details. Dismemberment is handled politely and usually completely obscured then. Several deaths even involve some of the casual neck-twisting usually seen in America's more roided-up action films. This strange sense of decorum jibes badly with a 90 minute screenplay going full speed ahead. JP3 might be plotted like a state-of-the-art B picture but, on the day, the film itself is executed with all the excess of one of Disney's True-Life Adventures.

The Lost World - Jurassic Park

The Lost World - Jurassic Park is a nastier, more overtly comedic second instalment that cuts the dimwit awe of the original film to jampack itself with queasy set-pieces. Framed as an expedition straight out of King Kong, Steven Spielberg's follow-up also takes a few basic structural cues from Aliens. As with James Cameron's sequel our lead is a reluctant survivor, in this case Jeff Goldblum's Dr Ian Malcolm, being forced back into the fray. Like Ripley, Malcolm is (eventually) flanked by a team of experts armed with military hardware that also kind of looks like lightly dressed filmmaking equipment.

Spielberg's tonal approach is largely and, I suppose, refreshingly impartial. The Dinosaurs aren't demonised, no matter who they gobble up. It is understood that the humans are trespassers wandering, uninvited, into the habitat of these animals. That makes them fair game. Spielberg and screenwriter David Koepp construct a never-ending attack factory that quickly whittles this army of extras down to something more dramatically manageable. So, while Jurassic Park had action sequences that revolved around surviving in close proximity to prehistoric monsters with Spielberg playing the moment, trusting that the effects were a big enough presence to maintain interest, the Lost World presumes that this element of surprise has been forfeited. These dinosaurs are therefore demoted to a further, spikier layer of threat in a series of minutely composed catastrophes, often including upended machinery.

Consequently, The Lost World's joys are more to do with pure filmmaking technique than anything specifically organic. These characters may have arcs but for some reason they all terminate around the 100 minute mark. The San Diego finale that follows this resolution therefore feels completely tacked on. Key characters, such as Vince Vaughn's photographer, are absent for no stated reason and the two leads have picked up incongruent action abilities between scenes. Spielberg's film also stops dead in its tracks for several minutes while we cycle through some lame suburban skit about night terrors. Lost World's best stretch comes earlier then: a breathless charge towards an extraction point that caps the second act. During this gauntlet the dwindling survivors have to dodge both a pack of Velociraptors and the two vengeful Tyrannosaurs.

Pete Postlethwaite's Roland Tembo is an interesting presence in this section, another Great White Hunter explicitly testing himself against these ancient titans. Tembo lugs around a double-barrelled cannon and, like centuries of forebears who cannot abide massive animals living undisturbed lives, he hopes to blast a hole in the Bull Rex. Though when he does finally fells his quarry, Tembo quickly slips into a depressive funk. He may have successfully brought down the greatest apex predator in history but he's lost too many friends along the way. Tembo doesn't feel this victory, he's burnt himself out. Simultaneously, Malcolm and pals are scrambling all over a dilapidated communications hot-spot, pursued by drooling Deinonychi. Although they haven't really clashed, at this point every major character has had their personal objectives converge then conclude. It's a shame that there's another twenty minutes of The Lost World to go. Still, if nothing else, those superfluous minutes do offer the audience a chance to see a crowd of millionaires experiencing a collective concussion as the genetic horrors they've cultivated make landfall in the United States. 

Jurassic Park

Jurassic Park puts us in the company of a succession of flawed, grasping men struggling with their place in the world. Their default coping mechanisms tend towards career, above all else. Whether through intent or just plain slightness of writing (screenwriters Michael Crichton and David Koepp adapting the former's best-selling novel), the vast majority of the men in Steven Spielberg's film are explicitly defined by their work. We have a couple of scientists, several corporate climbers, and even a Great White Hunter. Each, in turn, is proven flawed or even expendable. These men fail in Jurassic Park because they have no underlying responsibility, their skill sets are defined purely by ego and therefore found wanting. The only specimen to transcend this holding pattern is Sam Neill's Dr Alan Grant, a grumpy palaeontologist. 

We are introduced to Grant in his professional capacity as a Dinosaur Dig Supervisor, with the good doctor wandering around upsetting computers and frightening children with his vivid descriptions of their consumption. Dr Grant is in a relationship with Laura Dern's Dr Ellie Sattler, a much younger palaeobotanist. The difference in age suggests a kind of conspiratorial impropriety between the two, perhaps beginning in a University setting? Anyway, she wants him to settle down and have children. He'd rather poke around with fossilised bones. It's a poor start for this action hero. Grant has greatness thrust open him when the titular resort goes into meltdown leaving him stranded in the Tyrannosaurus paddock with two children in tow. Grant had been alarmed by the idea of offspring: they'd ruin his fun and probably smell. All in all, they represent an extra responsibility that he just doesn't want. Nevertheless, Grant warms to the youngsters quickly. 

Like himself, Joseph Mazzello's Tim is a walking dinosaur encyclopaedia; Ariana Richards' Lex is blonde and forthright like Dr Sattler. The children are a leavening influence on Grant then, not only do they force him to become stable and emotional available they even eke out his latent sense-of-humour. In a way these children are an instant, fully-formed representation of the kind of family that Sattler and Grant might (eventually) expect to have. Neill's palaeontologist has instantly understood that he has to take a very specific role in this situation: he must be strong and calm, towering above any danger the gang might find themselves in. In order to keep the children from becoming catatonic Grant must be their rock. Like Arnold Schwarzenegger's T-800 in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Dr Grant has become a surrogate father. Maybe this is why the film struck such a chord with its young audience? Set aside the perennial prehistoric favourites and you have a piece that treats children as precious commodities that intrinsically confer purpose.

Twilight Zone: The Movie

Time Out

John Landis kicks off the anthology with Time Out, a finger-wagger about a bigot getting a taste of his own medicine. Conceptually, Time Out is like one of those Star Trek episodes were the primary creative impulse seems to be that the studio had a load of period sets going spare. Vic Morrow's racist middle-manager is bounced between several confrontations in which he is no longer viewed as a well-to-do white man. Movie money elevates the premise - instead of airless TV corners we get well-dressed spaces full of detailing and furniture for Morrow to collide with. Thanks to John Landis' cavalier / criminal approach to stunt safety and child labour laws, Morrow and (unseen in this version) co-stars Myca Dinh Le and Renee Shin-Yi Chen were killed by a falling helicopter while shooting the segment's feel good ending. Time Out is therefore truncated, Landis and his story stuck revelling in the kind of sadism needed to power a profound character change.


Kick the Can

Steven Spielberg's segment is a treacly aside about a magical old man who can reverse the ageing process. Scatman Crothers' Mr Bloom breezes between retirement homes, stirring up the residents with talk of eternal youth. Kick the Can is the most naked and malformed of Spielberg's youth deifications. Evan Richards' gangly teen, seen here prancing around like Peter Pan, doesn't evoke the (apparently) intended magical whimsy, his presence instead registering as insistent, even creepy. Since this is a Spielberg film there's some intense emotional violence buried in the sugary premise. The exclusion of Bill Quinn's disbeliever Leo Conroy is pointed and painful, never more so than when the pensioner pleads to be taken away by his newly youthful friend (lover? There's clearly a lifelong connection between the two). Spielberg prods at Conroy's teary eyeline, capturing the exact moment that the elderly man's heart breaks.


It's a Good Life

Joe Dante pulls Twilight Zone: The Movie back on track with a contribution that revolves around a bored schoolteacher who inadvertently wanders into the realm of an omnipotent pre-teen. Jeremy Licht's Anthony is a capricious God whose idea of paradise doesn't stretch too far beyond never-ending TV sessions and plates heaving with sugary junk food. Kathleen Quinlan's Helen is a picture of glassy-eyed alarm as she creeps deeper into Anthony's subconscious. The child has surrounded himself with a collection of adult sycophants who pretend to be his adoring family on pain of animated death. To keep them in line this little dictator summons up rubbery Rob Bottin abominations that actualise the deranged, elastic energy of a Tex Avery cartoon. The entire segment teeters on the edge of a full-blown meltdown, like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre but with a family friendly rating.


Nightmare at 20,000 Feet

George Miller's MVP contribution is a thundering, adrenalised reworking of Richard Donner and Richard Matheson's 1963 TV episode. The original programme had a nervous William Shatner trying to keep a lid on things after he sees a gremlin vandalising the plane he's travelling on. John Lithgow takes the lead for this retelling, delivering an absolutely deranged performance. Shatner's character began his nightmare somewhat sane, a middle-aged man pleased with himself after recovering from a nervous breakdown. Lithgow is manic before he's even gone near his window seat. The segment opens with Lithgow locked in the toilet tearing at his hair. Miller accentuates the unease with a couple of tricks designed to simulate a plane ride from hell. The camera is never stable, bobbing along as if passing through light turbulence. A constant high-pitched whine is buried in the mix, the kind of  ambient fizz you feel between your ears before your plane begins its descent and they start popping. Lithgow's fellow passengers are an aggressive, uncooperative bunch, moving constantly while the poor soul tries to dredge up a memory of having been relaxed. Even time seems to lurch uneasily. A child bleats in Lithgow's face one minute, then is seen curled up in a deep sleep the next. Miller uses every trick in the book to keep the mood hysterical, there's not a single second that Lithgow isn't under some form of attack.

The Sugarland Express

A couple of jailbirds, out to rescue their son from foster care, panic and kidnap a highway patrolman after their ride is pulled over. This ill-advised abduction attracts a convoy of police cars, news trucks, and well-wishers, all following at a discreet distance. Steven Spielberg's first big screen feature is the sweetly naïve tale of two parents, barely more than children themselves, who are in way over their heads. They contextualise their entire dilemma in purely emotional terms, logic doesn't even enter into it. Goldie Hawn's Lou Jean firmly believes this misadventure can have a positive outcome for her family - no-one has the heart to tell her otherwise. The Sugarland Express offers several distinct modes of masculinity, ranging from a henpecked husband willing to risk grievous injury to placate his wife, to a paternal police Captain who prefers the softly softly approach. Ben Johnson's Captain Tanner feels especially notable, an old-timer who stays his hand, using his position to ensure the couple a mostly unmolested trip across Texas. Either unwilling to risk the life of the captured trooper, or secure in his judgement that these two offer no serious threat, he plays along, hoping against hope for a peaceful conclusion. This isn't just a sympathetic idea of a cop, it's mythic. Tanner indulges the Poplins because they're essentially good. Similarly, he blows out the tires on a news van because they're parasites.

EVEN BREAK

Footage from Duel was used to beef up an episode of The Incredible Hulk TV series, entitled Never Give a Trucker an Even Break. Steven Spielberg was so unimpressed with his first feature being gobbled up for stock footage that the director insisted that all further work contracts contain clauses protecting his films from similar indignities.

Duel

David Mann is a fussy neurotic who makes the mistake of discovering his dick on an anonymous Californian highway. Stuck behind a massive tanker truck that looks like a scaled up toy, Mann overtakes, enraging the vindictive lorry driver. Steven Spielberg's theatrical (in Europe at least) début is pure incident, building a pressure cooker narrative out what would otherwise be a dull car journey.

Duel is built out of these long haul rhythms, beginning with a disengaged drive. The radio splutters away, registering low in the sound mix, a grade or two beneath the consistent, relaxing sounds of a car maintaining a steady speed. Duel's opening minutes stress safety, conjuring up sights and sounds last experienced when you were very young and in the back of your parent's car, sleepy and safe, on the way to some distant holiday destination.

A vague sense of paternal security is established, then ruthlessly vandalised. First, Mann's masculinity is undermined by a quick collect call to an indifferent wife. Mann feebly apologises for failing to defend her honour at some drunken ass-grabbing party. Mann's wife reads as bored - this particular failing well known to her. Back on the road, Mann is hounded by the truck driver he overtook. The harassment is petty, it seems emotionally driven. It's not a monstrous other trying to gobble up prey, that would imply a distinct purpose and economy of action. Duel's encounters are instead a sustained kind of bullying, designed to emaciate Mann, making him feel worthless.

Power and agency are denied to him, any attempt to equalise or thwart the chase are batted aside by the inescapable, omnipotent truck driver. Mann is completely powerless. Away from these impotence set-pieces, Richard Matheson's script and Dennis Weaver's performance combine to create an impressive sketch of frail, withered masculinity. When Mann attempts to take a time out in a roadside cafe full of truck drivers, it's clear he's an interloper.

Mann has difficulty even navigating the space - there are just too many men in there, radiating their louche, cowboyish power. Mann dithers, unsure how to proceed. Locating a table in an empty corner away from the 'real' men, he stumbles over his lunch order, failing to match the politeness his waitress shows him. Every idle glance is contextualised as a threat, Mann driving himself mad imagining ways in which he can placate this room full of tormentors. Buy them booze? That's what these people like, right? In Duel everything is a threat, the hero doesn't even want to meet the challenge, he just wants to escape.

Amblin'

Like most début shorts, Steven Spielberg's Amblin' isn't particularly concerned with delivering a tight narrative experience. Instead it's an elliptical brochure documenting Spielberg's breezy, Abercrombie idea of counter-culture. Amblin' is handsome and pleasant, detailing the incidental adventures of two hitch-hiking lovebirds. As a sales document, Amblin' demonstrated that Spielberg had the ability to slip effortlessly between farcical physical comedy and an advertisers eye. It's sort of like Pierrot le Fou meets The Monkees.

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Poltergeist by Ken Taylor